Contemporary Arab Political Theories – Semantics and Argumentations

A lot of research has been done to understand whether there is something like an Islamic political theory that is compatible with the idea of democracy. The debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy has become a commonplace in contemporary Islamic political as well as Western academic discourse, but while everybody watches the exchange of arguments, we forget to ask what can be learned from the existence and configuration of the exchange itself. Thus, this article will not engage in this exchange. Rather, it makes an attempt to conceptualize the configuration of the debate and focuses on how the issue of compatibility is discussed by some of the authors who stand in the front line of the debate. The article will advance in three main steps: First, some findings on contemporary Arab political thought will be summarized and discussed for the purposes of this article. Afterwards, possibilities to add to the methods usually employed to analyze the compatibility issue will be lined out. Consequently, two perspectives for research on public discourse will be developed, demonstrating the basic ideas on exemplary material: The first is concerned with the impact of concepts on the structure of public discourse whereas the second deals with the analysis of argumentative structures. In each case reference to exemplary cases will be made.