This deeply researched and copiously referenced work on the vital subject of the rise of the modern state and its paradoxical transformation via ‘democracy’ into an increasingly totalitarian structure working at the behest of an oligarchy will be of great interest and use to the rising numbers of people who are rightly concerned at this alarming development. However, the author takes the work much further with the most forthright exposition of the Islamic paradigm, something that is not only vitally different from the ‘state’ and its illegitimate offspring ‘the islamic state’ but diametrically opposed to it and, with its stringent prohibition of usury, fatal to oligarchic rule.

Aisha Bewley is the translator of a large number of classical works of Islam and Sufism, often in collaboration with Abdalhaqq Bewley, notably The Noble Qur'an - a New Rendering of Its Meanings in English; Muhammad, Messenger of Allah - the translation of Qadi ‘Iyad’s ash-Shifa’; the Muwatta’ of Imam Malik ibn Anas; and Imam an-Nawawi’s Riyad as-Salihin.