The Relationship Between Religion and Political Authorityin the Islamic Tradition: Epistemological Foundations of Radicalism

Annotation

The aim of the article is to identify the role of the unity of the religious and the political in the Islamic tradition as an epistemological foundation for the formation of fundamentalist doctrines. The methodological framework of the study includes comparative-historical, systemic, and structural-functional approaches. The sources comprise works of classical and contemporary Islamic and Western political thought addressing the issues of Sharia, Islamic law, and political theory. Particular attention is paid to studies that reveal the specificity of the Islamic understanding of social and political reality. The study demonstrates that the Islamic tradition lacks the category of an autonomous political sphere, while the social order is formed within a unified religious-normative system. It is shown that this framework has not only an institutional but also an epistemological character, shaping the structure of political thought. It is argued that the absence of a concept of the secular predetermines the specificity of the interaction between religion and politics. It is established that fundamentalism represents a reaction to an epistemological rupture caused by modernization. The article concludes that fundamentalism functions as a form of reproduction of the traditional model under new historical conditions.

Keywords

• asabiyya
• Islamic tradition
• legitimation
• normative integration
• political thought,
• religious-normative discourse
• secularization
• fundamentalism
• Sharia
• epistemology
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