The Introduction provides a panoramic view of Strauss’s thought, with a special emphasis on his interest in Islamic political thought. This summary presentation will focus on what I call the four pillars of Strauss’s intellectual project: (1) Reason and Revelation; (2) Ancients and Moderns; (3) The Theologico-Political Problem; (4) Esotericism. All these themes have a direct relationship to Strauss’s writings on Islamic thought and his biographically documented interest in the writings of the Falāsifa. This summary presentation is followed by a critical assessment of previous studies on Strauss’s interest in Islamic thought. The objective of this critical assessment is, first of all, to discuss some of the common misconceptions regarding Strauss’s writings on Islamic philosophy in those writings which are mainly critical of his scholarship. The second objective is to show that, despite some very important studies on Strauss’s scholarship on Islamic thought, there is a significant gap existing in the scholarship.

The book concludes by considering the implications of hidden liberalism for the study of liberal thought-practices in non-Western, postcolonial settings, and more generally of liberalism in general. In recent years, political theorists have begun to examine the complex relationship between liberalism and empire. These studies have ranged from meticulous genealogies of imperialist arguments in the works of Enlightenment-era thinkers, to dissections of liberal justifications and criticisms of empire during the eighteenth century, and still further to conceptualizations and classifications of liberal-imperialist thought-practices in the long nineteenth century. Overlooked in nearly all of these studies are the implications of Western imperialism for the reception and development of indigenous liberal views and practices inside postcolonial societies. I offer a critical assessment of Western political theory’s privileging of a contextually-specific model of liberalism as a universal standard for understanding, appraising, and promoting liberal thought-practices across the globe. I argue that mainstream, critical, and approaches in political thought unwittingly perpetuate this “visibility bias” as regards the study of liberalism in non-Western societies, and suggest ways of making these modes of inquiry more inclusive.