The Arab Spring has once again moved the question of political Islam to the center of debates about democratic reforms in the Middle East. In Egypt and Tunisia—as throughout the region—Islamist political parties, many of them associated with branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, appear to have organizational advantages over secular parties, not to mention apparently larger bases of support. Will these parties behave democratically in the likely event that they win considerable shares in national assembly elections? Do they embrace a version of political Islam that fully accepts secular notions of the sovereign nation-state? Are these Islamists pretending to support democratic reform while harboring radical, antidemocratic agendas? These and other questions have preoccupied political scientists not just for the past months but for years.

Frédéric Volpi's Political Islam Observed was published a few months before the remarkable events of 2011, but such questions are central to his study—though not because he wants to answer them. Instead, Volpi examines how and why various social science disciplines ask the questions they do about political Islam. He aims not to explain the phenomenon (or phenomena) captured by the concept “political Islam,” nor does he suggest a definition that improves upon those already in circulation. But as he demonstrates, political Islam appears in most social science as “mainly an exception to the natural ‘order of things’” (p. 17), an empirical puzzle that needs to be explained. His central question is why. He turns the question on its head to ask what it is about various social science disciplines that make them struggle to makes sense of political Islam, often in very different ways. His primary conclusion is that historically as well as functionally, “political Islam” has come to play very specific roles within different social sciences, and “these roles are primarily structured not according to the mechanisms of dynamics of Islamism itself, but by the discursive and theoretical opportunities that emerge in preexisting scholarly debates” (p. 17). That is, scholarly writing on political Islam tells us at least as much about particular disciplinary commitments as it does about the multifaceted phenomena known as political Islam.

Individual chapters are devoted to an examination of the debates within cultural anthropology, international relations, sociology, comparative politics (framed around democratization studies), multicultural studies, terrorism and security studies, and globalization studies. The index is short but includes the key debates and authors in different disciplines. Volpi begins with a review of Orientalism's view of Islam as a cultural whole and turns quickly to post-Orientalist scholarship that examines how disciplinary perspectives shape social science analyses. The chapters then systematically examine the debates that are internal to various social science disciplines (and policymaking communities), as well as how they approach political Islam as an object or phenomenon that can be comprehended through systematic study and understood through the theories central to each discipline.

To take an example of interest to readers of this journal, in political science, like most social sciences, careful analyses rightly begin with clearly defined terms. Before we can ask questions about political Islam, then, we must offer some discussion of the parameters of precisely what we are talking about. We often begin by noting that political Islam, while far from a single phenomenon, should necessarily be understood as separate from Islam, the religion (or, at least, as a subcategory of the latter). Authors who write about political Islam will typically comment on the various definitions in circulation, identify one's own choice (or provide a new definition), defend that choice, and move on to the analysis.

Once clearly defined, political Islam can then be analyzed using the theories and methods of the various social sciences. Islamists, for example, can be rendered recognizable as rational political actors whose behavior is shaped by their goals and ideological commitments (their beliefs); the task is now simply to identify what those goals and beliefs are and to examine their behavior. Indeed, many debates within political science about Islamists center precisely on what Islamists really want—whether their stated goals are, in fact, their real goals. Once we can classify which Islamists are moderates (or Islamist liberals) and which are radicals (or militant extremists), it is only a short step to answering questions about commitments to democratic reform or which Islamists pose a threat to normal institutional politics.

As Volpi notes, however, “the ‘political’ character of political Islam cannot simply be attributed to a strategy by various Islamist movements to capture state power. It must also be seen as a re-interpretation of various social activities that were previously not considered to be political, by the state authorities and by those analyzing social life from a statist perspective” (p. 12). But since much of political science cannot easily work this notion of “the political,” it seldom makes its way into most political analyses. (There are, of course, exceptions.)

And as Volpi illustrates, social scientists quite often wield these categories without recognizing that “there is a slippery slope from the descriptive to the normative” (p. 6). That is, analytical distinctions can have a funny way of turning into substantive claims, so that the distinction between an instrumentalist use of religion to achieve political ends and an inward-looking piety that does not challenge the existing political order devolves quickly into categories of bad Muslims and good Muslims (as captured brilliantly in Mahmood Mamdani's analysis in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 2004). The contours of these scholarly debates have very real policy implications, and so the results are far from benign.

One particular strength of this book is that it is not polemical, nor does it take cheap shots at sloppy scholarship (of which there is a great deal on the topic of political Islam). Volpi has chosen to discuss many of the strongest and most nuanced studies in each of the disciplines examined, avoiding a tone of condemnation for a more insightful and constructive critique. He does not tell us that our disciplines are inherently biased and, thus, not capable of producing reliable scholarly conclusions. Even for someone who has studied political Islam from an interdisciplinary perspective for more than a decade, there is so much new and exciting in this book that it will certainly move to the top of a voluminous field of scholarship to take its rightful place among the “must-read” core texts.

Still, it would be a shame if this book were read only by scholars of political Islam or the Middle East, or by the growing number of scholars who embrace interpretive methods. Political Islam Observed could easily emerge as a core text in debates about concept formation and theory building, and it is ideal for courses that examine the philosophy of science, research design, all methodologies, and the history of the social sciences. Engaging and illuminating, this book should be essential reading for any scholar concerned with recognizing the complex ways in which their own epistemological commitments shape the questions they ask and the conclusions they reach.