Mirror for the Muslim Prince

Everyone seems to be interested in Islamic political thought these days, nodoubt as a result of the rise and fall of Islamisms/post-Islamisms and othercontemporary configurations of Islam and politics. And then there are the claimants for a new caliphate. However, most concerns with political thought– with the exception of the large Princeton Encyclopaedia edited by PatriciaCrone and Gerhard Bowering – tend to focus their attention on either the earlyand classical debates on the imamate (e.g., Crone), classical philosophy andthe “Arabic context” for Platonopolis (e.g., Nelly Lahoud), or the medievalakhlāq literature (e.g., Linda Darling and Muzaffar Alam), or even modernpermutations (far too many examples to mention). It is a rare work indeedthat tries to bring a range of perspectives in a diachronic analysis over space,time, and political theologies into a single volume. The success and achievementof Boroujerdi’s volume is to do precisely that and to collate contributionsfrom some of the most acute and incisive scholars writing on issues relatingto Islam and politics in contemporary, metropolitan academia ...