Sovereignty, Islam, and the Modern State: A Comparative Historical Analysi

This dissertation seeks to better understand why post-colonial state-making elites within the Muslim world pursued various strategies to negotiate the relationship between political Islam and their concept of the modern, sovereign state. This exploration will take as its starting point the idea that, while certain profound theoretical incompatibilities do exist between these two ideas, each is institutionalized in particular contexts in ways that have made compromise between the two either more or less likely. Thus, via institutional analysis of path-dependence, this dissertation will illuminate the dynamic interactions between post-colonial state-making elites and their counterparts motivated by political Islam, with a goal of comprehending the ways in which the ideas each group had of Islam and the state respectively shaped the institutionalized relationship between the two in newly independent Muslim countries.;The study concludes that substantial differences do in fact exist between political Islamic and high modernist conceptions of the state. These differences revolve around a few key issues: sovereignty, the general purpose of government, secularism, and modernity itself. In-depth analysis of the two cases determines that ideologies of the state seem, on the whole, to have been less flexible and less easily accommodated to political Islam than the reverse. Three factors demonstrate the relative flexibility of state ideology: adaptation to the local ideational landscape; the type of secularism adopted; and the level of oppression employed against political Islam. States whose ideologies permitted more local flexibility, included less rigid varieties of secularism and sought to co-opt rather than merely repress political Islam were, on the whole, much more successful in establishing a harmonious balance between Islam and the state.;Learning the lessons of the post-colonial period---particularly those represented by Turkey and Indonesia---remains vital for twenty-first-century state leaders in Muslim societies, and those outside actors interacting directly with Muslim-majority states. This is especially true for those state elites facing periods of transition, which may represent new critical junctures in the institutional relationship between Islam and the state.