Abstract
It is hard to imagine a political circumstance in the West more in need of sustained engagement with classic Muslim political theology than that of today. It is during these sad and violent times that the essays in this special issue of Studies in Christian Ethics have been commissioned, developed and debated; and although they make no explicit normative links to immediate issues of policy today, it will be clear that the questions they debate out of classic theological sources in both Christianity and Islam (authority, representation, sovereignty, legitimacy) are of key significance for any long-term mutual understanding between the traditions. As is explained in the editorial introduction by Drs Afifi al-Akiti and Joshua Hordern below, the discussion in this issue was forged as an explicit attempt to bring a new sort of political exchange into focus: not to throw contemporary ‘secular’ or ‘liberal’ political discourse into interaction with contemporary Muslim perspectives (a common enough undertaking with its own worth), but rather to probe behind and beneath such a mixed genre to the classic Christian and Muslim theological sources out of which the contemporary debate has itself evolved and developed.
Most of the papers in this issue were originally presented at the fourth annual Cambridge McDonald conference on theological ethics, 26–28 May 2014, and have been carefully refined and revised since then. Each of the recent McDonald conferences in Cambridge has been devoted to a topic of notable contemporary interest to theological ethicists; and the focus throughout the series has been on issues that demand a keen interdisciplinary discussion precisely in order to enrich the theological content of the outcomes. 1 As ever, we remain greatly indebted to Alonzo McDonald of the McDonald Agape Foundation for so generously funding this series, and to Susan Parsons, editor of Studies in Christian Ethics, for expertly shepherding the outcomes to completion in this format. However, the chief thanks in the case of this particular issue must go to Dr Hordern, now at Oxford University, and to his colleague Dr al-Akiti. During the early days of the McDonald series, Dr Hordern was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and collaborated closely with me as we planned the five-year series of conferences with an eye to expanding and regenerating the discussion of theological ethics at Cambridge. It was therefore some three years before the actual conference that I invited Dr Hordern to develop the ideas and personnel for this event, and it will be seen in what follows that the care and effort involved has been richly rewarded. I remain greatly indebted to Dr Hordern for the intellectual leadership he exercised at the conference and subsequently, and for what I have learned from him as a result.