Islam

Bassam Tibi

Why is Islam, which is a religious faith and a local culture, placed as an entry in an encyclopedia for political science? This discipline is not supposed to deal with religion and culture but instead with the polity and government. The subject matter is a religious faith that assembles nearly 1.6 billion people of humankind as an umma (community) that consists of a great variety of local Islamic cultures. These are, however, related to one another in terms of shared values and worldview. On these grounds, there is a resemblance that unites all Muslims to one civilization. Cultural diversity exists in Islam within the unity of one Islamic civilization. In view of this cultural diversity, there is no monolith named Islam. The answer to the question concerning the legitimacy of this entry is that Islamic civilization matters to politics since the great changes in the world around the end of ...

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