I am increasingly aware of scientific advances that were made in the Islamic world, many of which were discoveries that were made by Greek and Roman scholars that were then built upon and advanced by Islamic scholars (like algebra, geometry, for example) and then subsequently adopted by the Western world. Then, due to concepts like Orientalism and antithetical relationships between the West and the Islamic world, were appropriated by the West but the Muslim scholars were not given credit for them.
My question is whether there are similar connections to Western political theory and Islamic ways of thinking, which have then been adopted but not acknowledged to be connected to the Islamic world?
Greetings from Denver
As far as I am aware, there have been almost no discoveries of Islamic ideas directly influencing the development of Western political thinking in the way that Muslim-authored works on science influenced Western writings. For the most part, scholarship on the role of Islam and Muslims in early modern Western political thought focuses primarily on either the Westerners' anti-Islamic sentiments or their tolerant views of Muslims, which came out of their modern concepts of freedom of religion. (Denise Spellberg's work on the interest in the Qur'an and Islam shown by Thomas Jefferson and a handful of other early American political figures is a good example of this kind of scholarship.)
Part of the reason for this apparent lack of influence is that the translation efforts that made Arabic-language works available to late medieval and early modern Westerners rarely focused on Islamic political philosophy. The great majority of translations dealt with Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, and to some extent occult texts, which were in a way seen as science as well.
Nevertheless, there does seem to have been a key Muslim philosophical influence on one of the most important early modern Western political philosophers: John Locke. GA Russell has shown that Locke's concept of "tabula rasa"--the notion that the human mind is a "blank slate" that gains knowledge not through innate ideas but rather through empirical perception--was in all likelihood significantly influenced by Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a treatise by Spain's 12th c Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl. Hayy proposes the scenario of a person raised without any human contact on a deserted island in order to argue that knowledge of the world can be acquired via the use of reason and the perception of things in the world. This Arabic work was being translated in the 17th c by Oxford professor Edward Pockoke, who worked with his father (who himself was an Oxford professor named Edward Pockoke) translating Arabic texts. John Locke happened to be a devoted student of the Pockokes at the time and was significantly influenced by their teachings.
Although the concept of tabula rasa appeared in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which is a work concerned primarily with epistemology, it may have served as part of the basis for his later political philosophy work Two Treatises of Government, which (at least sometimes) emphasizes the notion that "natural law"--which Locked argues should serve as the philosophical and legal bases and forms of government--can be deduced through reasoning and observation of the world. In other words, the concept of the tabula rasa is the foundation on which Locke builds and justifies his vision of an ideal government (although, again, Locke is somewhat inconsistent regarding this, as he sometimes suggest that natural law is innately known and does not require reason and perception). In the end, even if the effects of Hayy on Locke's political philosophy are at best indirect, due to Locke's prominence as a political thinker the impact of Hayy remains important to consider.
Denise Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an
Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Translations and Translators,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1982), 421–462
Charles Burnett, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century,” Science in Context 14, no. 1/2 (2001): 249–288.
G. A. Russell (1994), The Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends, in: G. A. Russell (ed.), The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 224–262