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Abstract
In this paper, I will explain why the lack of debate between political theory and comparative politics has led to an inade-quate understanding of the politics of traditional Islamic scholars and Islamists in American political science. In the first section, I analyze the impact of the text-based approach of political theory; in the second, of the liberal frameworks of comparative politics; and in the third, a promising new development: the interdisci-plinary field of Islamic legal studies, which has the potential to bridge the division between political science, law, and area studies approaches to the study of Muslim societies. I argue that the reliance of political theorists on seminal Islamist texts, rather than on the interpretations of texts during legal and political pro-cesses, limits their ability to represent the evolution of pragmatic Islamist theory in countries such as Pakistan. Moreover, whereas political theorists, such as Lucas Swaine, have demonstrated the futility of applying liberal assumptions to theocrats, com-parativists continue to predominantly rely on liberal categories and frameworks, which produces a distorted view of Islamists. The division of labor between political theory and comparative politics, and the lack of conversation that results from it, makes it difficult-if not impossible-to fairly represent or analyze con-temporary Islamist groups in American political science.
Introduction
In many Muslim-majority states today, there is a tension between Islamist demands for sharia compliance and secular conceptions of individual rights. Now, more than ever, rigorous analyses of political institutions in Muslim societies are needed to develop the intellectual resources for toleration, democracy, and pluralism. However, the rich and nuanced knowledge about Islam that is developed in history, religion, and anthro-pology departments is rarely transferred to political science.1 This is partly because the institutional matrix in which the discipline is embed-ded-poised as it is between the United States government, public policy think-tanks, and mainstream media-imposes a framework of debate rooted in U.S. foreign policy interests. However, it is also partly due to the methodological peculiarities of the discipline of political science itself.
American political science has historically regarded itself as a social science, rather than as a humanistic discipline, but in recent decades, it has increasingly become dominated by rational choice models, game theory, and statistics. From 2000 on, the "Perestroika movement" criticized the...