Political Liberalism for Post-Islamist, Muslim-Majority Societies

Abstract

This chapter includes a moderate reading of political liberalism applicable to post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies. Contrary to the strong reading of John Rawls, which considers his political liberalism as limited in its scope to those societies that already have a strong liberal tradition, I argue that the Rawlsian project does have many things to offer to reasonable post-Islamist, Muslim individuals. Part One of the chapter focuses on the Rawlsian ideas of justification, demonstrating that the conceptions of justification available in Political Liberalism, i.e. political constructivism, wide reflective equilibrium, a wide view of public reasoning, the declaration and conjecture, can justify the political conception of justice for reasonable individuals living in any society, including Muslim-majority ones. In Part Two, focusing on Rawls’ idea of stability, I argue that, notwithstanding the strong reading of political liberalism followed by some commentators, stability in real democratic polities always involves a mixture of ideal and non-ideal stability, i.e. overlapping consensus and modus vivendi.