The two countries

The controversy over the nature of the state in Islam compared to its counterpart in the modern West has escalated following the outbreak of the Arab revolts and the rise of Islamists to the forefront of political conflict. The traditional hypotheses that view the process of political change in the lands of Islam and everywhere outside the West faced a major crisis; as the rise to power of Islamists posed significant challenges related to their previous theoretical perceptions of the nature of governance and politics in the modern state. This book was among the first to attempt to break free from the grip of that traditional Orientalist view of governance in Islam, trying to clarify the fundamental differences between it and the modern state in the West through the tools of historical sociology. The book "The Two States" aims to fill a large gap in our knowledge of the history of political ideas and the context of their development in the Islamic medieval and modern Western experiences, contributing to enriching the current debate on issues of the state, politics, and governance in our contemporary Arab and Islamic world.