7 The Rise and Demise of Civilizational Thinking in Contemporary Muslim Political Thought Halil Ibrahim Yenigun It is not a little characteristic of the structure of the Western society that the watchword of its colonizing movement is ‘civilization’. —Norbert Elias, [1939] 2000 Very few modern political concepts have gained such a degree of near-consensus among Muslim political thinkers as has civilization. Indeed, the trajectory of contemporary Muslim political thought can be reconstructed through various narratives, each of which attests to a shifting trail of key concepts. For instance, a student of intellectual history can point out how the ‘Liberal Age’ (Hourani 1983, p. iv) 1 was receptive to such European socio-political concepts as liberty, patrio- tism, parliamentary democracy, and nationalism. Yet this reconcilia- tory attitude gave way to blatant rejectionism from the mid-twentieth century onwards, only to witness liberal Muslims entertain a revival of democracy towards the end of the century. Other scholars, such as Roxanne Euben, might deploy the Weberian idea of ‘disenchantment’ to construct another narrative to demonstrate how Afghani’s disen- chanted understanding of Islam revived reason’s cherished position