History of Islamic Political Thinking: From Prophethood to the Present

Islamic literature on studies of Islamic political thinking has not received sufficient attention, especially in non-Arab studies, in light of the dominance of the trend that sees the centrality of European thinking and its dominance over other ideas and theses, especially ideas developed by Muslims who posed a historical challenge to the West.

This book collects the diaspora of Islamic political thinking, and gives a firm ground for it throughout the Islamic era, starting from the era of the prophet and the Rightly Guided Caliphs to the present. The author, based on the available translations of Arabic literature, traced the development of Islamic political thinking, whether in the form of political philosophy, political jurisprudence, or what was written in the form of political advice (kings’ advice).

The researcher has made a great effort in tracing thinkers and the ideas they produced, and trying to understand and classify those ideas, and the significant additions that each of them added in this intellectual field. While the researcher detected many political ideas that arose in the Islamic environment. He took us on a lengthy historical journey in Asia, Africa, Anatolia, Persia, and Andalusia, shedding light on Muslim scholars, and showing us how each of them interacted with his geographical environment and political reality which produced a number of political ideas for us.

In his book, the researcher stresses the role of Islam in terms of establishing many political ideas and concepts that arose at the beginning of the establishment of the state in the Prophet’s era, then the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Political ideas and concepts expanded and were influenced by the different peoples and races that were subject to Islamic rule, such as Persia, India, the Turks, and through to Andalusia and others. All these peoples and races had a great influence on the emergence of Islamic political thinking, and the nature of the ideas produced by every environment and every region in which Islam emerged and formed a state.

Undoubtedly, this book, with its large and wide survey of Muslim thinkers, scholars, and jurists and what they produced in the political field, stresses the importance of Islamic political production in the field of global political thinking which began before this stage of human history and continued thereafter until the modern era. Each country and each scholar had its contribution that influenced the movement of political thinking through to the modern state, which reached the maximum possible rooting and detail, and working on helping one to seek perfection and prosperity, and realize one’s ambitions in this world.

This book deserves to be an important link in the field of political thinking, whether Islamic or humanitarian in general, within the long movement of thinkers that served humanity in the theoretical foundation of the state’s vision that establishes people’s lives, livelihoods and service in it. Although the state along the history of Muslims has suffered from many problems that it could not overcome, the contribution of Muslims to the world of politics has developed many paths to lay foundations for good governance – even at the theoretical level – without the ability to apply them due to the repercussions of the difficult political reality which suffered from serious internal and external challenges throughout its history which prevented the development of the state and its effectiveness at the level of the nation, the political regime, and the governor as it was allowed in the modern era.

Despite all of this, Muslim scholars and thinkers have left many books, letters, and ideas that establish a sensible governance that contributed to developing people’s ideas and enhancing them in different directions which brought humanity to what it has reached today. So, it was one of the stages of the development of human thinking, and a milestone that the book traces its origins, and commendably demonstrates its features.