Political Islam and Foreign Policy in Europe and the United States Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Northwestern University This paper is about the epistemological underpinnings of European and American foreign policy toward political Islam. European and American approaches to political Islam rely upon commonly held sec- ular assumptions about religion and politics that have significant effects on foreign policy in Europe and the United States. Secularist epistemo- logy produces an understanding of ‘‘normal politics’’ that lends a particular coloring to the politics of Muslim-majority societies. These secularist understandings affect foreign policy in two ways: first, the appearance of Islam in politics is equated with fundamentalism and intolerance, and second, the forms and degrees of separation between Islam and politics that do exist in contemporary Muslim-majority societies either do not appear at all or appear as ill-fitting imitations of a Western secular ideal. Rather than a backlash against modernity or a return to tradition, political Islam is a modern language of politics that challenges and, at times, overturns fundamental assumptions about religion and politics embedded in Western forms of secularism. Il s’agit bien d’aborder la question de fond: l’islam est-il compatible avec la laı ¨- cite ´? Mais alors, de quelle laı ¨cite ´ parlons-nous? 1 -Olivier Roy, Vers un Islam europe´en, 11. The attempt to understand Muslim traditions by insisting that in them religion and politics (two essences modern society tries to keep conceptually and practi- cally apart) are coupled must, in my view, lead to failure. -Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 28–29. In Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell (2002:7) writes that, ‘‘the possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a universal knowledge.’’ This observation applies to the knowledge about political Islam generated by secularist epistemology in the field of inter- national relations. The conceptions of secularism underlying social inquiry deter- mine the kinds of questions that can be asked about secularism, religion, and Author’s note: I thank Jocelyne Cesari for her comments on an earlier version of this paper at our panel discus- sion ‘‘Islam in International Politics’’ at the 2006 APSA convention in Philadelphia. Thanks to Andreas Wenger, Victor Mauer, and Daniel Mo ¨ckli for inviting me to present this paper at ETH Zurich in September 2006 at the con- ference ‘‘A Strained Partnership: European-American Relations and the Middle East from Suez to Iraq,’’ and especi- ally to Dalia Dassa Kaye for her suggestions at our panel on ‘‘Current Issues.’’ The paper also benefited from discussions with graduate students at Northwestern in my ‘‘Politics of Religion in International Relations’’ seminar in 2005, and from the comments of three anonymous reviewers for Foreign Policy Analysis. 1 ‘‘We need to ask the fundamental question: is Islam compatible with laicism? But then, of which laicism are we speaking?’’ (author’s translation). Ó 2007 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK. Foreign Policy Analysis (2007) 3, 345–367