Abstract

In this dissertation, I offer an interpretation of Islamic fundamentalist political thought in an attempt to provide a window into fundamentalists' own understandings of the movement's meaning and purpose and contribute to explanations of the increasing power of fundamentalist ideas in the contemporary world. My analysis of Islamic fundamentalist political thought entails a critique of the Western modes of political analysis that have been used to interpret fundamentalist thought and action. My aim is to use this critique to illuminate the limits of Western rationalist theoretical categories, and concomitantly to demonstrate both the possibility and the necessity of an internalist approach to understanding Islamic fundamentalism, and of critical and evaluative criteria that do not depend upon access to standards of truth outside of language and history. ;In analyzing Islamic fundamentalist political theory, however, I also seek to illuminate some of the relationships between contemporary Western and Islamic political thought. In particular, I argue that one of the most influential theorists of Sunni Islamic fundamentalist thought, Sayyid Qutb, is engaged in a critique of rationalism that we in "the West" not only recognize, but in which we frequently participate. Such a comparative analysis simultaneously works against the tendency in the West to regard Islamic fundamentalist thought as pathological or culturally idiosyncratic and illuminates Western ambivalences regarding modernity and rationalism. It also serves as an occasion to elaborate the methodology of what I call comparative political theory, that is, the attempt to ask questions about the nature and value of common involvements in a variety of cultural and political contexts. By introducing non-Western perspectives into debates about common dilemmas of living-together, comparative political theory insures that "political theory" is about human and not merely Western dilemmas