Rehman, Scheherazade S. & Askari, Hossein (2010). How Islamic are Islamic Countries? Global Economy Journal, 10 (2).

See: www.ahmad-juhaidi.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/how-islamic-islamic-countries.pdf

This article offers food for thought. It is also another example of the extreme importance of the 'rules of the game' for determining what is fair / foul play. Tell me what the presuppositions, criteria or parameters are that precede your discourse, and I will probably already guess what conclusions you'll arrive to. This article shows to what extent scholarly discourses, including those about the Islamic message, are essentially conditioned by their methodological starting points. Change those axioms and presuppositions, and you'll be able to arrive at different conclusions. Da'esh draws the conclusions that it does because of their presuppositions about God and the Qur'an.

For example, to me, Allah can never be like Hitler, Mubarak, Saddam Hussain, Asad, Stalin, Lennin, Latin American dictators, slave traders, etc. I will therefore never come up with an explanation of the Islamic Message that comes anywhere close, say, to that of Da'esh. To me, any 'god' that behaves like Hitler, favors the slave trade in 21st Century, or runs 'Hell' as a concentration camp or Abu Ghaib is NOT 'the Highest God' at all; that 'being or idea' is an ugly idol (the crazy projection of the worst in us) and is deserving of the strictest intellectual jihad against it.

Discourses are language games, and since prophetic inspiration ended with the death of the last Prophet, absolutely no discourse about the Islamic message can claim any other origin than the mind of whoever articulated based on a given set of interpretative rules and presuppositions. Discourses about the Qur'an or the hadith do not share in the 'inspired' nature of their sources. Every doctrine, every discourse, every khutba about the Qur'an remains the speech of uninspired, non-Prophets. The Qur'an says what it says (said). Any explanation of what it says is no longer 'what it says' but what the speaker 'says that the Qur'an means to say when it says what it says (or what it said when and where it said it)'. The pure Qur'an was given to the consciousness of the Prophet and it was communicated by his own mouth as an answer (or guidance) to a concrete historical situation or issue. Anything outside of that is no longer the Qur'an, but our speech about the inspired Message.