Gazing though my window across the Saad Zaghloul Square of Alexandria into the Mediterranean, I can hear chants of the Egyptian revolutionaries who now want to secure the gains of their proud and peaceful revolution of January 25, 2011. In this wildi re of revolutionary fervor that has spread through the Middle East and has caught the region by surprise, Islam is deeply relevant. This is not an “Islamic” revolution like that of Iran, as everyone across the board is insisting, yet, with the passing of days and weeks, questions surrounding of the role of Islam in the future of the Egyptian and the new Arab states generally seem to loom ever larger. The subject matter of this monograph – the relationship between politics, law, and reason in Islamic thought – even though it pertains to the medieval world, is brought to life for me continually as I meet with Egyptians of various stripes in the midst of the revolutionary fervor and see their unprecedented openness toward expression of political views. The classical Muslim i gures whose thought is examined here are alive and well today in the sermons and writings of the ulama, preachers, and Islamists. Given the nature of the subject matter, it is only appropriate to attempt to bring it into conversation with the contemporary problems in Islamic political thought. In the following pages, I do so by raising the set of questions that I address in this monograph.