The Languages of Political Islam (Book Review‪)‬

The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800. By MUZAFFAR ALAM. Chicago: UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO PRESS, 2004. Pp. 244. $55 (cloth); $25 (paper). A modern history of Islamic political thought remains to be written. Medieval Islamic texts are not read as "windows unto worldviews," in Quentin Skinner's words, nor do we have, for a better understanding of the modern or medieval period, detailed studies of the way political concepts have changed over time. This is in stark contrast with the way such studies have dominated European intellectual history in the past three centuries, contributing along the way to the popularization of liberalism itself and the propagation of enlightenment values. In his 2005 study Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, Paul Strohm describes the evolution of the imagery of the "wheel of fortune" to demonstrate the gradual ascendancy of the king over the wheel, especially clearly exhibited in the drawings that accompany the texts, and, on that basis, argues for the incremental rationalization of political discourse almost a century before Machiavelli. On this side of the border, the wheel of fortune, also a much-used metaphor, is dismissed, if at all mentioned, as a mere literary embellishment, a static metaphor incapable of offering differing nuances in different contexts.