The title of this volume, Volpi argues, is a deliberate “wink” at Clifford Geertz's work, Islam Observed. For Frédéric Volpi offers no empirical analysis that uncovers, decodes, or defines political Islam. Rather Political Islam Observed is about the community that observes political Islam, about the ways in which political Islam has been represented within the various disciplines of Western academia and policy discourse. Volpi highlights the pitfalls, tensions, and underlying power dynamics in the project of defining political Islam. Narratives about political Islam, he argues, do not so much produce knowledge of the subject “as illustrate the epistemic power of various disciplines to shape the academic, policy and media framings of social phenomena” (198). Volpi shows how political Islam has been defined as the “attempt to establish an Islamic state and to implement an Islamic legal system (shari'a)” (203). However, he argues that “the ‘political’ character of political Islam cannot simply be attributed to a strategy by various Islamist movements to capture state power” (12). Rather, one of the problems with such a definition is that it fails to “define the ‘political’ that Islamic actors are, rightly or wrongly, supposed to be engaging with” (2). This secularist bias is also reflected in how Western social scientists and policy-makers deal with “Islamic liberals” who are not deemed “to be mixing religion with politics, but merely to express how Islam can be integrated into existing liberal-democratic frameworks” (16).

In what is an extremely well-researched and well-sourced book, Volpi looks at the narratives on Islamism in seven social science fields. His critique of orientalism in chapter two lays the foundation for subsequent chapters. Volpi illustrates the resilience of essentialist narratives and orientalist thinking, arguing that it has “led to ‘theologocentrism,’ namely the assumption that ‘almost all observable phenomena can be explained by reference to Islam’” (29). In chapter three, Volpi illustrates that international studies has encountered difficulties in striking a balance between taking religion seriously and culturalist perspectives that tend to revert to orientalist essentialism. In chapter five, Volpi argues that in democratization studies, the influence of orientalism has resulted in a “paradigmatic reading of Islam that would structure the freedom of action of Muslim social and political actors — what they can or cannot do and say, what they should or should not do and say.” (104) Chapter seven illustrates how security studies and terrorism studies — driven by their need to demonstrate policy relevance — focus on political violence, the psychology of terrorism, and the role of ideology in political violence.

Despite orientalism's endurance, Volpi concedes that there has been some movement toward what he terms post-orientalism. Post-orientalist accounts have included an interest in Islamism as a postcolonial discourse, an interest in the interpretation of the Islamic tradition, and — particularly since the turn of this century — the micro-politics of Islamic practice. However, the latter has had relatively little influence since it “removed the sense of unavoidability and inalterability that characterized orientalist views” (202). Other post-orientalist accounts, which rather present political Islam as a modern phenomenon, “have been more successful at linking up their insights with other disciplinary readings of the phenomenon” (202).

While Volpi concentrates on critiquing representations of political Islam, he offers some suggestions. For example, he calls for a more thoughtful approach to understanding the relationship between theology and ideological trends — including highlighting internal Islamic debates — and to understanding the relationship between ideology and political and social action. He emphasizes the need to see Islamism as something that “evolves as a bottom up local tradition alongside other pre-existing modes of social organization” (39). He calls for avoiding the “twin fallacies of either assuming that the fusion of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ is a natural occurrence, or of portraying as ‘normal’ a trajectory of relative political quietism occasionally interrupted by ‘abnormal’ Islamic revivals” (72).

In light of the above suggestions, perhaps the field of Islamic studies could have received more attention, although admittedly the book focuses on social sciences. Volpi concedes that “traditional” Islamic studies have departed from orientalism's deterministic treatment of texts and history by critically engaging with the views of Islamist movements and thinkers and by highlighting the role of interpretation in the Islamic tradition. However, beyond that Volpi gives relatively little attention to the important literature in Islamic studies, modern Islamic thought, and Islamic intellectual history.

Volpi's work skillfully examines the phenomenon of political Islam from an original and provocative perspective. It is a work that anyone writing “on” political Islam would do well to read. At the end, one is left wondering whether Volpi thinks that the term political Islam has any explanatory purchase at all. The only concession he makes to a definition is that it may be useful to emphasize “that an Islamist is one who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something crucial to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary ummah and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion as a matter of priority” (14). However, while Volpi concedes that there is not much of a future for the term political Islam, he also implies that we should still aim to take “a more integrated longer-term understanding of what political Islam is (and is not), of what it is likely to become (and what is wishful thinking)” (217). The debate about the usefulness of the term “political Islam,” to which Volpi's work is an important contribution, will no doubt continue.