The Problem of Empiricism in Comparative Political Research by Muslims A Research Agenda

Abstract

The Islamic critique of the dominant Euro-American paradigm in the
study of politics has so far focused on the subfields of political philosophy,
as in the articles of Abul-Fadl, of public administration, and of international
relation. Little attention has been paid by Muslim social scientists to
compamtive politics, by which is meant the investigation of the internal political
institutions and processes of countries. As the name of the subfield implies,
it is also intended to promote the comparison of political systems and processes
across national and cultural boundaries in search of some useful generalizations
about which structural arrangements are the most likely to promote whatever
values, including Islamic ideals, the analyst may employ as hisher criteria
for evaluation. True, there have been various books like Ahmad’s which
explicate the Islamic political ideal as exemplified in the practice of the Prophet
and the four rightly-guided caliphs. as well as books translating the Arabic
terminology of Islam into its modern equivalents, such as M . Ahmed‘s Islamic
Political System in the Modem Age, but these give little guidance to a political
scientist wishing to conduct research into the empirical reality of present-day
Muslim-ruled polities other than to condemn their deviation from the ideal
Qur’anic model. For instance, must a contemporary Muslim political scientist
reflexively castigate Pakistan for holding “free and fair elections” to its legislative
bodies and praise the late president Zia ul-Haq for instituting an appointive
majlis al shura to perform legislative functions simply because Western
observers tend to disapprove of this on the gmunds that an appointive legislature
does not meet the modern conception of democratic representation?
It shall be the endeavor of this paper to undertake a critique of the concepts
and value assumptions of the existing literature in the academic field of
comparative politics in the hope of revealing the built-in European (”Judeo-
Christian” or “secular-humanist”) biases and then to suggest an agenda of
issues on which Muslim and non-Muslim scholars might agree. Among the
unarticulated biases of Western comparative politics are: 1) secularism; 2)
materialism; 3) analysis which distinguishes subcategories but often fails to
integrate them in a “holistic” manner; 4) unilinear development according
to a European historical model; 5) liberal individualism which values freedom
and democracy over order and community; 6) quantification instead of
qualitative methods; 7) egalitarianism; 8) empiricism; and 9) pragmatism.
Among the few sympathetic American studies of existing Muslim political
practices which avoid these biases have been Clark’s on the zakah system
in Pakistan,’ Vogel’s dissertation on the Saudi judicial system, Kennedy’s
study of the hudud ordinances in Pakistan, Sutcliffe's study on the compatibility
of Islamic values with economic development in Jordan, and Wright’s analysis
of the Shahbano Begum case which dealt with the maintenance of Muslim
divorcees in India. Two Arab doctoral students have written such doctoral ...