Abstract
A lot of research has been done to understand whether there is something like an Islamic political theory that is compatible with the idea of democracy. The debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy has become a commonplace in contemporary Islamic political as well as Western academic discourse, but while everybody watches the exchange of arguments, we forget to ask what can be learned from the existence and configuration of the exchange itself. Thus, this article will not engage in this exchange. Rather, it makes an attempt to conceptualize the configuration of the debate and focuses on how the issue of compatibility is discussed by some of the authors who stand in the front line of the debate. The article will advance in three main steps: First, some findings on contemporary Arab political thought will be summarized and discussed for the purposes of this article. Afterwards, possibilities to add to the methods usually employed to analyze the compatibility issue will be lined out. Consequently, two perspectives for research on public discourse will be developed, demonstrating the basic ideas on exemplary material: The first is concerned with the impact of concepts on the structure of public discourse whereas the second deals with the analysis of argumentative structures. In each case reference to exemplary cases will be made.
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Notes
- 1.
Especially for the latter, cf. Courbage and Todd (2011).
- 2.
It is telling that the authenticity of the ‚hybrid‘ and often liberal speakers in the second area is often mistrusted by Western authors with Islamophobic tendencies and an essentialist view on culture and religion. If it is helpful to maintain certain worldviews, the charge of non-authenticity even stretches to those intellectuals from the core area who have been educated at Western universities.
- 3.
There are some main concepts of social constructionism at work here (Berger and Luckmann 1991). Most important, society and culture are outcomes of historical processes which are contingent, open for change and the result of ongoing interactions.
- 4.
Cf. for this for example Fahmi Huwaydi: “Islam […] is actually a system of life, a mental and cultural order that embraces the real world completely. It is not just idle talk to pacify the inner self or to heal souls.” (Huwaydi 1993, p. 7 f., my own translation).
- 5.
To prevent confusion (at least among political scientists), I should note at this point that I am not talking about scientific theories about politics. The object of analysis are political theories that consist of normative, descriptive and even sometimes explanatory (or narrative) elements. I refer to those theories as ‚empirical‘ because they are a given – although they need, like any data – interpretation (which I term as ‚resonstruction’).
- 6.
It goes without saying that the idea of shifting the level of analysis in this way is indebted to Muḥammad ‘Abīd al-Ğābirī’s work, cf. Jabri (2011, p. 6 f.)
- 7.
One thing should be noted for those who have the impression that both should be subsumed under discourse analysis: Argumentative patterns and semantics of public discourse are obviously interrelated. In a kind of discourse analysis inspired by Foucault (Foucault 2005), they would indeed appear to be almost one and the same: Any dispositif that organizes a discourse contains rules for legitimate concepts and argumentations. Despite this interrelation, both aspects will be analysed separately in the following sections. This seems to be justified since I will trace back those approaches to scholars who operate outside discourse analysis – Niklas Luhmann and Stephen Toulmin. Additionally, the branch of semantic analysis already has a long (though sometimes doubtful) tradition in Islamic studies (cf. Lewis 1988). However, it will be good to keep in mind that semantics and argumentations of course can be regarded as constitutive elements of discourse.
- 8.
It seems to be reasonable not presume a causal relation here.
- 9.
By the way, as it is the case with the semantic changes, it would of course be of interest to design those analyses diachronical in addition, or to check the consistency of the structure within a certain text which might reveal different argumentative layers as it has been indicated above.
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Zapf, H. (2014). Contemporary Arab Political Theories – Semantics and Argumentations. In: Cavuldak, A., Hidalgo, O., Hildmann, P., Zapf, H. (eds) Demokratie und Islam. Politik und Religion. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19833-0_6
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