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Islam, World Politics, and Democracy

Islam and the politics of democratic pluralism is one of the research and teaching clusters and activities of the UF Center for Global Islam Studies. Islam and the politics of democratic pluralism is a topic of the hour on national and global scales. This is a vital issue that is now and will remain on the national and global agendas in the twenty-first century and beyond. This research and teaching cluster seeks to provide an interface between conceptual and theoretical explorations of the idea of democracy and concrete practices and policies of democracy promotion within the politics of Islam in the contemporary world wherein religion and secularism coexist in every corner of the world. The cluster is conceived on the premise that we must think in terms of an irreducibly increasing diversity of Muslims worldviews in terms of historical, theological, ritual, ethical, epistemological, cultural, social, economic, demographic, political and ideological dimensions. To this end the cluster focuses on questions about the ontological, epistemological and logical presuppositions underpinning the concepts of Islam, pluralism, and democracy in the existing literature and current political practices for the purpose of building a research tradition driven by the key question of how to theorize, empirically study, and evaluate and validate new approaches to the issue of Islam and politics within an enriched concept and practice of democratic  pluralism.

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