Leadership in the West and the Islamic World: A Comparative Analysis

Leadership, studied by scholars for centuries, has always been a contested terrain. It is a multidisciplinary field concerned as well with ethics and morality. However, leadership is conceived differently in the West and the East and this difference is largely attributed to the differences in culture and their respective world views. The Western perspective of leadership dominates the world of learning to the total neglect of Eastern perspectives. This paper examines leadership from an Islamic perspective which has so far been neglected or misrepresented because it is studied based on European experiences. This necessitates reviewing the Western perspective on leadership as a backdrop for making a case for studying leadership from perspectives other than the West. The paper is less concerned with comparing leadership between the West and the rest. Its emphasis is upon examining roots of why the concept of leadership in Islam is different from those of the West. The final section of the paper presents the features of leadership portrayed by the Heads of State in 47 countries in which Muslims form a majority of the population and examines their congruence with the leadership concept of Islam.

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