Political Theology in an Islamic Key: Two Case Studies

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in expanding political theology beyond its roots in the Christian tradition. This paper investigates two case studies from the Islamic tradition, corresponding to the two main strains of the field. On the side of politically-engaged theology, it focuses on Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008), and on the side of genealogical inquiry into transformations of religion in a secular world, it takes up Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale, 2025). Both explicitly engage with their Christian forebears—Gustavo Gutiérrez and Carl Schmitt, respectively—making them particularly fruitful interlocutors. Though they come from very different perspectives and take very different approaches, both ultimately show that the problems that Christianity has bequeathed to modernity remain problems for an Islamic political theology as well.