It is certainly admirable that the author carries through his ambitious project of working through all of Islamic political thought "from the prophet to the present", and he's clearly an accomplished scholar. He has done an immense amount of work in synthesizing 1400 years of Islamic political thought into 350 pages. The bibliography in this book is also very useful for those looking to go deeper into the subject.

However, I think the author has done himself a disservice in conceiving "political thought" very broadly. I didn't notice it so much in parts I and II, which included good chapters on the classical thinkers: Ibn Rush, Ibn Khaldun, Al-Ghazali and so on. But especially in parts III and IV he delves into much more obscure literature: "advice-to-the-king" treatises, the legitimating ideologies of various dynasties and administrative works on practical government. I think he should have been more discriminate in separating the classics from such peripheral and mediocre writings, and he should have focused much more on the former. I like to read about ideas that were new and original when they were conceived, not about old ideas being repeated over and over again.

Perhaps this is an impossible requirement due to the intellectual stupor of Islamic societies after the classical period. There simply weren't many original ideas to begin with. The author resolves this conundrum in parts III and IV by including a lot of second-rate material, as I already mentioned, but also by narrating the political history of later Islamic societies at some length. I did not like this approach at all. Political thought and political history are related, of course, but they are not interchangeable. I don't think a book on the history of political thought should shift its emphasis over to political history the way this one does. Part V deals with Islamic responses to western ideas and dominance. This part was better than parts III and IV since it stayed more faithful to political thought, but I would have preferred to read part V as a longer, separate book. Its subject seems to be too complex to be condensed into just 70 pages.

In conclusion I think this is a good scholarly work, but too broad for my liking. The author stretches "political thought" beyond reasonable limits in trying to give equal coverage to all periods of Islamic history. The detailed references in this book might be useful for scholars, but general readers would learn more from books that focus on just one period.