A – Hybrid Learning

Afghan Mujahidin

Batoota — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 11:17:01 +0000

Afghan Mujahidin
The Afghan Mujahidin are guerrilla fighters who formed their groups in opposition to the communist government after the April 1978 coup. The Mujahidin movement is divided into an array of political parties, each following a different set of ideological, ethnic, clientelist, and sectarian loyalties. The first cleavage among the parties is based on ideological commitment: the Islamists advocate an Islamic revolution, and the “moderates,” although committed also to the implementation of shari `ah, rely on traditional elites and oppose the idea of Islamic revolution.
The Sunni Islamist movement, influenced by the ideas of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood of the 1950s, was active in the late 1960s on Kabul college campuses. An urban movement, it recruited mostly among young intellectuals who considered Islam more a political ideology than a religion. This movement split into three parties: the most radical party, Hizb-i Islam!, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun and a former engineering student; a regionally influential party, also named Hizb-i Islam!, led by Yunus Khales, a Pashtun mullah; and the relatively moderate party that is popular among Persian speakers, Jam`iyat-i Islalmi, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani (Burhan al-Din Rabbani), a Tajiki theology professor. From 1979 onward, the Islamist militants reentered Afghanistan (they had left in 1975) to lead the spontaneous armed rebellion that broke out after the communist coup of April 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion of December 1979.
The moderate parties were created after the communist coup: the Harakat-i Inqilab (Revolutionary Movement), led by Muhammad Nab! Muhammadi, a cleric, which recruits mostly among traditional Pashtun or Uzbek clerics; the Mahaz-i Mill!-yi Islam! Afghanistan (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan), headed by Pir Ahmad Gaylani, a secular but charismatic leader of a Sufi order, which recruits among traditional tribal, mainly Durrani, leaders; and the Jabhah-yi Nahzat-i Mill! (National Salvation Front), led by Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, a scholar and cleric from the Sufi Naqshbandi order, which recruits among local traditional notables.
A seventh party, the fundamentalist Ittihad-i Islam! (Islamic Union), led by `Abd al-Rabb Sayyaf, came into existence in 1982 as a front party for Arab Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood groups. It has no sociological or ethnic base, because it recruits mainly by distributing weapons to local low-level commanders, whatever their party of origin.
These seven parties are all Sunnis and have been united since 1985 in a loose Seven-Parties Alliance, based in Peshawar, Pakistan. This alliance constituted the core of the anti-Kabul Afghan Interim Government created in February 1988. The Jami`at slowly shifted toward the moderates, and the Hizb-i Islam! of Hekmatyar has fought all the other parties, trying to seize power for itself through an alliance with the hardcore communists and Pashtun nationalists.
Sanusiyah Sufi order in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya). He came from the `A’ilat Farhat branch of the Minifiyah, an independent client tribe. `Umar studied at the lodge of Zanzur, moving on to the Sanusi capital and university of Jaghbub in 1887, then moving with the leadership to Kufra in the Libyan desert in 1895.
Two years later he was appointed shaykh of the alQasflr lodge in western Cyrenaica, in the territory of the unruly `Abid tribe. `Umar was successful in solidifying the authority of the order in the region. His success noted, he was again called south in 1899, when the order was expanding into Borku (northern Chad). He was appointed shaykh of the `Ayn Qalakkah lodge. Here he had his first military experiences fighting the French forces. In 1903 he moved back to al-Qasflr as shaykh of the lodge.
When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911, `Umar led the `Abid in the ensuing jihad. By the time the first war ended in a truce in 1917, `Umar had gained great influence with the new leader of the Sanusiyah, Muhammad Idris. In 1923, the Italians reopened hostilities. Idris went into exile in Egypt and appointed `Umar as one of the leaders for the campaign in Cyrenaica. Already more than sixty years old, as na’ib al-`amm (general representative) he became a charismatic figure who inspired the tribes to join and maintain the struggle.
`Umar displayed considerable tactical skill and was able to lead the mostly tribal units in a campaign that for more than six years confounded the Italians in spite of their great numerical and material superiority. Eventually the guerilla forces started to be worn down, and in 1929, after a series of defeats, `Umar asked for truce negotiations. They led nowhere, and after three months he resumed fighting. But Italian superiority was now evident, in particular after they in 193o began rounding up the bedouin population into concentration camps and cut off supply lines by closing the Egyptian border with barbed wire. `Umar’s fighters became hunted groups, and on 11 September 1931, `Umar himself was captured in a chance encounter. He was brought to Benghazi and, after a summary trial, hanged on 16 September. After his death the resistance crumbled, ending within three months.
What made `Umar al-Mukhtar such a charismatic leader was a combination of religious authority and personal skill. While the forces he led were largely tribal, he himself came from a relatively minor, client tribe. His first military power was based on the `Abid tribe, among whom he was the leader of the Sanusi Sufi lodge.
With this basis he could use his political and military skill, which combined with a personal reputation for uprightness and incorruptability formed a power strong enough to stand up to the Italian forces for almost a decade.
[See also Libya; Sanusiyah.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Del Boca, Angelo. Gli Italiliani in Libia. 2 vols. Rome, 1986-1988. Thorough study of the period from an Italian point of view. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford, 1949. Still the major study of the period in English.
Santarelli, Enzo, Giorgio Rochat, Romain Raniero, and Luigi Goglia. Omar al-Mukhtar: The Italian Reconquest of Libya. London, 1986. Concentrates on the last years of the war, using Italian sources in a critical perspective.
KNUT S. VIKOR

ABBAS, SHAH

Batoota — Sun, 25 May 2014 10:47:38 +0000

Shāh ‘Abbās the Great (or Shāh ‘Abbās I) (Persian: شاه عَباس بُزُرگ‎) (27 January 1571 – 19 January 1629) was the 5th Safavid Shah (king) of Iran, and generally considered the greatest ruler of the Safavid dynasty. He was the third son of Shah Mohammad.
Shah Abbas I, the fifth ruler of the Safavid dynasty, ruled Iran from 1587 until 1629, the year of his death. Shah Abbas came to power at a time when tribal unrest and foreign invasion had greatly reduced Iran’s territory. Once on the throne he set out to regain the lands and authority that had been lost by his immediate successors. His defeat of the Uzbeks in the northeast and the peace he made with the Ottoman Empire, Iran’s archenemy, enabled Shah Abbas to reform Iran’s military and financial system. He diminished the military power of the
tribes by creating a standing army composed of slave soldiers who were loyal only to him. These so-called ghulams (military slaves) were mostly Armenians and Georgians captured during raids in the Caucasus. In order to increase the revenue needed for these reforms the shah centralized state control, which included the appointment of ghulams to high administrative positions. With the same intent he fostered trade by reestablishing
road security and by building many caravan series throughout the country. Under Shah Abbas, Isfahan became Iran’s capital and most important city, endowed with a new commercial and administrative center grouped around a splendid square that survives today. His genius further manifested itself in his military skills and his astute foreign policy. He halted the eastward expansion of the Ottomans, defeating them and taking Baghdad in 1623. To encourage trade and thus gain treasure, he welcomed European merchants to the
Persian Gulf. He also allowed Christian missionaries to settle in his country, hopeful that this might win him allies among European powers in his anti-Ottoman struggle. Famously down to earth, Shah Abbas was a pragmatic ruler who could be cruel as well as generous. Rare among Iranian kings, he is today remembered as a ruler who was concerned about his own people.
See also Empires: Safavid and Qajar.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matthee, Rudolph P. The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk
for Silver, 1600–1730. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Savory, Roger. Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Rudi Matthee

ABD AL-AZIZ AL-DURI

Batoota — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:48:15 +0000

ABD AL-`AZIZ AL-DURI, ( 1919-Nov. 19, 2010), Iraqi educator and Arabist social historian. Born in Baghdad, he was educated there and at London University. He taught history at the Higher Teachers’ College and the Faculty of Arts, was translation and publications director at the ministry of education, and was dean of Arts and then rector of Baghdad University, ending his working career as professor of history at the University of Jordan in Amman. Al-Duri’s publications include two studies on the political and financial history of the `Abbasid era, a study of the economic history of Mesopotamia in the tenth century, a study on the origins of Arab historiography, and studies on the history of Arab nationalism, anti-Arab national-ism (shu’ubiyah) and Arab Socialism.
In addition to his valuable studies on Iraqi history, al-Duri has contributed significantly in the field of the socioeconomic history of the Arab world. His suggestion that the emergence of an “Arab Nation,” although closely tied to the unity of language, was in many ways molded by a unified, or at least similar, socioeconomic historical pattern, is particularly pioneering. As do most influential Arab nationalists, al-Duri regards language as the major factor in forming an Arab identity, thus making Arabism a cultural, rather than an ethnic or regional or religious, matter. Like many Arab nationalists and some cultural Islamists, he tends to subsume Islam into Arabism: Islam unified the Arabs, giving them an intellectual and ideological basis by means of which they formed a state; through the latter they were to spread Islam even further afield, to the extent that to non-Arabs Islam and Arabism became virtually indistinguishable.
Unlike the most influential Arabist, Abu Khaldun Sati` al-Husri, who refused to consider economic interests among the main components in forming a nation, al-Duri always has implied that one of the bases of the Arab nation was the emergence of one path in the development of the Arab economy. For example, historically there has been a unified Islamic position toward the ownership (mainly public) of national resources such as land, water, and minerals and a comprehensive system of taxation and tribute with similar features, coinciding with distinct urban development, some improvement of agriculture, and great expansion in trade. This pattern gradually led to the emergence of a semi feudal system of a distinct bureaucratic nature (iqta` `askari) and the state’s crucial role in the economic affairs of the society.
Al-Duri emphasizes the social and economic processes through which the various peoples conquered by the Arabian Muslims were arabized in language and culture (as the conquerors and the conquered mingled in various activities in town and country) and how, following the consequent decline in tribalism, one nation, which he defines as an Arab (rather than an Islamic) nation, then emerged. He pays special attention to the “popular classes” and to various social movements (for example, al-`ammah, al-`ayyarun, al -futuwah) often overlooked in conventional historical studies.
Al-Duri sees the reemergence of Arabist ideas in the nineteenth century as an attempt to revive an earlier cultural heritage that had been abused by non-Arab rulers. The emphasis on Arabic (the language and the culture) as a nationalist link “had its roots in the Arab heritage and historical conscience, and was now being developed as part of the Arabs’ self-consciousness vis-a-vis the West,” and increasingly expressed in a more comprehensive (Pan-)Arabist fashion. Unlike some other authors, al-Duri contends that there is no observable influence or frequent reference to Western national theories in Arabic writings on the subject. Arabist concepts on nationalism are, he believes, authentic but still incomplete: they have not reached the level of forming “a general theory of Arab nationalism”; they have not linked their idea of the Arab nation to any distinct concept of the state; nor have they clarified the groups or classes that “embody the Arabist idea” and, hence, the socioeconomic orientation that the Arabist movement is bound to follow.
[See also Arab Nationalism.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Duri, `Abd al-`Aziz al-. Tarikh al-`Iraq al-iqtisadi ft al-qarn al-rabi` al-Hijri. 2d ed. Beirut, 1974. Scholarly study of trade, crafts, agriculture, urban life, and taxation systems in the earlier `Abbasid period.
Duri, `Abd al-`Aziz al-. Muqaddimah fi al-tankh al-iqtisadi al-`Arabi. Beirut, 1982. Brief introductory study of the economic and social history of the Arab East, from the emergence of Islam to the nineteenth century.
Duri, `Abd al-`Aziz al-. Al-takwin al-tarikhi lil-ummah al-`Arabiyah. Beirut, 1984. English translation by Lawrence I. Conrad, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation. London, 1987. Pioneering study of the socioeconomic history of the Arab world (East and West), suggesting that common (or similar) economic patterns have resulted in the development of a shared Arab consciousness.
NAZIH N. AYUBI
——————–update
BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Baghdad’s Al-Mada Culture & Arts House held a wake on Friday for the late outstanding Iraqi Historian, Abdul-Aziz al-Douri, who passed away in Jordan at the age of 91. The procession, led by the Iraqi Critic Ali Hassan al-Fawaz, witnessed speeches commemorating the late Iraqi Historian by a number of well known Iraqi intellectuals. Among the names were Archaeological Researcher, Salem al-Alousi, the former Baghdad University Rector, Dr. Usama al-Souri, the politician Muadh Abdul-Rahim, Dr. Tareq al-Hamdani, Dr. Imad Abdul-Raouf, Dr. Hikmat Rahmani and Dr. Muhab Darwish. Writer Ali Hussein told Iraqi News news agency that the “wake for the Leading Arab Historian, Abdul-Aziz al-Douri, has taken place at the Al-Mada House to pay tribute to the symbols of the Iraqi culture, with Douri having been one of their leading elements in Iraq over the past 40 years.” “Al-Mada House shall try to print the cultural works of Abdul-Aziz al-Douri, being one of the most outstanding symbols of the Iraqi culture and one of the greatest Arab historians,” he said. Abdul-Aziz al-Douri, a leading Iraqi historian and man of thought, was born in 1919. He earned his PhD in London in 1942, after which he was appointed as an Islamic History Professor in Baghdad’s High Teachers House. He was later promoted to Baghdad University’s History Department’s Chairman, the dean of Literature & Sciences from 1949 till 1958, after which he was appointed as Baghdad University Rector from 1962-1966. Dr. Douri also worked as visiting professor in London University – 1955-1956, visiting professor in the American University in Beirut – 1959-1960. Dr. Douri finally moved to Jordan to work as history professor in the Jordanian University. He authored several books, among them “The First Abbasid Era,” – 1943, “Studies about the Late Abbasid Era,” – 1945, “Interval in the Early History of Islam,” 1950, “Studies in the History Science of Arabs,” 1960, “The Historic Roots of Cosmopolitan,” 1962, “The Historic Origin of the Arab Nation – a study in identity and vigilance,” 1984, “Nassir al-Din al-Assad – Archaeology & Modernization,” 2002. Dr. Douri passed away in Amman, the capital of Jordan, on Nov. 19, 2010, at 91 years of age. SKH/SR 1

AL- AZHAR

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:32:01 +0000

AL-AZHAR. Situated in the heart of premodern Cairo, al-Azhar is the greatest mosque-university in the world today. Reluctantly adjusting to modern times over the last century, the millennium-old Azhar remains a focal point of Islamic religious and cultural life for Egypt and the entire Islamic world.
The First Nine Centuries (to 1872). Jawhar al-Sidilli conquered Egypt for the Fatimid caliph al-Mu’izz in 969, founded Cairo as the new capital, and in 97o began constructing al-Azhar as the official assembly mosque. Al-Azhar has been enlarged and much remodeled since.Organized instruction began there in 978. The mosque’s name, “the brilliant,” may allude to the prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah “al-Zahra’,” the eponymous ancestor of the Fatimids. Al-Azhar became one of several Cairene missionary centers for the Fatimids, Isma’ili Shi’is who claimed to be the true imams.
Salah al-Din and his Ayyubid heirs downgraded al-Azhar when they restored Egypt to Sunni Islam in 1171. Sultans and emirs of the Mamluk dynasty (1250-1517) patronized and restored the now Sunni mosque, but it was as yet only one among many seats of Islamic learning in Cairo. Cairo’s situation on the Nile, the road to Syria, and Maghribi pilgrimage routes to Mecca made it a natural cultural hub. The Mongol sack of Baghdad (1258) and the loss of Islamic Spain enhanced Cairo’s religious and cultural centrality.
The Ottoman conquest of 1517 diverted power and patronage to Istanbul, but al-Azhar weathered the storm and emerged as the preeminent seat of Arabic-Islamic learning. It also provided a vital link between the Arabic-speaking population and the Turkish-speaking military elite. By the late seventeenth century, the shaykhs of the mosque were choosing their own head-the shaykh al-Azhar. Shaykhs of the Shafi’i school of law, predominant in Cairo and the Delta, monopolized the post from 1725 to 1870. This suggests considerable autonomy, for the Ottomans themselves were Hanafis.
During the French occupation (1798-1801), Azhari shaykhs continued as intermediaries between the people and foreign military rulers, but al-Azhar also became a rallying point for revolt against the French, who bombarded, occupied, and desecrated the mosque. In 1805, the Azhari `Mama’ sanctioned the ouster of Egypt’s Istanbul-appointed governor by Muhammad ‘Ali and his Al-banian troops. But Muhammad `Ali soon felt strong enough to begin the long campaign to subordinate alAzhar to the state. He ignored the ruler’s obligation to consult the `Mama’, chose the shaykhs al-Azhar himself, played Sufi leaders off against the shaykh al-Azhar, and confiscated many religious endowments.
As usual in premodern Islamic schools, al-Azhar had no formal admissions procedures, classrooms, desks, grade-levels, academic departments, required courses, written examinations, grades, or degrees. Professors lectured from a favorite pillar of the mosque, the students gathering at their feet. Memorization and commentary, often on epitomes and commentaries rather than on the original classics, were the means of instruction. Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, and jurisprudence were taught in the morning; grammar, rhetoric, and other “auxiliary sciences” after the noon prayer; and various nonessential subjects after the sunset prayer. Many Azharis were active Sufis as well as `Mama’.
Students from outside Cairo joined groupings called riwaqs, which were supported by religious endowments. Each riwdq had its shaykh and bread allowance, and larger ones had libraries, lavatories, and living quarters. Around 1900, there were three riwaqs for Lower Egyptian students and one each for students from the Fayyum, central Egypt, and Upper Egypt. There were riwaqs for Kurds and Berbers, and for students from Java, India, Afghanistan, Iran, the Sudan, Chad, Bornu, Somalia, the Hejaz, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. The Upper Egyptian and Maghribi riwaqs were fiercely Maliki, the Lower Egyptian ones Shafi’i, and the Syrians Hanafi. The few Hanbalis had a riwdq of their own, and several riwaqs were open to all. In 1876, al-Azhar had 5,651 Shafi`i students with 147 shaykhs, 3,926 Malikis with 99 shaykhs, 1,27o Hanafis with 76 shaykhs, and 25 Hanbalis with 3 shaykhs.
Resistance and Reform from Isma’il to Nasser, 1872-1952. State reformers found it easiest to bypass al-Azhar in founding schools, a printing press, an official journal, and Western-inspired courts. The departure of progressive Azharis like Rifa’ah Rafi` al-Tahtawi, Muhammad `Abduh, and Sa’d Zaghlul to work for the state reinforced al-Azharis conservatism. Beginning in 1872, state reformers tried to overhaul al-Azhar despite conservative resistance. Eventually the necessity of competing with state school graduates for government jobs fostered a reformist minority within al-Azhar itself.
Khedive Isma’il prepared the ground for reform by installing the first non-Shafi’i in 145 years as shaykh al-Azhar. Muhammad al-`Abbasi al-Mahdi, a Hanafi, also served concurrently as grand mufti of Egypt. In 1872, Ismail instituted an oral examination (the `alimiyah) as a prerequisite for teaching at al-Azhar. When the `Urabi revolt of 1881-1882 broke out, al-Azhar was a rallying point for national resistance to European interference. A Shafi`i shaykh al-Azhar replaced al-Mahdi, who was identified with the palace and the Turkish elite. With the arrival of the British army of occupation, al-Mahdi reclaimed his post.
Cooperation between `Abbas II and the great Islamic modernist Muhammad `Abduh, then a Shari`ah Court judge, ushered in another reform attempt in the 1890s. `Abbas installed a Hanafi shaykh al-Azhar and named `Abduh to a new supervisory council for al-Azhar. Innovations included the establishment of a central library, a standardized salary scale, and a nationwide network of preparatory religious “institutes” under al-Azhar. The reforms bogged down when `Abbas and `Abduh quarreled. `Abbas then installed a conservative shaykh al-Azhar, and, shortly before his death in 19o5, `Abduh resigned in frustration from the Azhar council.
In 1908, a sweeping decree added new subjects, required yearly examinations, and regularized a primary secondary ladder in the institutes, but student and faculty protests forced the cancellation of these measures. In 1911, a cautious substitute decree shrewdly exempted a Council of Senior `Ulama’ (today’s Academy of Islamic Research) from reformist regulations imposed on other professors.
Isma’il had opened a School of Law (originally Administration and Languages) and the Dar al-`Ulum teachers’ college to by pass al-Azhar. The opening of the School for Qadis (1907) and the state-run Egyptian University (1925) dealt a further blow to job prospects for the un specialized Azhari graduates. The two elderly Maliki shaykhs al-Azhar between 19o9 and 1927 responded not with reform but with pressure on the state to hire Azharis. King Fu’ad agreed to do so, for he needed Azhari endorsement of his caliphal ambitions and a counterweight to Sa’d Zaghlul’s and the Wafd Party’s following among secondary and Egyptian University students.
The Wafdist-Liberal Constitutionalists cabinets of 1926-1928 canceled the state’s commitment to hire Azharis, seized the prerogative of naming the shaykh al-Azhar, and brushed aside the king’s candidate, Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, in favor of Muhammad Mustafa al-Maraghi. But King Fu’ad soon turned the tables on al-Maraghi, a Hanafi and an admirer of `Abduh. Fu’ad suspended the constitution, reclaimed the prerogative of appointing the shaykh al-Azhar, and put in Zawahiri.
Never the less, the Azhar decree of 193o and followup decrees in 1933 and 1936 implemented much of al-Maraghi’s program. Al-Azhar was pressed more firmly into the Western-inspired mold of the Egyptian University and the state schools. It became a university (jami`ah) as well as a mosque jami’), with colleges of theology, shad `ah, and the Arabic language, each with a state-appointed dean. The three colleges occupied temporary quarters until moving in the 1950s to a new quadrangle behind the mosque. Only public lectures were still given in the mosque itself.
Fu’ad’s bid for autocracy failed, and al-Maraghi returned as shaykh al-Azhar in 1935. He sent Azharis to study in Europe and encouraged dialogue with Shi’is, but his exile had taught him caution. He took care to cultivate young King Faruq. Mustafa `Abd al-Raziq accomplished little as shaykh al-Azhar (1945-1947) for Azharis distrusted him as a disciple of `Abduh, a graduate of the Sorbonne, and a professor of philosophy from the Egyptian University.
New Directions under Nasser. Disappointed in Shaykh al-Azhar `Abd al-Rahman Taj’s (1954-1958) conservatism despite his Sorbonne education, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser found the reformist shaykh he wanted in Mahmud Shaltut (1958-1963). Disappointed by his master al-Maraghi’s latter-day royalism and conservatism, Shaltut immediately had welcomed the 1952 revolution. In June 1961 Nasser had Speaker Anwar el-Sadat ram a bill for radical al-Azhar reform through a surprised parliament in a single night. A withering press attack on the `ulama’ followed.
The Azhar law of 1961 provided for a Supreme Council under the shaykh al-Azhar, an Islamic Research Academy, a Department of Cultural and Islamic Mission, al-Azhar University, and the precollegiate institutes. The existing colleges of theology, shari `ah, and the Arabic language (renamed Arabic Studies) were further reformed. The College of Arabic Studies drifted farthest from its old moorings; in 1974, 93 percent of its contact hours were in “secular” subjects. The College of Shari`ah added Qanun (non-shari`ah law) to its name and curriculum, and even the College of Theology now requires social sciences and a Western language. Opening the College of Islamic Women (literally “Girls”) was a radical step, as was the addition of colleges of engineering, medicine, commerce, science, agriculture, and education. Azhari old-timers resented the newcomers, and students in such subjects as medicine and engineering grumbled about the extra preparatory year of religious studies required of them. The location of the new colleges in the suburb of Madinat Nasr separated them psychologically as well as physically from al-Azhar.
Students from poor, provincial, rural, and illiterate families had long mingled at al-Azhar with those from privileged urban backgrounds. But from the late nineteenth century onward, privileged families deserted al-Azhar for state or private schools and better career opportunities. A survey of seniors at al-Azhar and Cairo universities in 1962 shows that Azharis were generally poorer, more provincial, more rural, and from less educated families than their Cairo University counterparts. They were also far more conservative on such issues as coeducation and family planning.
Al-Azhar in Contemporary Perspective. The balance of numbers shifted away from the Azhar system and toward the state schools as the twentieth century wore on. By 1970-1971 only 1 percent of Egyptian primary school students, 2 percent of secondary students, and 5 percent (al-Azhar’s three original colleges) of college students were in religious schools. Al-Azhar’s 1,263 university students in 1935 paled beside the Egyptian University’s 7,021. By 1960 al-Azhar had grown to 6,145 students, but Cairo (formerly the Egyptian) University had 27,973 students, and there were three new state universities as well. By expanding its range of subjects and opening branch campuses, al-Azhar had 160,000 university students taking year-end examinations in 1990 compared to 600,000 in the state universities. Standards in both systems plunged in the face of inadequate support and overwhelming numbers of students.
Al-Azhar’s Preaching and Guidance section sent preachers and lecturers throughout Egypt. Al-Azhar acquired its own press. Its Majallat al-Azhar (Journal of al-Azhar, originally Nur al-Islam, Light of Islam) was established in 1930, its Voice of al-Azhar radio program in 1959, and Azhari preachers increasingly saturate Egyptian radio and television airwaves.
Outside Egypt, al-Azhar is prized as a champion of Sunni Islam and the Arabic language. Students returning from studies at al-Azhar and Azhari professors and preachers on mission abroad are in demand throughout the Islamic world. Everywhere they have helped establish and improve Islamic schools and communal institutions.
Al-Azhar had 639 foreign students enrolled in 1903, and 999 in 1948. Foreign student enrollments at both al-Azhar and the state universities increased rapidly under Nasser, reflecting his ambitions in the Arab, African, and Islamic worlds. Al-Azhar’s foreign student enrollments in the Nasser era peaked at 4,291 in 1955, then tapered off to 2,500 in 1972 just after his death. In 1990, al-Azhar campuses hosted about 6,000 foreign students from seventy-five countries. The Institute of Islamic Missions offered foreign students, who were often poorly prepared, a less rigorous program.
Arabs from east of Egypt (particularly Palestinians, Jordanians, and Syrians) came in substantial numbers throughout the twentieth century. With 1,534 students in 1972, they comprised 61 percent of all foreign students. Nearly a third of these were Palestinians. The once substantial Maghribi contingent declined in the 1960s because of independence and educational expansion at home. Only modest numbers of Sudanese came before mid century (214 in 1948), but by 1955 there were 2,441, 57 percent of all foreign students. By 1972 the figure had dwindled to 124. Students from elsewhere in Africa, barely noticeable in 1903, reached 1,300 in 1964 but fell to 400 in 1972.
Stereotypes of al-Azhar as a rigid institution frozen in time persist among its secularist detractors, but Muhammad `Abduh or his feminist disciple Qasim Amin would not recognize it today. Al-Azhar takes the education of women, albeit in a separate college, for granted and offers such areas of concentration as commerce and engineering. The Assembly Hall even bears `Abduh’s name. Al-Azhar requires a Western language, often adds an English section to its, journal, and has had shaykhs al-Azhar who hold French and German degrees. Western experts and a Ford Foundation grant helped it establish an Institute of Languages and Translation.
Nevertheless, al-Azhar is indeed conservative. It held Islamist activists at arm’s length, from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad `Abduh, and Muhammad Rashid Rida, to Muslim Brotherhood leaders Hasan al-Banna’ and Sayyid Qutb. It is significant that Banna’ and Qutb were products of Dar al-`Ulum, not al-Azhar, and that in Egypt most leaders of today’s “Islamic groups” are not Azharis. Azhari shaykhs may dismiss radical Islamists as extremists only superficially familiar with Islam, and many Islamists disparage Azharis as “official `ulama’,” cravenly subservient to the state which pays them. [All of the figures named in this paragraph are the subject of independent entries.]
Islamists generally approve, however, of the condemnation of controversial books by al-Azharis Islamic Research Academy, which sees itself as guardian of true Islam. In the 1920s, al-Azhar stripped ‘Ali `Abd al-Raziq of his degree and drove him from his judgeship for reinterpreting the caliphate in secular fashion, and it hounded Taha Husayn for his provocative book On Pre-Islamic Poetry. Certain books by Nobel Prize-winner Najib Mahfuz (Naguib Mahfouz) and literary critic Louis `Awad are banned in Egypt, and al-Azhar has condemned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and works by outspoken secularist Said `Ashmawi. Not a few Azharis privately agree with Shaykh `Abd al-Hamid Kishk, the blind Azhari graduate whose radical, populist sermons drew an enthusiastic Islamist following in the 1970s and 1980s. Kishk chided his alma mater for accepting Western-educated shaykhs al-Azhar, demanded elections to fill that office, and called for the elimination of the colleges added since 1961. [See the biographies of `Abd al-Raziq, Husayn, and Kishk.]
For a decade, President Hosni Mubarak and Shaykh al-Azhar Jad al-Hagq ‘Ali Jad al-Hagq have maintained the uneasy state-Azhar symbiosis. Al-Azhar walks a tightrope between provoking another state assault like Nasser’s and discrediting itself in popular eyes through subservience to the state. Azhari authorities issued fatwas endorsing family planning, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and Egypt’s participation in the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Jad al-Hagq condemned terrorism by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iranian partisans. Yet he refused to sanction the payment of interest on funds invested for national development, as the government wanted. The balancing act goes on.
(See also Education; Egypt; Universities; and the biographies of `Abduh, Mardghi, Shaltut, and Nasser.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Creswell, K.A.C. The Muslim Architecture of Egypt. 2 vols. Oxford, 1940-1959. See volume i, pages 36-64.
Delanoue, Gilbert. Moralistes et politiques musulmans daps l’Egypte du XIXe siecle, 1798-1882. 2 vols. Cairo, 1982. Painstaking and profound study of intellectual life in nineteenth-century Egypt. Nothing remotely comparable in English exists.
Dodge, Bayard. Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning. Washington, D.C., 1974. Readable if pedestrian account, ending on the eve of the 1961 reform.
Eccel, A. Chris. Egypt, Islam, and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation. Berlin, 1984. A mine of information and stimulating interpretation. Despite organizational problems and excessive sociological jargon, the fundamental work in English on alAzhar.
Gran, Peter. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840. Austin, 1979. Biographical study of Shaykh al-Azhar Hasan al-`Attar, with a controversial interpretation of the relationship of culture to society and the economy.
Heyworth-Dunne, James. An Introduction to the History of Education in ModernEgypt.London, 1968. Fundamental work in English on nineteenth-century Egyptian education.
Hussein, Taha (Husayn, Taha). The Stream of Days: A Student at the Azhar. Translated by Hilary Wayment.London, 1948. Highly personal reminiscences of student days at al-Azhar in the early twentieth century by one of Egypt’s leading writers.
Jomier, Jacques. “Al-Azhar.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. I, pp. 813-821.Leiden, 1960-.
Reid, Donald Malcolm.Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt.Cambridge, 1990. Views al-Azhar’s evolution as background to the development of Cairo University and the state school system. Shafshak, Mahmoud. “The Role of the University in Egyptian Elite Recruitment: A Comparative Study of al-Azhar and Cairo University.” Ph.D. diss.,University of Chicago, 1964. Valuable social background and attitudinal data, unavailable elsewhere, from a 1962 survey of students.
Vollers, Karl. “Azhar.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, pp- 532-539.Leiden, 1913
DONALD MALCOLM REID

AZERBAIJAN

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:25:11 +0000

AZERBAIJAN. Northern or Caucasian Azerbaijan is situated on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Conquered by the Russian Empire early in the nineteenth century, it remained under Russian rule until the collapse of that empire in 1918. The first Republic of Azerbaijan existed from 28 May 1918 until 28 April 1920, when it was reconquered by the Red Army. The country remained under Soviet rule as the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic until declaring its independence on 3o August 1991.

AZERBAIJAN

At the time of the Russian conquest, the population of Azerbaijan was approximately 8o percent Shi i and 20 percent Sunni Muslim; the latter lived mainly in the north near Daghestan. The Azerbaijani Turks were thus the only Turks to be mainly Shi`i, a result of direct Iranian rule since the founding of the Safavid dynasty under Shah Isma’il-1 (r. 1501-1525). The Russians conquered the independent khanates in Caucasia in two wars with Iran, ending in the Treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828). Direct military rule was in force until the early 1840s.
With the establishment of Russian imperial rule, the power of the Muslim ulema (Ar., `ulama’) began to diminish sharply. Russian imperial law supplanted the mix of religious (shari `ah) and customary (`adat) law, and religious properties (awqaf; sg., waqf) were seized. Thus the legal and administrative functions of the `ulama’ were taken over by tsarist administrators, and their economic power was undercut.
The key tsarist policy that destroyed the ulema was the creation in the 1840s of Sunni and Shi’i ecclesiastical boards. These were meant to bring the Muslim “church” and its believers under state control as the Holy Synod had done with the Russian Orthodox Church. Each board consisted of a state-appointed president (called mufti for the Sunni, and shaykh al-Islam for the Shi’l), its supporting administration,and a judicial administration for each province-Stifling, Erevan, Elizavetpol (Ganje), and Baku. The apparatus was under the control of the Russian imperial ministry of internal affairs and the personal authority of the viceroy of Transcaucasia. The mullahs in each province were under the legal jurisdiction of the civil authorities.
Regulations established parameters within which mullahs and qadis could act but also granted them rank in the government system and a range of privileges. Before a cleric could occupy any post, he was required to pledge loyalty to the tsar. He was to “fulfill unswervingly the laws and instructions of the government,” and to inspire in his coreligionists “steadfast loyalty and devotion to the sovereign Emperor” and “obedience to authorities.”
State regulations concerning religious properties fundamentally altered the Islamic legal definition of waqf, to include any properties or capital used by religious institutions or the religious classes. All “religious properties” could be sold by public auction, and disputes concerning them were decided according to the civil law established for state administration.
The relationship between the religious establishment and the modernizing secular elite was complex. By the early twentieth century, when the national movement was in flower, the Islamic establishment was greatly weakened after a century of Russian rule. In the face of Russian pressure, sectarian peace prevailed among the Shi’i and Sunni of the Russian Empire. At the All-Russian Muslim Congresses of 1905-19o6, the Sunni ulema in the Russian Empire, in an unprecedented move, accepted Shiism as a fifth madhhab or legal school, the Ja’fari. Furthermore, a reform movement within Islam (Jadidism) divided the religious classes along “traditionalist” (Qadimist) and “reformist” (Jadidist) lines, and therefore did not constitute a single monolithic body. Finally, secular elites, though anticlerical, never rejected Islam. Even a 1907 school reform program designed by a committee of secular intellectuals called for native Azerbaijani Turkish students to be taught, in their native Turkish dialect, a mixed program of language, literature, religious studies, and various secular subjects; Russian would be taught and used as the language of instruction for other subjects. A mullah, presumably a reformer, would oversee the program.
After the fall of the Russian Empire, when the first Republic of Azerbaijan was declared, secular and religious forces had achieved a modus vivendi in a primarily secular framework. The republic’s constitution guaranteed religious freedom but separated religion from the state. Christian churches continued to operate. The Bolshevik conquest of Azerbaijan and the creation of a soviet socialist republic there subjected Azerbaijan to the anti-religious campaigns of the Communist regime.
The anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s were brutal. Along with clergymen of all other denominations, Muslim ulema in Azerbaijan were beaten, arrested, deported to Siberia, or shot. Mosques and other religious institutions were closed; some were destroyed and their materials used for public buildings, school dormitories, or factories.
Efforts to purge religious and national elements from Azerbaijani culture lasted throughout the 1920s and 1930s. From 1926, a concerted effort to displace existing literature with “proletarian literature” gathered momentum. In the following years, native novels, poetry, music, and the visual arts were vilified and replaced by socialist realist works. Education was a crucial target for ant-ireligious campaigns: teachers were accused of “spreading religious (and/or nationalist) propaganda,” removed from their jobs, and sometimes arrested or exiled; textbooks were replaced; their authors were often removed from their posts, and some were exiled.
The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 led Stalin’s regime to grant numerous cultural concessions to the various peoples of the USSR. Among these was the reestablishment of Muslim ecclesiastical boards on the imperial model. These represented some loosening of the official policy on religion but kept institutions under state control. Training was only possible in Bukhara (lower level seven-year madrasahs) and in Tashkent (upper level, four-year madrasahs).
In the postwar decades anti-religious efforts, more often called “scientific atheist” education, addressed the popular notion that religious practices and beliefs were part of the national heritage. Atheist propaganda stressed the separation of religious and national traditions, arguing the harmful nature of the former and the positive nature of the latter-as long as it remained at the level of folkdancing and handicrafts.
The regime’s policies had limited success. The urban population at least had little idea of Islam by the 1970s. The ancient celebration of the beginning of spring, Novruz, was widely thought to be an Islamic holiday. Few people knew the difference between Sunni and Sill’! Islam. Many openly expressed the belief that the official mullahs were “KGBers.” Much surviving religious practice descended to the level of superstition. In rural areas, pilgrimages to tombs continued and occasional “holy men” or “holy women” were said to have miraculous healing powers. Still, the word “Muslim” continued to be associated with decency and morality. It became a group marker to indicate those who shared certain moral and social values, as opposed to outsiders like Russians who, though traditionally Christian, were believed to have lost their morality under communism. Even members of the Azerbaijan Communist Party routinely practiced religious rituals in connection with circumcision, marriage and burial.
Azerbaijanis, like the Soviet Central Asians, experienced a demographic resurgence since the 1960s and for the first time since the start of industrialization in the 1880s they are again a majority in their republic and its capital Baku. The head of the ecclesiastical board (which has not been abolished by the new republic), Shaykh al-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade, came to prominence for speaking out against Russian repression of the national movement in 1990. He subsequently played a lesser political role, though he cultivated relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia. He participated in the presidential inauguration of Azerbaijan Popular Front leader Abulfez Elchibey in June 1992. Elchibey included kissing the Qur’an in the ceremony. One year later, in a coup of June 1993, former communists returned to power. Pashazade appeared also at the swearing-in ceremony of Heydar Aliyev, former Communist Party first secretary, as president.
Religious parties are virtually unknown in Azerbaijan and religion plays no role in political mobilization. Elchibey’s government had pledged itself to religious freedom and other civil liberties, and the separation of church from state. In the first months of Aliyev’s rule, despite repressions of political rivals and critics, Aliyev made no changes in laws regarding religion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altstadt, Audrey L. “The Forgotten Factor: Shi’i Mullahs of Pre-War Baku.” In Passe Turco-Tatar, Present Sovietique, edited by Gilles Veinstein et al. Louvain and Paris, 1986. Provides more detail on Russian imperial ecclesiastical boards and the economic position of mullahs.
Altstadt, Audrey L., Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule. Stanford, Calif., 1992. History of Azerbaijan from the Russian conquest to 1991; includes detail on religion and religious policies.
Atkin, Muriel. Russia and Iran, 1780-1828. Minneapolis, 198o. Includes coverage of the religious repressions that accompanied Russian conquest.
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay. Islam in the Soviet Union. Translated by Geoffrey E. Wheeler and Hubert Evans. London, 1964. Historical overview covering tsarist and Soviet times.
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and S. Enders Wimbush. Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union. London, 1985. Includes some information on pilgrimage places in Azerbaijan.
Khadzhibeili, Dzheikhun [Jeyhun Hajibeyli]. Antiislamskaia Propaganda i ee Metody v Azerbaidzhane. Munich, 1957. The only comprehensive treatment of antireligious propaganda in Azerbaijan.
AUDREY L. ALTSTADT

AZAD, ABU AL-KALAM

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:23:00 +0000

AZAD, ABU AL-KALAM (1888-1958), Urdu journalist and stylist, Islamic thinker, and religious universalist symbolizing the Muslim option for composite Indian nationalism. Mawlana Azad was born in Mecca, where his father Khairuddin Dihlawi (1831-19o8) had migrated in 1858 and later married the daughter of a mufti of Medina. The ancestors of Azad had intellectual and spiritual links with Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi (d. 1762), and Shah `Abd al-`Aziz (d. 1824). Khairuddin was an influential `alim pir (learned Sufi authority) with outspoken antiWahhabi leanings. The family moved to Calcutta around 1898.
Azad was taught at home under the strict supervision of his father and completed, at the age of fifteen, the dars-i Nizami course of higher Islamic studies. His phenomenal memory, as well as his public preaching, prose, and verse, made him famous as a child prodigy. Very early, however, he became critical of his father’s bitter opposition to the scripturalist Wahhabis and of his practices of taqlid (reliance on tradition) and pirimuridi (the relation between spiritual guide and disciple). For some time Azad fell under the spell of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s (1817-1898) reformist ideas and rationalistic theology. This was followed by a period of doubts, unbelief, and sensuous living. A deep experience of mystic love induced by earthly love led him back to faith in God by the end of 1909.
Azad’s journalistic career started with his launching in 1903 of the short-lived reformist journal Lisan al-sidq. Thereafter he worked for short periods with Al-nadwah, the organ of the Nadvat al-`Ulama’ academy in Lucknow, under the guidance of Muhammad Shibli Nu’mani (d. 1914), and with the renowned newspaper Vakil in Amritsar. He was familiar with the contemporary writing of the Arab world in the vein of Jamal al-Din alAfghani and those associated with the influential journal Al-manar with its roots in neo-Hanbali theology. On a visit to western Asia in 1908-1909 he met Iranian nationalists in Iraq, and in Cairo Arab nationalists and Turkish revolutionaries, followers of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk, d. 1938). He synthesized their ideas with his own experience of contact with the Bengal Hindu revolutionaries in the wake of the 1905 partition of Bengal.
In 1912 Azad, through his widely influential weekly journal Al-hilal (The Crescent), set out first to revive among the Muslims of India the true spirit of Qur’anic Islam as the only solution to the nation’s problems, and second to move them to political revolt through participation in the struggle of the Indian Congress Party for self-government. The fight for independence was a religious duty for Muslims, but they had first to be freed of their “pathological fear of the Hindus.” Azad emerged as a forerunner of Mohandas Gandhi, who was to launch his anti-British noncooperation agitation in 1919. However, nonviolence for Azad was a matter of policy, not of principle.
When the government forced Al-hilal to close down, upon the outbreak of war between Turkey and Britain, Azad started another journal, Al-balagh. But soon, exiled from Bengal, he was to spend three and a half years in internment near Ranchi. Immediately upon his release in January 1920, he joined the nationwide struggle for political freedom led by Gandhi. The address that Azad delivered in February 1920, as president of the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference, served as a strong inspiration and theoretical basis for the Khilafat movement. Referring to the covenant concluded in 622 between Muhammad and the people of Medina, including Jews and pagans, Azad described Muslim together with non-Muslim parties as a single community (ummah wahidah).
Azad was again arrested toward the end of 1921 and formally put on trial. His defense, later published under the title Qaul-i faysal, occupies an eminent place in both the political history of India and the history of Urdu literature. In 1929 Azad, in cooperation with thirty other nationalist Muslim leaders, convened the Nationalist Muslim Conference, but his real field of political activity was within the Congress. During the 1930s and 1940s he was imprisoned four times; he eventually spent one-seventh of his life in either internment or jail. In 1940 Azad was elected president of the All-India National Congress and held this position until 1946. He failed to prevent the partition of India, which was for him a lasting tragedy overshadowing the achievement of independence. In 1947 he joined the interim government of India as minister of Education. This post, as well as that of deputy leader of Congress, he held until his death.
Azad’s overall religious perspective is marked by the unique blending in his temperament of aesthetic experience and religious consciousness. The charming letters to his friend from the British prison at Ahmad nagar (Ghubdr-i khdtir, edited by Malik Ram, New Delhi, 1967; rev. ed. 1983) provide insight into his multifaceted Islamic sensitivity. Earlier, in his fragmentary autobiography Tagkirah (edited by Fazluddin Ahmad, Calcutta, 1919; rev. ed. Malik Ram, New Delhi, 1968), Azad had offered a passionate discussion of such moral and religious issues as the eternal validity of the Word of God, the affinity between earthly and sacred love, and the appreciation of beauty in its varied forms, including music, which he held to be compatible with the Qur’an. All of Azad’s writings had a deeply religious tenor and were marked by his artistic, highly personalized diction, appealing to intuition rather than discursive reason.
Azad’s mind accommodated conflicting elements without any attempt to reconcile them in a conceptual whole. His countless writings and speeches all refer to a few fundamental attitudes and options sponsored by his interpretation or tafsir of the Qur’an. However, in Tarjuman al-Qur’an, Azad’s annotated Urdu rendering of surahs 1-23, and especially in his commentary on the opening verses of the Qur’an, his main concern is to let the Qur’an speak for itself. The Qur’an is a spiritual text concerning God and humanity, enjoining good and prohibiting evil. Pseudo scientific attributions of medieval or modern provenance must not distort its divine beauty and simplicity.
In their essence all faiths are one (din); their distinctiveness, expressed in different laws, is neither original nor inherent. Islam as the religion of the Qur’an does not have to be politically and nationally separatist to be viable and effective in history. Moreover, God’s attributes are readable in their qualities of nurture, harmony, and guidance as imprinted on the created universe. The Qur’an indicates the middle path between transcendentalism and anthropomorphism. Praise, gratitude, and universal brotherhood are the obvious human responses. Although Azad believed that human obduracy generates destructive “groupism,” he preferred not to probe the depths of sinful perversion in individuals or societies.
A basic lacuna in Azad’s religious scholarship is the absence of an updated hermeneutics of the fundamental sources of Islam-the Qur’an and hadith-and, based on that, a reformulation of the principles of legal construction. However, although he did not initiate a school of thought, his vision of Islam as Qur’an-based universal humanism continues to inspire Muslim sensitivity, especially in the Urdu-speaking world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Azad, Abu al-Kalam. Taijuman al-Qur’dn. 2 vols. Delhi, 1931-1936. Critical edition by Malik Ram. 4 vols. New Delhi, 1964-1976. Translated and edited by S. A. Latif, The Tarjuman al-Qur’an. 3 vols. Bombay, 1962-196’7.
Azad, Abu al-Kalam. Speeches of Maulana Azad, 1947-55. New Delhi, 1956.
Azad, Abu al-Kalam. Khutubdt-i Azad. New Delhi, 1981. The chief public speeches of Azad, 1914-1948, in the Urdu original.
Azad, Abu al-Kalam. India Wins Freedom (1959). Edited by Humayun Kabir. Reprint, Madras, 1988. Reprint containing thirty pages originally withheld from publication.
Datta, V. N. Maulana Azad. New Delhi, 1990. Places Azad more firmly than Douglas in the context of Indian politics.
Douglas, Ian Henderson. Abul Kalam Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography. Edited by Gail Minault and Christian W. Troll. New Delhi, 1988. The most penetrating study of Azad’s life and works. Comprehensive bibliography.
Faruqi, I. H. Azad. The Tarjuman al-Qur’an: A Critical Analysis of Maulana Azad’s Approach to the Understanding of the Qur’an. New Delhi, 1982. Elucidates the links of Tarjuman with earlier Qur’an exegesis and brings out its distinguishing features.
Hameed, Syeda Saiyidain, ed. India’s Maulana: Abul Kalam Azad, vol. I, Tributes and Appraisals; vol. 2, Selected Speeches and Writings. New Delhi, 1990. Volume I adds to Humayun’s memorial volume (below) on the occasion of Azad’s centenary. Volume 2 presents a number of key texts by Azad (for the first time in English) and offers a comprehensive bibliography of the primary and secondary sources.
Hasan, Mushir ul-, ed. Islam and Indian Nationalism: Reflections on Abul Kalam Azad. New Delhi, 1992. Delineates Azad’s political trajectory in the context of nationalist struggles in West Asia and India.
Kabir, Humayun, ed. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: A Memorial Volume. Bombay, 1959 Remains the most important collection of views and analyses of Azad’s personality and work by contemporaries.
CHRISTIAN W. TROLL

AWAMI LEAGUE

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:18:39 +0000

AWAMI LEAGUE. As one of Bangladesh’s two major political parties, the Awami (“people’s”) League led the country’s war of independence against Pakistan in 1971, under the charismatic Shaikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), affectionately called the Banglabandhu or “Friend of Bengal.” It is a secularly oriented, left-leaning political organization. Its party symbol, the boat, symbolizes the river-based life of the region.

AWAMI LEAGUE

The Awami League, originally called the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League, was founded in Dhaka (Dacca) in 1949. Articulate Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan had become increasingly resentful of the Muslim League leadership because of its failure to transform that party into a representative organization. Bengalis resented the domination by a new political elite composed mostly of expatriate Muslims from India and the civil-military bureaucracy of West Pakistan. The founding of the Awami League thus reflected the growing sense of frustration of the indigenous Bengali elite with central authority in Pakistan. By 1966 the party had emerged as the embodiment of a Bengali political community.
Although widely associated with the name of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1893-1963), a former prime minister of united Bengal and Pakistan, the organization owed its origin to Maulana Bhasani (1885-1976), a pro-Beijing peasant leader. Dubbed the “Red Maulana,” Bhasani’s goal was to transform the structure of Pakistani politics by radically democratizing political institutions and involving the masses. The leadership of the party was, however, taken over by the centrist leader Suhrawardy, who began molding it as an organization of the nascent Bengali Muslim bourgeoisie. It was renamed the Awami League, dropping the word “Muslim” to emphasize its secular character. Soon Bhasani and his socialist confidants were pushed out of the party.
The watershed in the Awami League’s development as a mass organization occurred under Shaikh Mujib. The Language Movement of 1952 that had urged recognition of Bengali as one of Pakistan’s official languages, the dismissal of a popularly elected government in East Pakistan in 1954, and the subsequent imposition of martial law in 1958 that had specifically disadvantaged the Bengali political elite had all been perceived as indications of the rulers’ hostility toward the political, economic, and cultural aspirations of Bengalis. As a consequence, the assertion of Bengali linguistic-cultural identity, in sharp contrast with the closer identification with Islam during the Pakistan movement, became the dominant theme of East Pakistani politics, especially during the 1960s. The Awami League under the leadership of Shaikh Mujib emerged as the voice of this movement.
Beginning in 1964 Shaikh Mujib played a dominant role in reorganizing and revitalizing the Awami League, attracting mass support, and gaining control of the political movement in favor of greater regional autonomy. He formulated the famous Six-Point Program in 1966, which demanded, inter alia, the formation of a federation in Pakistan with the federate units enjoying a large measure of political and economic power. Mujib was charged with treason by the government in the same year and imprisoned in the Dhaka army cantonment. An upsurge in popular support soon made him a symbol of Bengali nationalism and forced the government to drop the case.
Elections held in 19’70 under a new military regime gave the Awami League 16o of the 162 seats allotted to East Pakistan, ensuring an absolute majority in the 300seat national parliament. The military junta, however, refused to hand over power to the elected representatives, leading to a popular uprising in the province in February 1971. Shaikh Mujib launched a noncooperation movement against the central government on 7 March, urging people to fight for freedom and democracy. The independence movement had begun.
Although mass mobilization was central to the Awami League’s political strategy, the control of rural elites severely restricted its ability to initiate meaningful reforms once in power. For example, the Eleven-Point Program of the students (1968) demanded nationalization of banking, insurance, and major industries, reduction of taxes on farmers, and better wages for workers. Although these were incorporated into the League program in order to broaden its base of support, a section of the party hierarchy opposed them.
One of the notable achievements of the Awami League was to enact a constitution for Bangladesh in 1973, less than two years after independence. But this exercise in democracy soon became academic when Mujib amended the constitution in 1975, introducing a one-party system under the banner of BAKSAL (Bangladesh Peasants and Workers Awami League). Gross mismanagement of the economy, corruption, and the highhandedness of party cadres created mounting problems for the government and eroded its popular support.
Questions were also raised as to the Awami League’s loyalty to Islam, although it is doubtful that the party leadership, despite its ambivalent commitment to secularism and socialism, has ever underrated the strength and appeal of Islam in a predominantly Muslim country. Earlier, in October 1970, Shaikh Mujib had clearly asserted his “commitment to the constitutional principle that no law should be enacted or imposed . . . which is repugnant to the injunctions of Islam” (1972, p. II). There is no evidence to suggest that his position ever changed. His government imposed a ban on religious parties after independence, basically as a reaction to the excesses they had committed during the war in 1971. Mujib recognized the need for closer ties with other Muslim countries and became gradually more receptive to Islamic issues. He even attended the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1974.
The Awami League government was overthrown in August 1975 in a coup staged by a group of young army officers, who killed Shaikh Mujib, most of his immediate family members, and a number of his close associates. The party has since suffered from factionalism and defections. It has equally had to confront its political opponents, backed by the army and the armed cadres of the fundamentalist Jama’at-i Islam!. However, it has successfully consolidated its position in recent years, reemerging as one of the largest political parties in the country. Shaikh Hasinah Vajid, one of the surviving daughters of Shaikh Mujib, was made leader of the party in 1979; she was elected to parliament in 1990 and has since led the opposition there.
Although Shaikh Hasinah Vajid and her party embody the spirit of Bengali nationalism and democratic government popularized by her father, her affiliation with Islam appears more pronounced. The party has moved closer to an Islamic posture despite efforts to project a secular-socialist image. However, its old stereotype as an un-Islamic party persists among its opponents.
[See also Bangladesh.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhuiyan, Md. Abdul Wadud. Emergence of Bangladesh and Role of Awami League. Delhi, 1982. Highly informative account of the rise of the Awami League as a mass political organization and its role in Bangladesh’s War of Independence.
Jahan, Rounaq. Pakistan: Failure in National Integration. New York, 1972. Balanced view of the origins of Bengali nationalism in Bangladesh.
Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh. Bangladesh My Bangladesh. Delhi, 1972. Selection of speeches by Shaykh Mujib and relevant documents on Bangladesh (compiled by Ramendu Majumder).
O’Donnell, Charles P. Bangladesh: Biography of a Muslim Nation. Boulder, 1984. Excellent overview of society and politics in Bangladesh.
Sen, Rangalal. Political Elites in Bangladesh. Dhaka, 1986. Socialist view of politics and political elites in Bangladesh.
Umar, Badruddin. Politics and Society in East Pakistan and Bangladesh. Dhaka, 1974. Marxist analysis of political developments in the region.
Westergaard, Kirsten. State and Rural Society in Bangladesh. London, 1985. Study in the dynamics of regional and rural society and politics in Bangladesh.
RAFIUDDIN AHMED

AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMATION

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:10:31 +0000

AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMATION. Most Muslim rulers try to legitimize their authority through Islam; however, there are today only two regimes in Sunni Islamic countries in which the king claims a religious title associated with his political authority-Morocco and Saudi Arabia (Tibi 1985). The title of the Moroccan king is amir al-mu’minin (“commander of the faithful”), and the Saudi king is khddim al-haramayn alsharifayn (“custodian of the holy shrines” of Mecca and Medina). In Saudi Arabia the Qur’an is considered the constitution, in contrast to Morocco, which has a modern constitution.
In August 1992 the Moroccan king showed willingness to amend the constitution to enhance the power of his prime minister, who is constitutionally fully subservient to royal authority. The amendment also refers to human rights mentioned in the constitution. When the constitutional change was submitted to a referendum on 4 September 1992, the king responded to opposition criticism by emphasizing the authority of an Islamic ruler. He said, “Islam does not permit a constitutional monarchy like the one that exists in western Europe. As a Muslim ruler, I am entitled to temporarily delegate some of my authority to others, but I have no right to give up on my own power privileges.” This poses the question whether the king’s view represents an authentic perspective on authority and legitimacy in Islam. The al-Azhar scholar `Ali `Abd al-Raziq, in Islam and the Principles of Government (1925), held that Islam does not entail a system of government. `Abd al-Raziq argued further that Islam historically has been abused to legitimize unjust rule.
Islam is characterized by a holistic view of the world in which politics, law, and all other spheres of life are intimately and organically merged into one unity (Tibi 1990, chapter 3). The governing principle of this totality is tawhid (the oneness of God). Tawhid means that the world and consequently the lives of Muslims are wholly governed by the oneness of God, the supreme authority. It follows that Muslims in principle see no separation between political and religious authority. The corollary of this is that political authority has to be religiously grounded; that is, its legitimation has to be related to the principle of tawhid. No Muslim ruler can therefore claim to have sovereign authority, because that is God’s alone. The ruler has to base his authority on the precept that he executes the divine will of God as fixed in Islamic revelation. It is this provision to which the Moroccan king’s statement refers.
The medieval Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyah (d. 1328) coined the term ta’til for claims by humans to govern the world. In his authoritative pamphlet Ma’a-lim ft al-tariq (Milestones), the spiritual father of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb (19o6-1966), reactivated this precept in his challenge to democratic legitimacy and the idea of popular sovereignty. [See the biographies of Ibn Taymiyah and Qutb]
Although this characterization of the basic concept of authority and legitimacy is shared by most Muslims, Islamic history reveals a multiplicity of competing patterns of authority and legitimacy related to sectarian developments. Historians of Islam have described this civilization in terms of a conflict over identifying the true imam or authority for Muslims (Hartmann 1944). The wide range of political rulers who have been Islamically legitimized shows that Muslims have disagreed about legitimacy. In classical Islam, Sunni and Shi-i rulers as well as their opponents have legitimized their authority based on their specific understanding of Islam. The lack of a tradition of a consensually accepted pluralism has contributed to the growth of religious controversies regarding Islamic authority and legitimacy, as Watt (1968) has shown. All Muslim rulers refer to the Qur’anic commandment, “Oh ye who believe, obey Allah, obey the Prophet and those in authority [al-amr] among you” (4.59); it is open to interpretation whether authority here means power.
In modern times, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the caliphate in 1924 smoothed the way for the introduction of the European concept of popular sovereignty among Muslims (Enayat, 1982, pp. 1 i 1f.). In the Arab lands the concept of an Islamic ummah (community) has been superficially secularized to refer to an Arab ummah that unites Muslims and Christians in a modern nation-state based on popular sovereignty (Tibi, 1 99 1 ). The rise of Islamic fundamentalism has greatly challenged this new secular concept of the ummah (Choueiri, 1990, pp. 63ff.) and has contested the assumption that in the modern state legitimacy is secularly grounded. [See Ummah.]
In his general monograph The Legitimation of Power (1991), David Beetham devotes a chapter to Islam, in which he points out that the politicization of Islam presents a challenge to Western notions of the exclusively secular basis of political legitimacy. The core of this challenge is the idea of the Islamic state. Fundamentalists argue that the Islamic state (see Kurdi, 1984) can only be based on a specific pattern of authority and legitimacy. Given that Islamic fundamentalists are not traditionalists-they themselves are both a product of modernity and a reaction to the process of modernization the question is whether the concept of an Islamic state is based on a new rather than a traditional type of legitimacy.
Departing from the tawhid principle and thus from the belief that God governs the entire world, all spheres of life in the Islamic state are expected to be organized in consonance with Islamic revelation. In other words, political authority in Islam has to be constantly grounded in divine legitimacy. In classical Islam, the caliph’s authority was based on his submission to the shari’ah. Although he is the absolute political chief of the Islamic community, he has no right to legislate. His authority is restricted to administrating shad `ah. In practice, however, Islamic rulers have deviated from this principle by introducing the autonomous realm of siydsah (administration), in which the caliph retained some sovereignty. As Joseph Schacht writes in his introduction to Islamic law, “This siyasa is the expression of the full juridical power which the sovereign . . . can exercise whenever he thinks fit . . . a double administration of justice, one religious and exercised by the Kadi [qadi] on the basis of the shari’a, the other secular and exercised by the political authorities” (1964, p. 54). This system of authority was practiced by the caliphs from the Umayyad period onward.
Contemporary Islamic rulers who base their political authority on Islamic legitimacy draw on a tradition embedded in the political history of Sunni Islam. Classical and contemporary Islamic societies share a low degree of institutionalization in their political systems. According to Samuel P. Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), one of the consequences of this lack of highly institutionalized structures and processes is the personalization of political power. Thus the authority of the political ruler in Islam, classical and contemporary alike, has been highly personal, not institutional, and has been legitimized in an arbitrary manner by the `ulama’ and jurists submissive to the ruler. This fact explains the lack of continuing institutional power in Islamic history.
Among the sectarian religious divisions with regard to authority and legitimacy, the most pertinent one is that differentiating the doctrines of the caliphate in Sunni Islam and the imamate in Shi’i Islam. For Sunni Muslims the caliph is equally an imam in the double meaning of being both the symbolic leader of congregational prayers and the political leader, but the Shi’i imam does not. embody temporal political leadership. Whereas Sunnis believe that prophecy ended with the death of the Prophet, Sh-is believe in the continuation of prophecy through the imams; however, they conceive the imamate not as temporal leadership but as religious guidance “for preserving and explaining the Divine Law” (Momen, 1985, p. 147). Thus the legitimacy of the Shi’i imam is not only based on the interpretation of Divine Law, “the Imam’s knowledge is co-extensive with that of the prophets. . . . Thus the Imam as a result of his knowledge is perfectly able to give judgement on all matters of religious law” (p. 156). Some Shi`i scholars interpret the authority of the imam as political insofar as he is “a person who takes the lead in a community in a particular social movement or political ideology” (Tabataba’i, 1975, p. 173). However, until the advent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this was not a common view among Shi’is. Khomeini’s revisionist interpretation of vildyat-i fagih (wildyat al fagih) “obliterates some of the most important differences between Sunnis and ShNs. He minimizes the extent of the rift by . . . his appeal to the Shi’is to . . . install an Islamic state [that] indicates his denunciation of . . . Shi’i practices that have become staple themes of Sunni polemics against Shi’ism” (Enayat, 1983, pp. 174-175). [See Wilayat al-Faqih.] It is not surprising that current treatises by Sunni fundamentalists have recourse to Khomeini’s ideas of authority and legitimacy, which endorse harmony and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi-`is. The Sunni writer Muhammad Salim al-`Awwa, in his book Fi al-nizam al-siyasi lil-dawlah al-Islamiyah (The Political System of the Islamic State, 1983), published seven times in Arabic, presents such a case.
In the period between the abolition of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the early 1970s, the idea of the nation-state and its secular legitimacy seemed to have superseded the idea of an Islamic order. In the nineteenth century `Abd alRahman al-Kawakibi (d. 1903) was the most significant Muslim Arab author seeking to revive the caliphate under Arab rule against the Sunni Turks. Muhammad Rashid Rida’s (d. 1935) book The Caliphate or the Supreme Imamate (1922/1923) was the last significant Islamic work to defend the caliphate. The scholar Shaykh `All `Abd al-Raziq held that those who have legitimated political authority by recourse to Islam have abused Islam for political ends. `Abd al-Raziq’s argument, which provoked his dismissal from al-Azhar, was that Islam is a religion and ethical system, but not a system legitimizing political authority. Despite his dismissal, `Abd alRaziq’s argument had already come to represent the spirit of the times. [See the biographies of Kawakibi and Rashid Rida].
The two Arab Muslim monarchies, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, are legitimized by Islam, and although they differ considerably, both do in some measure reflect Islamic political culture. In his book on legitimacy in Arab politics, Michael Hudson writes:
The ideal Arab monarchy, perfectly legitimized, entirely congruent with the values of the traditional political culture, would be an Islamic theocracy governed by the ablest leader of a tribe tracing its lineage to the prophet. The ruler would be guided by the substantive ethic of Islam and by the patriarchal consultative procedures of tribal decision-making. The ruler’s authority would rest not only on his coercive power but in the respect of his people for a leader on the right path (the Sunna). . . . By this legitimate behavior alone, he would earn the deference of his people and thus acquire authority (1977, p. 167).
Morocco and Saudi Arabia, however, ran counter to the dominant pattern of secularization throughout the period of early decolonization until 1967. Between the 1930s and early 1970s, the secular nation-state was the most accepted form of legitimacy in the Arab world, even though the processes of secularization and structural differentiation needed as underpinnings for the nation-state had not taken place in the Islamic world (Tibi, 198o). In the world of Islam secularization has been normative rather than structural in nature and thus has failed to take root.
The turning point for the resurgence of political and its views on authority and legitimacy was the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War in 1967. The Arab hub of the Muslim world was the center of the recent Islamic revival long before the Islamic revolution in Iran drew the attention of the West to this process. One of the main features of this revival has been the renewed focus on authority and legitimacy in Islam and their relevance for the crisis of the secular Muslim state (Khoury, 1983, pp. 213ff.). The redefinition of these ideas is meant to establish a religious order in place of the existing secular ones. This is the content of the new concept of the Islamic state. As exemplified in the case of `Ali `Abd alRaziq, debates on these issues have never ceased in modern Islam, even in the period when secular ideologies prevailed (Tibi, 1986). During the 1950s and 1960s, some important publications revived these debates and reopened the arguments against `Abd al-Raziq’s views; significant among them were the works of al-Rayyis (1953) Mfisa (1962), and Mutawalli (1964).
In terms of dissemination and popularity, however, these books could not compete with prevailing secular positions, such as that of Khalid Muhammad Khalid’s Min hung nabda’ (From Here We Start). Khalid’s book was reprinted ten times between 195o and 1963 and distributed far beyond Egypt. Khalid’s strong argument against what he called kahanah Islamayah (Islamic theocracy) culminates in a clear commitment against the use of Islam as a legitimation of political authority:
We should keep in mind that religion ought to be as God wanted it to be: prophecy not kingdom, guidance not government and preaching, not political rule. The best we can do to keep religion clean and pure is to separate it from politics and to place it above it. The separation between religion and the state contributes to keeping religion away from the shortcomings of the state and from its arbitrariness (1963 p. 184).
Such views have been superseded since the early 1970s. Even Khalid, having recanted, is now among those who support the idea of the Islamic state (see Khalid, 1988). [See the biography of Khalid.] The strongly articulated plea of Islamic fundamentalists for an Islamic solution began to replace the secular writings of the enlightened Arab Muslim authors. In 1953 Muhammad Diya’ al-Din al-Rayyis assured readers that Islam provides a pattern of legal rule because political authority is bound to the shari ah as a legal framework. Those who disagree with him, in particular those whom he calls Orientalists, are blamed for viewing Islamic governments as despotic: “The Orientalists, in their allegation that the government of Islam is despotic, are mistaken. . . . The source of their mistake is that they look at the Caliphate that really existed in history. . . . Thus they confuse Islam as a legal idea with what really happened in the Muslim world” (1953, pp. 225-226). Al-Rayyis thus sees Islam as a pure idea to be kept apart from the dirt of history; the implementation of the idea remains a pious call. This is also the case in the most authoritative book of `Abd al-Hamid Mutawalli, Mabadi’ nizam al-hukm fi al-Islam (1964), where he writes, “As far as the science of government is concerned, Islam provides general principles valid for every time and place.” These principles, he says, guarantee equally the practice of the “Islamic constitutional norms” justice, freedom, participation (shura), and equality (p. 548).
Another authority, Muhammad Yusuf Muisa, states that in Islam the relationship between the ruler and the ruled is based on a type of social contract called bay`ah. The author is thus reading into Islam the Rousseauian idea of social contract. Bay’ah means “oath of allegiance” as a source of legitimacy; however, it is not a social contract based on the unbreakable, institutionally controlled commitment of the ruler to the practice of Islamic law. [See Bay’ah.] The historical record shows that no Islamic ruler has ever been legally accountable, and norms not substantiated in history have no meaning. Musa insists that an Islamic ruler is democratic insofar as, by accepting the bay’ah, he commits himself “to rule and to cast his policy in accordance with Islamic law as fixed by the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet.” To define Islamic rule, Musa writes:
Islam is not theocratic because it denies the ruler a divine character . . . nor is it a monarchy since Islam does not allow succession by inheritance . . . nor is it despotic because an Islamic ruler is subject to the law, and thus it guarantees the citizens all kinds of freedom. . . . It cannot however be called democracy in the old Greek or modern Western sense since in Islam the will of the people counts only if it is in line with the shari’a. The shari’a has the highest sovereignty in Islam (1962, pp. 142-145).
Besides the fact that “citizenship” is a modern concept that did not exist in classical and medieval Islam, we are still confronted with the questions, what is the legitimate Islamic system, and what is Islamically unique in the authority it incorporates? Musa answers, “The system differs from all others known to mankind in classical, medieval, and modern history as well as in the present. . . . In recognizing the unique character of this system, we ought to say that it is an incomparable system. It is the Islamic system and that is sufficient” ppP. 146-147).
The truth is that all attributes denied to have characterized political rule in Islam have existed in actual Islamic history. Despite this, al-Rayyis, Musa, and Mutawalli, who published their fundamentalist views of political Islam in the 1950s and 1960s, and who have ignored the historical record, are extensively quoted in the contemporary writings of Islamic revivalism.
The political literature of Islamic revivalism during the 1970s and 1980s, with its focus on authority and legitimacy, does not go beyond the arguments highlighted above. This revival is related to the crisis of legitimacy in existing political regimes. The acid test of the legitimacy of rulers is acceptance by the ruled, but absence of any popular legitimizing basis is the reality in most current regimes in the Islamic world. The envisaged return to Islam is presented in the guise of an Islamic state as a solution to perceived moral decline. Even though the proponents of the Islamic state derive the legitimacy of their model from the distant past, the pattern of authority and legitimacy they propose is an artifact of the modernity they rhetorically reject.
The most sophisticated authors of current, broadly disseminated books on authority and legitimacy are Muhammad Salim al -`Awwa (1983) and Mustafa Abu Zayd Fahmi (1981). They emphasize the legal and participatory meanings of Islamic political norms and so provide an Islamic model of authority and legitimacy seemingly compatible with modernity; but even they fail to tell us why Islam has never achieved the specifically democratic, legal, and participatory Islamic values they present. From the early history of Islam (Mottahedeh, 198o; Dabashi, 1993) until the present, the political authority of imams and emirs has been based on personal rule, and Islam was used to justify the ruler’s status as an imam. The historical context of authority and legitimacy has changed, but not the principle of personal rule.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmed, Ishtiaq. The Concept of an Islamic State. London, 1987. Presents the argument that Islamic authority and legitimacy are components of the idea of an Islamic state, focusing on Pakistan.
`Awwa, Muhammad Salim al-. Fi al-nizam al-siyasi lil-dawlah al-Islamiyah. Cairo, 1983.
Beetham, David. The Legitimation of Power. London, iggi. Excellent overall study of the legitimacy issue, with a chapter on Islam. Choueiri, Youssef M. Islamic Fundamentalism. Boston, 1990. Critical study of the claim that political Islam represents true Islamic legitimacy.
Dabashi, Hamid. Authority in Islam. New Brunswick, N.J., 1993. Social science-oriented inquiry into authority in Islam, from Muhammad to the Umayyad period.
Enayat, Hamid. Modern Islamic Political Thought. Austin, 1982. Excellent study by the late Iranian Oxford scholar in which tensions in Islam between classical and modern political concepts are reviewed. Enayat, Hamid. “Iran: Khomeini’s Concept of the Guardian of the Jurisconsult.” In Islam in the Political Process, edited by J. P. Piscatori, pp. 160-180. Cambridge, 1983. Excellent chapter on Khomeini’s revisionist interpretation of authority and legitimacy in Shi’i Islam.
Fahmi, Mustafa Abu Zayd. Fann al-hukm ft al-Islam. Cairo, 1981. Hartmann, Richard. Die Religion des Islam (1944). Reprint, Darmstadt, 1987. Concise and knowledgeable classic survey of Islamic history, with a discussion of Islamic debates on “who is the true imam.”
Hudson, Michael. Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy. New Haven, 1977. Overview of the legitimacy problem in the modern Middle East, with reference to Islamic history and case studies on all Arab states.
Khalid, Khalid Muhammad. Min hung nabda’ (1950). 6th ed. Cairo, 1963. Translated from the third edition by Isma’il R. al-Faruqi as From Here We Start. Washington, D.C., 1953.
Khalid, Khalid Muhammad. Al-dawlah ft al-Islam. Cairo, 1988. Khoury, Philip S. “Islamic Revival and the Crisis of the Secular State.” In Arab Resources, edited by Ibrahim Ibrahim, pp. 213236. London, 1983. Analysis of the legitimacy crisis of the secular state and its implications for the repoliticization of Islam.
Khuri, Fu’ad Ishaq. Imams and Emirs: State, Religion, and Sects in Islam. London, 1990. Study of sects in Islam as an opposition to prevailing authority.
Kurdi, Abdulrahman A. The Islamic State. London, 1984. Effort to trace the concept of the Islamic state to the Qur’an, laden with grand projections.
Momen, Moojan. An Introduction to ShN Islam. New Haven, 1985. Includes information on the Shill concept of authority and legitimacy.
Mottahedeh, Roy P. Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society. Princeton, 1980. In-depth historical inquiry into acquired loyalties and loyalties of category in early Islam.
Musa, Yusuf Muhammad. Nizam al-hukm ft al-Islam. Cairo, 1962. Mutawalli, `Abd al-Hamid. Mabddi’ nizam al-hukm ft al-Islam. Alexandria, 1966.
Rayyis, Muhammad Diya’ al-Din al-. Al-nazariyah al-siyasiyah al-Islamiyah. Cairo, 1953.
Schacht, Joseph. An Introduction to Islamic Law. Oxford, 1964. Authoritative study on the juridical bases of authority and legitimacy in Islam.
Tabataba’i, Muhammad Husayn. Shiite Islam. London, 1975. Includes important information on Shi’i views on authority. Tamadonfar, Mehran. The Islamic Polity and Political Leadership. Boulder, 1989. Important social science study on the legitimacy of Islamic leadership, past and present.
Tibi, Bassam. “Islam and Secularization: Religion and the Functional Differentiation of the Social System.” Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 66.2 (198o): 207-222. Presents the idea that secularization of legitimacy and authority in Islam failed because it lacked a structural underpinning and was restricted to normative change.
Tibi, Bassam. “A Typology of Arab Political Systems: Arab Monarchies Legitimized by Islam.” In Arab Society, edited by Samih Farsoun, pp. 48-64. London, 1985. Analysis of Islamic legitimacy in Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
Tibi, Bassam. “Islam and Modern European Ideologies.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18.1 (1986): 15-29.
Tibi, Bassam. The Crisis of Modern Islam. Salt Lake City, 1988. Social and cultural roots of tension between Islam and modernity.
Tibi, Bassam. Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change. Boulder, 1990. Analysis of the gap between normative and actual levels of legitimacy and authority in Muslim societies.
Tibi, Bassam. Arab Nationalism. New York, 1991. Critical inquiry into the rise, development, and decline of secular Arab nationalism. Tibi, Bassam. “The World View of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists.” In Fundamentalisms and Society, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, pp. 73-102. Chicago, 1993. Analysis of the holistic view of the Islamic world, as revived by contemporary Islamic fundamentalists. Their views merge with politics and religion and thus move authority and legitimacy issues to center stage.
Watt, W. Montgomery. Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts. Edinburgh, 1968. Overview of the basic political concepts in Islam, including those on authority and legitimacy.
BASSAM TIBI

ATATIORK, MUSTAFA KEMAL

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:58:26 +0000

ATATIORK, MUSTAFA KEMAL (1881-1938), founding father of the Turkish Republic. Born of modest Turkish parentage in the cosmopolitan Ottoman port of Selanik (now Thessalonliki in Greece) into a markedly Muslim environment, Ataturk opted for a military education, passing out as an infantry staff-captain in 1905. A participant in the Young Turk movement, his early military career ran concurrently with his secret, illegal political activities against the despotism of Sultan Abdul Hamid II-itself a misconstrued attempt to invigorate the empire against slow throttling by the Great Powers. Ataturk and his fellows diagnosed the grievous condition of their society as caused by its political structure and prescribed political restructuring as the cure.
Ataturk’s obsession with partisan politics was typical of the Young Turk officers who secured the restoration in I9o8 of the 1876 Constitution and thereby the transfer of the center of power to the officer corps. He saw no contradiction between his military profession and his founding, joining, and propagating of various revolutionary societies in the Arabian and Macedonian provinces. Only when he perceived that factionalism based on military membership in political societies would undermine the discipline, and therefore the fighting capacity, of the armed forces did he advocate that the military disengage from partisan politics and the officer corps thus assume an autonomous position and hence a commanding role. Unheeded, somewhat excluded, and overshadowed by more glamorous officers in the tumultuous aftermath of 19o8, Ataturk devoted himself to military writing and fighting. He was active in quelling domestic uprisings in the capital (1909) and Albania (1910), as well as in the defense of Ottoman Libya against Italy (1911-1912); but it was the disastrous Balkan War of 1912-1913 that really accelerated his conversion to Turkish nationalism, not yet wholly negating his Ottomanism but salving his wounded Volksgeist.
Ataturk emerged from World War I a brigadier-general, acknowledged as one of the youngest and most outstanding commanders among the combatants and accorded prestige and popularity at home. Yet the finality of their defeat faced the Turks with the problem of preserving their very existence against the victorious Allies’ attempts to dismember what remained of the empire. Ataturk shared the officers’ prevalent belief in the efficacy of the regular military to resist such pressures and so in their own indispensability to the life of the nation; he therefore assumed decisive military and political leadership. His supervision and centralization of spontaneous and widespread local resistance, establishing an alternative national assembly to represent the resisting Turkey, was founded upon his conviction that a nation’s right to full independence is fought for, not granted-a postulate central to the National Struggle of 1919-1922 and demanding the absolute loyalty of the professional soldiers to it.
With the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, President Ataturk concentrated on the furtherance of his nationalist revolution. Through a series of predominantly political reforms, relentlessly pursued despite some internal and international opposition, Ataturk, from 1927 a retired field-marshal, endeavored to establish an inherently capitalist nation-state based on the principle of popular sovereignty; the state’s moral substance would be a conscious synthesis of indigenous and universal elements. His envisaged social order for Turkey was fashioned out of long reflection on the Ottoman disorder he had lived through. This social order assumed a modern state inclining toward social democracy, in which ideas that had taken root in Reformation Europe would -be grafted onto the liberated Turkey through the complementary concepts of contemporaneity and nationalism.
Ataturk considered contemporaneity to derive from the rationalist essence of civilization, holding contemporary civilization as equivalent to, but not identical with, civilization in western Europe. He strove to cultivate rational enquiry as the ultimate authority in society, to gain individual self-awareness and thence national unity. Linking civilization with the idea of progress as both technological development and moral improvement, his view of contemporary world civilization to which all nations might contribute involved recognition of the multiplicity of its origins, including medieval Islamic civilization. Simultaneously, he sought to nurture that sense of loyalty to country, already beginning to overtake traditional loyalty to sultanate during the National Struggle, into an intense Turkish nationalism, whether combined with the traditional bond of Muslim society or, preferably, replacing it; nationalism would be the Turks’ rediscovery and reassertion of their Turkishness-based on assimilation no less than birth. To Ataturk, contemporaneity, fostering the integrative tendency of contemporary world civilization, involved a break with the past, while nationalism with its self-assertive tendency served as a counterbalance, providing continuity with the past through even the most drastic social change. The conjunction of contemporaneity and nationalism thus forms the core of his holistic view of the political universe, underpinning all the reforms he initiated, and it relates directly to his belief in the power of ideas-developing the individual so that the individual can change the society. He aimed to educate individuals toward control of their own affairs, to stimulate a nationalist economy free from foreign dominance, and, significantly, to secularize the polity; for this, he would extricate the state from the cumbersome dichotomous structure whereby social institutions were regulated in part according to seriat (Ar., shari-ah), and unify those institutions under state authority alone.
The depth of Atatiirk’s religious conviction is still unclear; what is certain is that his drive to secularism (called layiklik or laiklik, a misappropriation of the term laicisme) in Turkey was not conceived as an attack on Islam, which he considered the most rational, natural, and therefore final religion. He held the decay of the Muslim world and its falling under oppression to be the fault of Muslims, dominated by their wrong thinking. His idealist philosophy ascribed this to Muslims’ retreat over the centuries from rationalism to implicit acceptance, rendering themselves submissive and defenseless. As he argued, the weight of rigid orthodoxy that had turned Islam from a reasoned belief to blind faith must be lifted from society, not just so that Muslims might advance but for Islam itself, which needed to be cleansed of irrational and inflexible accretions. Then, too, since Islam is essentially a rational religion in which knowledge preponderates, individuals might reach the divine by using their intellect. Atatiirk’s persistent attempts to have the Qur’an and the language of worship rendered into an authorized Turkish version for general use were thus aimed at religious enlightenment. He wanted for Turkey a secular society of Muslims wherein the maintenance and advancement of Islam would rest upon the voluntary adherence of individual believers: nonreligious government for the religious rather than religious government, in what would inevitably be a secular state.
Ataturk lived his life determining how to impose the possible but not attempting rigidly to impose the notyet-possible. Given the dearth of religious scholars of sufficiently revolutionary caliber, he abandoned his earlier feeling that a secular state must nevertheless provide some kind of infrastructure for the regulation and instruction of Islam. His consequent withdrawal in the 1930s to the thesis that the government of such a state has no role in the people’s religious development, and to the legal implementation of this, was perhaps misconceived. It created the paradox of the unlettered hoca (religious teacher), who lacked adequate state-supported education yet was blamed for perpetuating ignorance and bigotry among the faithful.
Ataurk’s attempted reform of Turkish religious life comprises, with his other social reforms, a consistent political philosophy. His ultimate objective, in a formula admitting of general application, was the achievement of a genuine and modern nationhood, responsible for and answerable to its citizens individually and collectively, which would survive, conscious and assured, in the contemporary world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal. A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1927. Leipzig, 1929. English version of Ataturk’s famous six-day speech, covering the years from the 1918 Armistice (without the original documents). Essential for an understanding of the man and the period. Aydemir, Sevket Sureyya. Tek Adam: Mustafa Kemal. 3 vols. Istanbul, 1963-1965. The most perceptive life of Ataturk in print ; the book still awaits a critical editing and translation into English. gokman, Muzaffer. Ataturk ve Devrimleri Tarihi Bibliyografyasi/Bibli-ography of the History of Ataturk and His Reforms. 3 vols. Ankara, 1981-1983. Comprehensive bibliography that includes works by Ataturk, comprising speeches, statements, declarations, treatises, diaries, letters, handwritten and dictated notes, and unsigned articles, together with secondary material in numerous languages. lgdemir, Ulug, et al. Ataturk: Biography (1963). Translated by Andrew J. Mango. Reprint, Ankara, 1981. Published by the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO, this is a complete translation of the entry “Ataturk, Gazi Mustafa Kemal” in Islam Ansiklopedisi (13 vols.), vol. 1, fasc. 10, pp. 719-807 (Istanbul, 1949-1986). The authorized biography, an encyclopedic compendium of information; dated but factually sound.
Kazancigil, Ali, and Ergun Ozbudun, eds. Ataturk: Founder of a Modern State. London, 1981. Informative, though somewhat uncritical, example of collected scholarship on Ataturk.
Kinross, Lord (John Patrick Douglas Balfour). Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation (1964). Nicosia, 1981. Still the most readable biography in English. While there have been numerous workaday lives of Ataturk, he still has not found his much-needed scholarly biographer. Tongas, Gerard. Ataturk and the True Nature of Modern Turkey. Translated by F. F. Rynd. London, 1939. Though long out of print, this study by a contemporary is still one of the most incisive in its approach to Ataturk’s revolution. Nevertheless, the ideas behind the revolution continually require further examination. The author of the present article, for example, has already written elsewhere (in English) on the political thought of Ataturk, and is currently preparing a book-length study.
Turfan, M. Naim. “Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, 1881-1938.” In The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers, edited by Robert Benewick and Philip Green, pp. 12-14. London and New York, 1992. Readily accessible and recent example.
M. NAM TURFAN

ASADABADI, JAMAL AL-DIN AL-

Batoota — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 07:47:43 +0000

See Afghani, Jamal al-Din al-.