History and the categorization of the study of Islamic political philosophy in the West

The present paper is the first to deal with the two issues of history and the categorization of the study of Islamic political philosophy in the West. The first part of the paper deals with the emergence and historical development of the study of Western scholars on Islamic political philosophy and, in addition to giving an account of the life of these scholars, introduces the most important works written in the West about Islamic political philosophy. In the second part, the study of the Islamic political philosophy in the West is categorized into four approaches: historical, interpretive, critical, and descriptive. The above categorization is not based on time, but on the congruence of content. In addition, arriving at the above approach for categorization was not based on an deductive criterion, but on the inductive study of the works written about the Islamic political philosophy in the West.