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Recalibrating Our Levels of Analysis: Working towards Islamic Democracy from the Ground-Up


This review article aims to challenge Andrew March’s pessimism regarding the possibility of Islamic democracy in the modern world. It will argue that instead of conceptualizing the possibilities for Islamic democracy in a top-down manner, rooted in the language and imaginary of sovereignty, discussions about Islamic democracy ought to first focus on more empirically measurable and less theologically controversial things such as economic development, educational achievement, institutional functionality, and good governance. Such an approach removes the need for future Islamic political theorizing to be post-sovereigntist and/or post-statist as March contends. Instead, the future of Islamic political theorizing needs to actually be ‘political,’ addressing the same policy and administrative issues that any other form of contemporary democratic political thought aims to address.