It’s worth noting that mainstream Islamist movements in the Arab world no longer include the hudud punishments for theft, adultery, and apostasy in their political platforms and rarely discuss them in public (South and Southeast Asian Islamists haven't been as circumspect). In this sense, the median Egyptian or Jordanian voter is to the right of the main Islamist parties in their respective countries. (Many Muslims say they believe in the hudud because the punishments are in the Quran; whether they would actually be comfortable with the state—a state they may oppose—cutting of someone’s hand for stealing is a rather different question.)

These are, in any case, only the most extreme examples, and it would be problematic to take the hudud as somehow emblematic of modern Islamism or, for that matter, pre-modern Islamic law. The more relevant consideration is how Arabs view the relevance of Islamic law, including on issues like gender equality, minority rights, and the role of clerics in drafting national legislation. Why, for example, do only 24 percent of Egyptian women, according to an April 2011 YouGov poll, say they would support a female president? What some might call “culture,” and not necessarily Islam, is a major factor, but it would be difficult to pretend that religion has nothing to do with these attitudes. And, presumably, Islam has at least something to do with why 51 percent of Jordanians, according to the 2010 Arab Barometer, say “a parliamentary system that allows for free competition, but only between Islamic parties” is somewhat appropriate, appropriate, or very appropriate.

Islam is distinctive in how it relates to politics. This isn’t necessarily bad or good. It just is. Comparing it with other religions helps illuminate what makes it so. For example, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP may be Hindu nationalists, but the ideological distance between them and the secular Congress Party isn’t as great as it may seem. In part, this is because traditional Hindu kingship—with its fiercely inegalitarian vision of a caste-based social order—is simply less relevant to modern, mass politics and largely incompatible with democratic decision-making. As Cook writes in his new book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, “Christians have no law to restore while Hindus do have one but show little interest in restoring it.” Muslims, on the other hand, not only have a law but also one that is taken seriously by large majorities throughout the Middle East.

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Muslims are not bound to Islam’s founding moment, but neither can they fully escape it. The Prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a head of state, a warrior, a preacher, and a merchant, all at once. Some religious thinkers—including Sudan’s Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and, later, his student Abdullahi An-Na’im—have tried to separate these different prophetic legacies, arguing that the Quran contains two messages. The first message, based on the verses revealed while the prophet was establishing a new political community in Medina, include particulars of Islamic law that may have been appropriate for seventh-century Arabia but are not necessarily applicable outside that context. The “second message” of Islam, found in the so-called Meccan verses, encompasses the eternal principles of Islam, which are meant to be updated according to the demands of time and context. Taha was executed by the Gaafar al-Nimeiry regime in 1985 and his theories failed to gain many adherents. But the basic idea of extracting general principles while emphasizing the historicity of their application has, in less explicit form, been advocated by a growing number of “progressive” Muslim scholars, many of whom live in the West.

Can these ideas gain traction? And, if they do, could it lead to an Islamic “reformation”? Perhaps, but there is one slight complication. Islam has already experienced a “reformation” of sorts. In the late 19th century, the Islamic modernism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abdu—the precursor to “Islamism”—attempted to make Islam, and pre-modern Islamic law, safe for modernity (or was it the other way around?). This movement was a response to many things—secularism, colonialism, the rise of Europe—but it was also, importantly, a response to the creeping authoritarianism of the late Ottoman era. The legal scholar Mohammad Fadel notes that Rashid Rida, a student of Abdu’s, proposed “a new legal system that would be consistent with popular sovereignty and whose method of law-making would rely on independent reasoning exercised collectively through deliberative institutions.” Such a legal system required codifying Islamic law, making it more uniform to prevent arbitrary abuses, and, in effect, nationalizing its implementation. A written, codified law would provide a check on the excesses of executive power. The arbitrary whims of corrupt rulers would give way to something resembling the rule of law. As Noah Feldman argues in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, historically it was a self-regulating clerical class that, as keepers of God-given law, ensured that the caliph was bound by something beyond himself. “To see the [sharia-based system] as containing the balance of powers so necessary for a functioning, sustainable legal state is to emphasize not why it failed,” Feldman writes, “but why it succeeded so spectacularly for as long as it did.” The Islamic modernists had little interest in returning religious scholars to a place of prominence. Instead, they hoped to introduce consultative mechanisms and institutions to balance the burgeoning power of the executive.