The question of political and religious despotism is investigated here through an examination of the most important manifestations of the congruent critique, made by two prominent modern Arab thinkers: al-Kawakibi and Abdel-Raziq. The study aims to demonstrate that they have various critical features in common despite their multiple differences, since the goal of critiquing despotism, whether political or religious, is the critique of politics from inside using its own tools. Both thinkers worked ceaselessly to sow the seeds of enlightened thinking in order to break the essentialist and interest-based links between the political and religious domains and re-establish the relationship between them according to a modern, and rational understanding.