What is the nature of political Islam? Twenty or more years ago, there was considerable agreement among scholars on how to answer this question. Political Islam comprised parties and movements that sought the formal application of Islamic law in politics and society. The cornerstones of Islamic party platforms at that time were usually the implementation of shari'ah and Islamization of the state. Many Islamic parties competed in democratic elections, but were ambivalent about the compatibility of liberal democracy with Islamic principles, believing that religious principles and law should be paramount rather than the will of a populace whose knowledge of and commitment to faith was not assured. Such parties were often exclusivist or sectarian and steadfastly asserted Islam's superiority as a system of moral, legal, and political guidance. They were also committed to dramatic change, preferably in the short term.

More recently, characterizing Islamic politics has become more difficult and contentious. In many majority Muslim countries, new patterns of Islamic political activism are emerging, sometimes manifested in newly formed parties, and other times evident in the reorientation of long-established parties. The features of this trend are a declining emphasis on, and sometimes complete abandonment of, prior shari'ah-ization and Islamic state agendas, and their replacement with a more inclusive, pluralistic form of politics which stresses Islamic values and upholds democracy as the final system within which political contests should be fought. Parties evincing these principles are gradualist in outlook and accept the need for cooperation with other political forces, including non-Islamic ones. Scholars coined various terms for this new form of Islamic politics, including “neo-Islamism”, “post-Islamism” and “Muslim democracy”. The party best exemplifying these new traits is Turkey's Welfare and Justice Party (AKP), led by Tayyip Erdogan, but other instances are the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, and Egypt's Muslim-Brotherhood-based proto-party Hizb al-Wasat.

While there is a rich literature on political trends in the broader Islamic world, especially the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Central Asia, there have been relatively few detailed studies of Islamic politics in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.