Article in International Studies · April 018 doi: 10. 1177/0020881718790687 citations reads 4,427 author: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects

Key words: Western international theories, Islamic international theories, secularism versus 

Islamic faith, Muslim traditionalists, Muslim modernists, ontological and epistemological bases 

of Western and Islamic international theories 

 

In 2010 Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan published a co-edited volume entitled ‘Non-Western 

International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and Beyond Asia’ challenging the prevailing 

idea that international relations (IR) theory was an exclusive Western project. Their volume 

primarily offers distinct Asian IR traditions and voices to provide readers with alternative 

comparative IR perspectives. Two years later Tickner and Blaney (2012) published their co-

edited book ‘Thinking International Relations Differently’ raising powerful voices against 

Western dominance in the discipline of IR. Tickner and Blaney’s edited book presents diverse 

non-Western scholarly perspectives on central concepts and issues in a West-dominated IR – the 

state, security, authority and sovereignty, secularism and religion, globalization and so on, and 

thus questions the taken-for-granted concepts, categories and epistemologies of Western IR. 

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Likewise, Shilliam (2011) has problematized the concept of global modernity which the West 

views as an exclusive Western contribution to the world and so frames the contours of IR to deal 

with the non-West. Shilliam questions the very foundations of Western social and political 

thought, brings to light non-Western ideas and perspectives on modernity, probes their 

significance for IR and thus opens up new spaces for further engagements with non-Western 

modernities. None of these three major books on non-Western IR theories and perspectives has, 

however, attempted to map out and analyze the relatively unexplored discourses on Islam and IR. 

Though Acharya and Buzan (2010) exclusively focus on Asian IR perspectives and theories, they 

left the Middle Eastern IR theories and praxis out of purview citing reasons for lack of expertise 

and resource constraints. A single contribution by Tadjbakhsh (2010) to Acharya and Buzan’s 

volume attempts to outline how Islamic IR contradicts Western IR theories

 

premised on 

positivistic and empiricist undertakings to account for the link between cause and effect. 

Tadjbakhsh contends that there is a fundamental disjuncture between Islamic and Western IR 

theories, but she does not highlighting the disjuncture from ontological and epistemological 

angles to clearly map out the nature and implications of the disjuncture. 

  

Back in 1993 Samuel Huntington published his seminal article ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ 

juxtaposing Islamic, Western and other civilizations, and had reached the conclusion that 

conflicts between Islamic and Western civilizations were unavoidable, especially in the context 

of the collapse of the bipolar world structure in 1991. The problem with Huntington’s thesis was 

that he more highlighted (and perhaps exaggerated) the conflicting aspects of Islam and the 

West, viewed Islam as a monolithic religion, discussed little about the multiple groups and 

voices within Islam. Nor did he theorize the inevitability of conflicts between the Islamic and 

Western civilizations. More rigorous attempts to problematize relations between Islam and the 

West were made by scholars working in the critical and neo-Gramscian theoretical traditions of 

IR. Pasha (2013, 2012, 2010), for example, has accounted for violence by Islamic radicals in 

relations to globalizing Western modernity that restricts cultural horizons to prevent 

authentication of non-Western forms of life. He explains Islamic resistance to the West by 

looking at how conditions of late modernity have ruptured and displaced Islamic Faith in what he 

calls ‘Islamic Cultural Zones’. Though Pasha’s contributions to understanding conflicts between 

Islam and the West are appreciable, he remains narrowly focused on how the Islamic radicals 

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become disenchanted with Western modernity and why violence erupts; the positions of the vast 

majority of Muslims – the modernists, the secularists and even the ‘Western Muslims’ receive no 

or little attention. Likewise, Shani (2008, 2007) has attempted to contribute to the ‘post-Western’ 

turn in IR by engaging Islamism and Sikhism as critical political discourses, and thus challenges 

the secular Western IR to make space for other IR traditions. His discussions on Islamic IR, 

however, remain more of a general type as there is little effort to bring into focus how Islamic 

Faith looks at relations with the non-Islamic world or how Islamic thinkers belonging to different 

schools of thought have interpreted Islamic approaches to the ‘non-Islamic Other’. In the post-

9/11 context, a bevy of Muslim writers

 (

See, for example, Abo-Kazleh 2006; Bsoul 2007; 

Hassan 2007; Sabet 2003; Takim 2011) and scholars made efforts to re-conceptualize Islamic IR 

theories – their basic concepts, foundations and approaches to relationships with non-Islamic 

states but their analyses fall short of going deep into the horizon of ontological and 

epistemological differences between Islamic and Western IR theories. 

 

The recent rise of the Islamic State (IS), proclaimed on 29 June 2014 and finally defeated by 

early December 2017, that aimed at reunifying the Muslim Middle Eastern states by redrawing 

the political map of the region has apparently ignited debates between Islamic and Western 

conceptions of universalisms and IR theories (Nuruzzaman, 2015). Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the 

self-styled caliph of the IS, made a speech the same day the IS was declared outlining the basic 

thrust and action program of his new Islamic state. He highly spoke of the need for a khilafah 

(caliphate) to establish the Sharia (Qur’anic laws) and thus assert the past glorious role of Islam 

in world affairs. He categorically said: “The establishment of a caliphate is an obligation. The 

religion cannot be in place unless the Sharia is established” (Al Jazeera 2014). Dabiq Magazine, 

the official mouthpiece of the IS, in its first issue released in July 2014, carried the cover story 

‘The Return of Khilafah’. Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-`Adnani, the official spokesperson of the 

IS, declared the khilafah and concluded the announcement with the following words: “The sun of 

jihad has risen. The glad tidings of good are shining. Triumphs loom on the horizon. The signs of 

victory have appeared”.

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The khilafah

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 strives to create an Islamic governance system where all Muslims, irrespective of 

their ethnic, cultural or linguistic differences, constitute a single community called the umma, are 

tied up together by a common feeling of solidarity called assabiya,

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 and only one caliph at any 

given time can legally exist to rule the umma (Bouzenita 2007, p. 36)

 

and guide their temporal 

and spiritual lives. The concept of khilafah thus directly contradicts the Westphalian system of 

nation-states with different governments ruling over mostly ethnically and culturally 

homogeneous peoples within fixed territorial boundaries. Furthermore, whereas the Westphalian 

state system rests on the idea that each state lawfully enjoys an exclusive claim to sovereignty, 

the khilafah recognizes only God’s sovereignty on earth and over the whole universe; it is loath 

to the idea that humans and their governments can ever claim sovereignty, even in the 

management of temporal issues and affairs. Whereas the Westphalian states focus on the 

temporal and delink it from the spiritual, a point elaborated below, the khilafah integrates both 

the temporal and the spiritual as it seeks to create a universal moral order in light of God’s 

teachings, as revealed in the Qur’an (Takim 2011, pp. 6-8).  The basic differences between the