The have another kind of poetry which is widely in use among them. It employs four lines, of which the fourth has a rhyme that is different from that of the first three. The fourth rhyme, then, is continued in each stanza through the whole poem. …1This brief quote from the final portion of Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima is perhaps an unwittingly perfect representation of his cyclical approach to sociology and history. Many of his commentators have remarked on his development of (...) a dynastic theory that sees a dynasty rise and decline within roughly four generations.2 The question that arises from such a deterministic account of history is: how, then, can human society progress, as indeed history indicates that it... (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is well known for presenting a political philosophy based on a mechanistic account of human beings that offers the pain–pleasure response (or the peace–fear response) as a basis on which to make political choices. Although it has been subjected to countless treatments over the centuries, its account of civil religion in Part 3, “Of a Christian Commonwealth”, based on a highly original reading of the Bible, is deserving of further examination. Following an overview of a long line (...) of pagan and later monotheistic Christian and Muslim thinkers who advance the position that religion is a way of civilizing or uniting the masses, including Thucydides, Cicero, Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Pomponazzi, amongst others, I argue that Hobbes turns this notion on its head by arguing that religion can cause the de-civilizing of the masses, and indeed can foment civil war, leading him to the solution of separating belief from practice, with the former a solely private matter and the latter the exclusive purview of the state. In its Hobbesian schema, this great divorce of belief and practice – rather than a call for tolerance or pluralism – is sacrifice that is necessary in order to create the religious homogeneity required to sustain the body politic in the form of the great Leviathan. (shrink)

"First, he must guard the faith.""And it must be understood that a ruler … cannot always act in ways that are considered good because, in order to maintain his power, he is often forced to act treacherously, ruthlessly or inhumanely, and disregard the precepts of religion."Despite their apparently contradictory views on the role of religion in statecraft, and despite being separated by 500 years of history and thousands of miles of geography, al-Māwardī and Machiavelli both approach the relationship of power (...) and persuasion in an unapologetically direct fashion that shocked their contemporaries and continues to challenge their readers to this day. Following brief biographical... (shrink)

Constitutional Conversations : Alternative models for the challenge of civilizational conflict -- Western Constitutionalism : Universal Norms or Contingent Cultural Concepts -- From Medina to Runnymede : Comparing the Foundational Legacies of the Constitution of Medina and the Magna Carta -- Comparing Constitutionalisms : Is there an Islamic Constitutionalism? -- Constitutional Conversations- The Fusing of Political Tradition in Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi's The Surest Path -- The Arab Spring- Constitutional Thought in Contested Political Space, Questions and Conclusions.