We can approach the task of locating the political systems of the Islamic world within a comparative international framework from various perspectives. Theories of civil society, of social movements and of political transformation have grown out of democratic theory and over the last few years have become increasingly significant to the assessment of Islamic societies. After a long period of fixation on textual materials, which reflected the influence of the classical Middle East scholarship, contemporary researchers are investigating real political processes without disregarding the role of religio-cultural traditions and modern ideologies. A number of authors are currently rethinking the significance of fundamentalist Islam in the process of social change as the – provisionally – final stage of this development (see Chapter 4). The question of whether Islamic fundamentalists may play a constructive role in eliminating authoritarianism, however, can be answered only if we keep another theoretical option in mind: the theory of authoritarianism.

It is significantly less homogeneous than the theory of democracy, perhaps because democracy has generally been studied in light of its development within the context of Western modernity, while authoritarian political power is as old as human history, and just as diverse. As a rule, modern-day comparative political science pays significantly more attention to political transformation and democratization than to authoritarianism, which seems to represent ‘the old’, that which must be overcome (see, for example, Jahn 2006; von Prittwitz 2007).