LAUSR

This book by Faiz Sheikh criticises the focus of IR on Europe and Christian nations and calls for a more Global IR. In fact, Sheikh’s book is an endeavour to show how the linkages between Islam, specifically political Islam, ‘might help bring the international back into international relations’ (p. 2). The book follows two objectives: (1) expounding the structure of an Islamic IR and (2) probing the challenges that an Islamic IR might face when integrated with other paradigms and notions in IR. To show the first objective, the author introduces normative political Islam which is a post-Islamist approach. This post-Islamist approach differentiates between Islam as faith and Islam as politics and argues that the Islamic texts are not clear about the form of states and IR. However, this approach is still an Islamic approach because it covers the ambiguity of Islamic texts about the form of the state and IR and shows that Muslims can use other Islamic concepts such as rationality and mysticism. Ayatollah Khomeini, who brings mysticism to political Islam, and Ibn Khaldun, who argues about the importance of rationality in political Islam, are two instances that Sheikh uses to indicate how other Islamic sources can help to form an Islamic government and IR. To achieve his second objective, probing the challenges that an Islamic IR might face when integrated with other paradigms and notions in IR, Sheikh uses the poststructuralist approach. It seems that it is the similar criticisms of modernity shared between poststructuralism and Islam which is the main reason for convincing the author to use this framework. By introducing normative political Islam alongside poststructuralism, the book makes some interesting points. However, there are two main problems with the book that should be mentioned here. First, presenting Khomeini as an example of normative political Islam seems problematic because Khomeini – in contrast to Normative Political Islam – did not consider any separation between Islam as a faith and Islam as politics. Second, for the author, the main reason that Islam is absent within IR is because of the dominance of liberalism within contemporary IR; therefore, using poststructuralism, Sheikh endeavours to challenge the values of liberalism as universal values. However, the main reason that nowadays there is no room for religion in IR is the domination of realism (not liberalism) in the field. Therefore, it seems that if the author had spent more time in criticising realism rather than liberalism, he would have provided a better explanation for the absence of Islam in IR.