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This study discusses two faces of Islam regarding its relationship with the state, namely cultural Islam and political Islam. Cultual Islam believes that to spread Islamic values does not have to take power, but can also pay attention to the grassroots, by preaching to the community, establishing educational, health and economic institutions. Whereas cultural Islam is more power-oriented, they believe that with that power it can be easy to apply Islamic teachings, and some even want to change the shape of the country into an Islamic state. Some political Islamists participate in parties, and some are non-parties. Usually, those who are non-party are more likely to be radical. Both have advantages and disadvantages, what is clear is that cultural Islam is more humane and has an impression on society.

Long before the September 11 attacks galvanized Western attention on what has variously been called political Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and Islamism, African nations with sizeable Muslim populations were experiencing significant transformations in the relationship between religion and state. Political Islam in West Africa explores those ongoing transformations in key countries of the Sahel region. Each country chapter provides both historical context and an examination of the changing nature of domestic politics and foreign policy in the post-September 11 world. Introductory and concluding chapters provide additional context and highlight overarching themes. A notable feature of the book is a comprehensive bibliography of Islamism in West Africa

Developing the concept of "justice as discourse" -- Justice as discourse in application -- Muslim contexts I : history and heritage -- Muslim contexts II : contemporary contexts -- Terms of engagement : (re)imagining religion, law, state, and society for Muslim contexts.

A review essay on 14 books that deal with Islam & Islamism compares varied approaches to defining & describing religion & its relationship to culture. Differences in understandings of fundamentalism from the viewpoint of religion, social anthropology, political science, & history are pointed out. Consideration is given to such issues as the importance of Islam in both the private & public lives of Muslims; Western perceptions of Islam as hostile to democracy & modernity; global perspectives of political Islam; reasons underlying Muslim rage; & distinctions between Islamists in general & jihadists in particular. In spite of the wide range of topics covered by these books, it is contended that not enough attention has been given to the social background of Islamists, especially jihadists. Like activists in any radical political movement, the leaders & followers of militant Islamist groups are young. As such, Islamism is described as a "phenomenon of transition," which is connected to modernization & may lose its strength when newly mobilized followers grow older or adapt to the new environment. J. Lindroth

Islam, Muslims and the Modern State: Case-Studies of Muslims in Thirteen Countries edited by Hussin Mutalib and Taj ul-Islam Hashmi.

Islam plays a pivotal political role in Southeast Asian countries, where the governments that have ruled since independence have been concerned with influencing the trajectory, content, hermeneutic and style of the legal traditions of their Muslim citizens and reconciling them with the states' wider policy objectives. This contribution looks at one particular tool for this form of 'guiding' Islam – the codification of Islam – comparing the codes in two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Brunei) and two Muslim-minority countries (Singapore and the Philippines). Utilising comparative law methodologies, this article explores the structure, style and content of the codes in order to explicate their explicit and implied function. These codes are less concerned with being a statement of substantive Islamic law than with setting up a state-sanctioned bureaucracy for the administration of law for Muslims. These bureaucratic institutions were the key instruments for the states to develop their own brand of Islam. In doing so, the state's approach towards socially engineering Islam oscillates among appropriation, accommodation, control and subjugation of Islam in different political and legal frameworks.

Surveillance is often understood as simply a tool for collecting information, and opposition to the surveillance practices of the US government frequently relies on the analytical framework of privacy and rights violations. Other critical analyses of surveillance practices use the lenses of racial discrimination and/or neocolonial political domination. While all of these are valuable approaches, they downplay the extent to which specific modes of existence and ways of being have been targeted in the current surveillance paradigm. In this paper I discuss the role of religion and its relationship to the law—in other words, the state's control of "appropriate" religion—in defining surveillance practices. Using critical interpretive and deconstructive readings of the discourse surrounding the surveillance paradigm, I show that surveillance is used as an instrument to revise and alter modes of non-Western moral and ethical life and to render human subjects more suitable for assimilation into the burgeoning secular/liberal world order, including its concept of "appropriate" religion. I argue that the current mode of government suspicion and surveillance in the US continues long-standing demarcations between acceptable and unacceptable religion in secular law (and in liberal/secular Western societies more broadly), and I demonstrate how this paradigm subordinates and marginalizes non-Protestant religions. In order to fully understand the US surveillance state, we need to pay attention to the way that secular order attempts to define and shape non-Protestant religions and in so doing endangers its own democratic principles of tolerance and neutrality.