Noah Feldman's deeply interesting and profoundly misleading book supplies an answer to a question that must puzzle Americans who buy the argument that Islam is a religion of peace: Why do Muslim voters always turn out majorities for violent Islamist parties?
The short answer, according to Feldman, a Harvard Law professor and heavy hitter at the Council of Foreign Relations, is that misgoverned Muslims subscribe to a religion that makes much of justice, and they yearn for a return to a rule of law -- sharia -- that they believe worked in their glorious past.
You have to recognize that Feldman misrepresents the political goals of the Islamists, which he equates with the Muslim Brotherhood. In particular, he accepts the published platform statements of the various national Brotherhood parties, while ignoring their (more indicative) speeches to their adherents.
As well as to non-Muslims. The Islamists have not been shy about telling us what they intend, which does not match the anodyne statements in the party platforms.
According to Feldman, sharia offered (at a time when no other religion or political system did so) a promise of law-based government, and divine law at that. The sultans had to defer to sharia, and sharia was (by a fluke of Muslim history) the preserve of independent scholars, the ulama.
The scholars served as a counterbalance to the inherent despotism of kings, leaving Muslims satisfied that something other than mere force ruled their lives.
Right here Feldman goes off the rails. He asserts that sharia was (and is) egalitarian, at least for men, and that this contributed to the satisfaction of the populace and, so long as they were seen to be deferring to sharia, to the legitimacy of rulers.
This is false. Sharia is egalitarian only among Muslims. It requires that non-Muslims be treated as inferiors at law.
However, if, as Feldman is, you are primarily concerned with finding some constitutional framework that might replace the failed states of the majority Muslim countries, perhaps you can overlook this inconvenient truth. Whatever his motive, Feldman does overlook it.
He argues that the unintended outcome of the Tanzimat (Ottoman reform movement of the 19th century) was a disaster for the balance of political interests in Muslim states.
The independent scholars were ruined by being replaced with a written constitution. The constitution was then revoked, leaving not even a theoretical restraint on the executive.
This system of no checks and no balances, he says, carried over to the 20th century, after the last sultan departed. Thus, almost all Muslims consider themselves oppressed, their rulers illegitimate.
Instead of looking to some modern, parliamentary replacement, they look backward to the good old days, when executives were restrained by sharia.
Though pessimistic about its chances, Feldman considers this atavistic approach almost the only conceivable way that a new, stable and just constitutional framework could be arrived at in majority Muslim countries.
Since so far Islamist parties always win when elections are more or less free, the rest of the world had better learn to deal with it, he says.
But he is misleading or worse when he treats sharia as something internal to Muslims. Muslims who live in non-Muslim countries say (to pollsters and in widely distributed sermons) that they wish to live under sharia, too.
The kicker is that when they say that, they mean everybody -- not just Muslims -- must live by sharia.
Feldman concludes: "Just now, the Islamist promise of the rule of law offers the only prospect for meaningful political justice for many Muslims. If it, too, fails, the alternative may well be worse."
It's difficult to see how non-Muslims could peacefully co-exist with the success of Islamism, however.

Noah Feldman's thesis is based on a false premise; one that suggests that Muslims around the globe are clamouring for an "Islamic State".

This assumption is repudiated by the fact that in the recent elections in Pakistan, all parties propagating the establishment of Sharia based Islamic State were trounced and the centre-left PPP formed a coalition with the number two party, the centre-right ML and the secular nationalists of the ANP.

In Indonesia as well as Bangladesh, there is little appetite for the Islamists while in Iran, if the Mullahs ever permitted a fair and transparent elections, they would be wiped out. No wonder the ruling Ayatollahs vet every candidate and reject the nomination papers of any secular liberal Muslim candidate, not mentioning the impossibility of anyone from the Left seeking any public office.

And in the Arab heartland, it would take no more than one cycle of elections to ensure that Muslim Brotherhood return to the margins of society where they have historically belonged.

The author knows exactly what he is talking about. And unlike most of the literature he is trying to discuss the issue logically and in details.
He seems to have very good understanding of the way muslims think in the East.