GETTING ISLAM STRAIGHT
Charles E. Butterworth
University of Maryland
Prepared for delivery at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association,
August 28 - August 31, 2003
INTRODUCTION
About half a century ago, two relatively unknown scholars
delivered a series of lectures under the auspices of the Charles
R. Walgreen Foundation at the University of Chicago, one within
two years of the other. They had much in common: country of
birth, ethnicity, educational formation, flight from persecution
by tyrannic forces that brought them to asylum of sorts in the
US, and a desire to explain contemporary politics as well as
political thought by seeking its antecedents in the history of
political philosophy. The books resulting from the lectures and
appearing in inverse order one and three years after their
delivery are so well-known that the mention of their titles
immediately suffices to identify their authors and the multiple
controversies associated with their approaches: The New Science
of Politics and Natural Right and History.
Both Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin voice dismay over the way
positivism has affected clear thinking about politics as well as
about the moral and rational qualities needed for political life
to flourish. Strauss goes further and castigates historicism,
especially radical historicism, for the impetus it gives to moral
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Convention