Islamic public administration and Islamic public value: Towards a research agenda
| Published date | 01 October 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09520767231201799 |
| Author | Wolfgang Drechsler,Rainer Kattel,Salah Chafik |
| Date | 01 October 2024 |
Special Issue: Religion as an explanatory factor in public administration:
Directions for research
Public Policy and Administration
2024, Vol. 39(4) 608–624
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/09520767231201799
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Islamic public administration
and Islamic public value:
Towards a research agenda
Wolfgang Drechsler
Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, London, UK
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Rainer Kattel
Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, London, UK
Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia
Salah Chafik
Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, London, UK
Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia
Abstract
This essay explores whether religion has a place in addressing public challenges, par -
ticularly in the context of Non-Western Public Administration paradigms such as
Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic. The authors focus on Islam as a case study and highlight
the need for real-life cases to build a grounded theory. To this end, the essay documents
the authors’ongoing research on Islamic Public Value. We argue that to understand Public
Administration in a global context, it is essential to recognize the limitations of a Western
perspective, from which the dichotomy of religious versus secular emerged, and in so
doing, consider alternative departure points, i.e. paradigms incorporating religious or
semi-religious elements.
Corresponding author:
Salah Chafik, Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, 11 Montague St,
11 Montague St, London WC1B 5BP, UK.
Email: s.chafik@ucl.ac.uk
Correction (November 2023): Article updated to correct Rainer Kattel and Salah Chaflik’saffiliation and
also in-text citation of Mazzucato et al. 2021 has been updated.
Keywords
Islamic public administration, non-western public administration, Islamic public value
Introduction
“Does religion have a place in addressing public challenges?”This question was posed for
a Harvard Kennedy School faculty discussion very recently (Hughes, 2023), and for the
editors, authors, and likely potential readers, too, at least as a potentiality, the answer very
likely lies in the affirmative, because otherwise, why deal with the topic at all?
This also reflects the enterprise of which the current issue of PPA, and hence this essay,
is a part –and here, with a special emphasis on Public Administration (PA). But while
dealing with religion in larger political-philosophical dimensions has been somewhat re-
established as a perhaps minor but not anymore atavistic field, earlier decades showed no
such interest. One can say that the relation between religion and PA was truly off the
agenda, the extent of which recent serious engagement by the editors of this issue, both in
a literature review (Ongaro and Tantardini, 2024) and in a forthcoming book (Ongaro and
Tantardini, 2023), amply documents. Part of it may be a laggard, particularly main-
streamish, anorakish, copycatty attitude of global-Western PA that has made the entire
discipline be particularly behind even the general social science discourse (Drechsler,
2019a; see Massey 2023).
But as the endorsements for the latter book by serious mainstream PA scholars show,
this is not the case anymore, firstly because, “If there’s anything Max Weber might have
been wrong about, it’s the disenchantment of the world –there is very little of the sort, or if
there is, it is hardly ever complete. And even where rationalization has set in, few things
inform values and institutions in time and space as much as its respective religion(s).”
(Drechsler in Ongaro and Tantardini 2023)
Second, the perhaps most eminent public philosopher of our time, Jürgen Habermas,
published in 2019 a late magnum opus on religion and philosophy, from the perspective of
the latter but with great respect and taking-seriously of the former (2019), and as he states
here:
Secular modernity has turned away from the transcendent for good reasons, but reason itself
would wither away with the disappearance of any thought that transcends the totality of what
exists in the world. (Habermas 2019, p. 2:807)
Thirdly, although the global West may have basically discarded its own traditional
religions, greater attention to the often very-religious-indeed Global South, and the fact of
the Global South coming to the Global North, have changed this perspective as a matter of
need. Indeed there are growing movements to decolonise politics and institutions, often
related to indigenous cultures and religious practices (e.g. Althaus 2020).
However, we must also realize that this is a very Western question –whether religion
matters for addressing public challenges –to ask in the first place. One aspect that speaks
for our object of study, the Islamic paradigm of PA, is that by and large, most people in
Drechsler et al. 609
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