Islam – Hybrid Learning

Trump Indicators Orders to Rebuild the Navy, Block Terrorists

Batoota — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 06:36:40 +0000

Trump Signs Orders to Rebuild the Army, Block Terrorists

President Donald Trump signed two government actions Friday that he stated would supply “an amazing rebuilding of the armed companies” and would “preserve radical Islamic terrorists out” of the nation at a ceremony for the swearing-in of his decide for protection secretary, James Mattis.

In a room on the Pentagon designed to pay homage to those that have obtained the Medal of Honor, Trump, praised Mattis after which signed the actions earlier than an viewers of protection officers and White Home workers.

Saying the actions would “make sure the sacrifices of our navy are supported by the actions of our authorities,” Trump added that members of the navy “will at all times be supported by the actions of our authorities, consider me.”

The primary motion requires the event of “new planes, new ships, new assets and new instruments for our women and men in uniform,” Trump stated. “And I am very proud to be doing that.”

“As we put together our price range request for Congress – and I consider Congress goes to be very comfortable to see it – our navy energy can be questioned by nobody. However neither will our dedication to peace. We do need peace,” he stated.

The second motion adopted reviews this week Trump was planning to dam some refugees and visa holders from sure predominantly Muslim nations from coming into the U.S.

It is unclear whether or not these reported provisions have been included on this order. Trump learn a portion of that order to the ceremony’s viewers, emphasizing that it was meant to offer “safety for the nation from overseas terrorist entry into the U.S.”

Earlier within the day, Trump instructed The Christian Broadcasting Community that persecuted Christian refugees could be handled as a precedence relating to entry to the U.S.

“They’ve been horribly handled,” he stated. “Are you aware, for those who have been a Christian in Syria it was inconceivable, very, very – at the very least very, very robust to get into the USA. In case you have been a Muslim, you possibly can are available in. However for those who have been a Christian, it was nearly inconceivable. And the explanation that was so unfair is that the – everyone was persecuted, in all equity, however – they have been chopping off the heads of everyone – however extra so the Christians. And I assumed it was very, very unfair. So we’re going to assist them.”The American Civil Liberties Union was one among a number of human rights advocacy teams that interpreted the motion as discriminating in opposition to Muslims.

“‘Excessive vetting’ is only a euphemism for discriminating in opposition to Muslims,” ACLU Government Director Anthony D. Romero stated in an announcement instantly after the ceremony ended. “Figuring out particular nations with Muslim majorities and carving out exceptions for minority religions flies within the face of the constitutional precept that bans the federal government from both favoring or discriminating in opposition to specific religions. Any effort to discriminate in opposition to Muslims and favor different religions runs afoul of the First Modification.”

On the ceremony, Trump stated he wished to make sure the U.S. just isn’t “admitting into our nation the very threats our troopers are preventing abroad. We solely need to admit these into our nation who will help our nation, and love – deeply – our individuals.

“We are going to always remember the teachings of 9/11, nor the heroes who misplaced their lives on the Pentagon,” he added. “We are going to honor them not solely with our phrases, however with our actions, and that is what we’re doing right now.”

The ceremony capped Trump’s first journey to the Pentagon since turning into president. Touring with senior adviser Steve Bannon, Nationwide Safety Adviser Mike Flynn and different members of his interior circle, Trump was greeted by Mattis and an honor cordon outdoors the constructing when his motorcade arrived earlier than going into a gathering in a safe facility generally known as “the tank” with senior members of the Joint Employees.

Trump waited in his limousine for a number of moments with Mattis standing at consideration on the entrance to the constructing. A pool report stated the delay was as a result of Trump was ready for White Home reporters to reach.

Mattis launched Trump after his swearing-in by Vice President Mike Pence, and welcomed the president to the headquarters of “your at all times loyal navy.”

MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE

Batoota — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 05:44:48 +0000

MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE. Founded in All 1381/1962 CE at the height of the Egyptian-Saudi political crisis, the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-`Alam al-Islam!) was the product of a meeting of III Muslim scholars, intellectuals, and politicians held in Mecca on the occasion of that year’s pilgrimage. They convened to discuss the affairs of the Islamic ummah in view of the threats posed to it by “communism” in general and the “irreligious” Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in particular. On 18 May 1962 they inaugurated the Muslim World League as a new transnational Islamic organization, describing it as a “Muslim cultural organization” and an “Islamic peoples’ organization,” “serving the whole ummah and not acting as an agent of any government.”
With its head office in Mecca, the League was at first represented by a constituent council (al-majlis al-ta’sisi) only. The conference at Mecca chose twenty-one scholars, intellectuals, and notables as members of the council, which met for the first time in December 1962. The number rose to some sixty members in the early 1990s. From the start, the composition of the council demonstrated that the League was trying to bring together four mainstreams of contemporary Islamic ideology and theology: the council was headed by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Shaykh (d. 1969), ensuring a minimum of Wahhabi control; eight scholars, among others Abulhasan ‘Ali al-Nadvi from Lucknow in India represented the classical Salafiyah; Said Ramadan (Egypt), Abu al-A’la Mawdudi (Pakistan), and `Allal al-Fasi (Morocco) were among the partisans of the divergent currents of the neo-Salafiyah; and finally, the first secretary-general, the Meccan merchant Muhammad Surur al-Sabban (1898/99-1972) spoke in the name of the Hijazi neo-Wahhabiyah. Nearly half of the members of the council had already been in contact with the General Islamic Conference founded in Jerusalem in 1953 (a reservoir of Muslim Brotherhood tendencies). This general proportional representation has been maintained since the League’s founding. Correspondingly, the Wahhabi scholar `Abd al-`Aziz ibn `Abdallah Ibn Baz took over the presidency of the constituent council after the grand mufti’s death, and Hijazian intellectuals have been in control of the administration of the League.
The Muslim World League, on the one hand, has acted as a mouthpiece of the Saudi Arabian Government, which has financed the organization since its inception. On the other hand, the different currents represented by the League have been able to develop an identity of their own so that the activities of the League have sometimes been directed against Saudi interests.
Nevertheless, according to statute, the League’s secretariat is headed by a Saudi Arabian citizen (Muhammad Surur al-Sabban, 1962-1972; Muhammad salih alQazzaz, 1972-1976; Muhammad `Ali al-Harkan, 19761983; and `Abd Allah `Umar Nasif [Abdullah Omar Nasseef], since 1983). During the early phase of its history, the Muslim World League succeeded in subjecting to its control other competing transnational organizations, such as the General Islamic Conference of Jerusalem, the Islamic World Congress (Karachi), and the International Islamic Organization (Jakarta). In its covenant of December 1962, the League stated its intention to promote the message of Islam, to fight conspiracies against Islam, and to discuss all problems relevant to Islam. In addition, in article four of the covenant and in accordance with the politics of Islamic solidarity heralded by King Faysal, the League promised to work for the cooperation of all Islamic states and argued in favor of an Islamic bloc taking a stand against pro-Nasserist and Ba’thist regimes.
After the end of the Arab cold war-a term coined by Malcolm Kerr to characterize the political split between Egypt and Saudi Arabia from 1957 to 1967-the Muslim World League gradually changed its objectives. Following the foundation of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1968-1972, the League stressed its supranational, independent identity and concentrated on establishing a network of Islamic cultural and political organizations.
The League upgraded the role of the constituent council and abolished the so-called General Islamic Conference (which met in 1962, 1965, and, exceptionally, in 1987). It founded twenty-two branch offices and bureaus in countries where Muslims constitute a minority (primarily in Africa) and affiliated itself with local Islamic organizations and agencies.
During the 1970s, the League gradually expanded its activities in the fields of coordination (tansiq), da’wah, jurisprudence, and social welfare. In 1974, it invited 140 delegations to a conference of Islamic organizations and decided to establish continental councils (in 1985, five), local Islamic councils in twenty-eight Muslim minority communities, and a coordination committee. One year later, in 1975, the League set up a World Council of Mosques, which specialized in the coordination of da`wah activities; it controls several regional and numerous local mosque councils. Since the League’s beginnings, the faction of Wahhabi scholars has argued for the establishment of a jurisprudence council entrusted with the elaboration and control of internationally accepted standards of Islamic law. Internal disputes postponed this project; in 1976, however, the League opened the Islamic Fiqh Academy with which other academies in Europe and in other parts of the world were associated. The decisions taken at the annual meetings of the fiqh council have acquired some authority. Finally, the International Islamic Relief Organization was made responsible for the League’s activities in the field of social welfare. Together with several Islamic universities in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf states, the League’s training center for da`is (missionaries) supervizes the education of official or semiofficial da’wah workers. From 1973 to 1990, the number of da’wah workers increased from 49 to 816.

The League has gradually developed a publication program: in 1963, the headquarters began to publish the monthly journal Majallat Rabitat al-`Alam al-Islami, called Al-rabitah since 1987. After several disappointing attempts, the League in 1973 succeeded in editing an English-language journal called journal of the Muslim World League; in addition, the press office has published a weekly called Akhbar al-`Alam al-Islami (after 1991, named Al-`Alam al-Islami). After the death of the secretary-general in 1976, the former Saudi Arabian minister of justice and new secretary-general al-Harkan, who had stressed the League’s activities in the field of jurisprudence, and his successor in office, Naslf, himself an academic (rector of King `Abdal’aziz University in Jeddah in 1981), both emphasized the importance of media and of education.
[See also Da`wah, articles on Institutionalization and Modern Usage; Organization of the Islamic Conference; Saudi Arabia.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Landau, Jacob. The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization. Oxford, 1990.
Schulze, Reinhard. Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Islamischen Weltliga. Leiden, 1990.
Sharipova, Raisa M. Panislamiza Segodnia: Ideologia i praktika Ligi Islamskogo Mira. Moscow, 1986.
REINHARD SCHULZE

JUDAISM AND ISLAM

Batoota — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 16:04:56 +0000

JUDAISM AND ISLAM. From Islam’s inception, it has had a varied and profound relationship with Judaism. In scripture and thought, in society and politics, in culture and intellectual life, the two religious civilizations have exemplified their relations. In modern times, these relations have reflected major historical dislocations. This article selectively surveys the history and range of contacts between Islam and Judaism, while emphasizing the modern period.

Islam’s formation, seen mainly through internal sources, revealed a prominent “Judaic dimension.” Some of the content of Islam’s revelations and the tradition emerging from this, as well as the actual relations between Muslims and Jews in Medina, constituted the beginning of the Muslim-Jewish encounter.
Muhammad’s revelations evinced ideas and stories, enjoined practices, and established institutions which had Judaic resonances and forms, including a profile of the Jews themselves. Notions of monotheism, revelation, prophecy, scripture, the next world, and God’s relationship with his creatures are, among others, central here. Institutions such as ritual worship and its directional orientation (salat, giblah) and fasting (sawm) seem to have had quasi-Judaic forms in Mecca before their later islamization in Medina. Prophet figures, such as Joseph (surah I2), Noah (surah, 7.59ff; I0.72ff.), Solomon (and the Queen of Sheba) (surah 27.15ff.), and Moses (surah 28.3ff.), to name but a few, though often somewhat different from their Judaic and biblical counterparts, prove in their very Qur’anic presence the hovering influence of that model.
Although there was a Judaic and biblical presence in Muhammad’s revelations, it did not always represent canonical Judaism and the Bible, as much earlier Western scholarship presumed. It is likely that a melange of ancient Near Eastern traditions, which, though in part Judaic, represent a synthesis of many related cultural strands (including, obviously, the Christian), was reflected in early Islam. These cultural interactions are highly complex and are amenable to many interpretations.
One main Qur’anic conception of the Jews does have a Torah and biblical form close to a canonical Jewish depiction, but it also deviates from that biblical form in a way which indicates the early Islamic self-definition in regard to the (Jewish) other: the Jews (Banu Isra’il, or “Israelites”) in covenant with God, repeatedly violating the covenant and Torah, opposing the prophets and thereby incurring divine wrath. This coincides with the original biblical conception. The Bible also foresaw ultimate redemption of the Jewish people (Deuteronomy 30.iff.). The Qur’an omits Jewish redemption with an implicit supercessionist view of Islam in regard to Judaism (Qur’an 2.83ff.).
The Qur’anic and other early Islamic portrayals of the Jews also reflect the situation in contemporary Medina. A complex relationship between the Prophet and the Jewish tribes there (al-Yahud, or “the Jews”) is revealed in (sometimes oblique) references to Jewish machinations against Muslims and alliances with the Munafiqun (“Hypocrites”; opponents of Muhammad). This gave substance to the Qur’an’s more abstract depictions of the historical Banu Isra’il rebellion against prophecy. Reported Jewish rejection of Muhammad’s teachings in Medina seemed a living example of the ancient problem.
Contrary to-perhaps in dialectical tension with-this rather polemical (and political) portrayal is a Qur’anic respect for the Jews and Judaism. This is shown in the notion of the ahl al-kitdb (“people of the book”), which, while referring also to Christians (and Sabians) seems often to incorporate the Jews as its main example. The “book,” so revered as an ideal type, is here firmly attached to the Jews and their tradition. This is in spite of the Qur’anic claim of the corruption of the Jewish book and other wrongdoing of the ahl al-kitdb.
In the field, relations between Islam and Judaism worsened, culminating in a series of Muslim campaigns against the Jewish tribes and a final Muslim victory. These campaigns were interwoven with the long series of Muslim campaigns against the Meccans, in a sort of “point-counterpoint” fashion. Thus the early battle dramas of Badr (624), Uhud (625), the Ditch (627), and alHudaybiyah (628) had an alter ego in the Muslim trials with the Jewish tribes of Banu Qaynuqa`, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayzah.
The resolution came with the Muslim defeat of the Jews of Khaybar (628), among whom were the Banu Nadir expelled by the Muslims from Medina. Here a clear conception of the practical relationship between Islam and Judaism emerged. This meant the Jews would live as a protected minority, paying, in return, a special tax. A model for later arrangements was thus established. The full institution of dhimmah (protection), covering Jews, Christians, and other scriptuaries, gradually evolved in accordance with Muhammad’s revelations and events on the ground. Derived from the later so-called Pact of `Umar (in various seventh- and eighthcentury rescensions), this institution governed the traditional Islamic-Jewish relationship throughout the medieval era, until its dissolution in the modern period.
The foundation of Islamic-Jewish relations established during Islam’s formative period remained in place and gave direction to subsequent developments. The span between 632 (Muhammad’s death) and the beginning of Islam’s modern period (late eighteenth century) saw an extension and development of this foundation. The great Jewish communities of Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, and the Levant came under Islamic sway (seventh century), as did smaller and less venerable ones. Living administratively as “protected peoples”
(dhimmis), the Jews then interacted with Muslims in various ways.
The cultural and intellectual interchange was profound. In theology, exegesis, philosophy, law, mysticism, and poetry, Jews and Muslims contributed to and learned from one another. The Judaic component in Islam, for example, was augmented by works of Jewish and quasi-Jewish prophetic stories (Qisas al-Anbiyd’ and Isrd’iliydt), which, while sometimes proscribed by Islam for theological reasons, still achieved a massive presence in Islamic texts, particularly in the tafsir (exegetical) tradition and in popular folklore and Sufism. The Islamic philosophical tradition, on the other hand, aided the Jews in establishing their own philosophical learning. Maimonides’ debt to Muslim philosphers and theologians, for example, was very great. And the existence of the Muslim al-Tabrizi’s (thirteenth century) commentary on a portion of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed is a sign of great interest in the other direction. Maimonides’ son, Abraham, was a proponent of a so-called Jewish Sufism, which utilized the framework and technical terminology of the Islamic mystical tradition. Examples in these areas can be multiplied many times.
The classical Islamic depictions of Judaism and the Jews found in the Qur’an and other early sources were later augmented and elaborated by Muslim scholars working in various disciplines. Their discussion sometimes reflected the more polemical as well as the positive side of the classical portrayal, and severe and straightforward vilification of the Jews was not typical. The Muslim intellectuals, rather, either commented on the sources in a neutral manner or generally elaborated on the earlier depictions in such a way as to make of the Jews a kind of “warning model” to Muslims of a people who had strayed and been chastised by God. Such discussions were usually detached, abstract, and not applied to the actual Jewish communities living within the Islamic fold. This was an important difference between the medieval and certain twentieth-century Islamic interpretations of the early sources on the Jews.
The life of Jewish communities in the Muslim world throughout this long period was governed by the elaborate laws of dhimmah. Itself derived from traditional hierarchical conceptions of Islamic spiritual finality and superiority to the other faiths, the dhimmah idea and practice mainly imposed practical regulations and restrictions as a way of implementing these notions of difference. Thus were the Jews (and other ahl al-kitdb) subject to certain legal, economic, occupational, dress, and other restrictions. Although this created a legal status and feeling of inferiority for the Jews in Muslim countries, they could often be autonomous in their internal communal fife while also interacting with the majority culture. Harsh treatment, although certainly not unknown, was also not the rule but the exception. In later centuries, the situation of Jews (and other minorities) deteriorated generally, but this occurred unevenly in different times and places. These developments reflected a difficult period of relative political and economic decline in parts of the Islamic world. The dawn of the modern era witnessed an exacerbation of the general Islamic situation and a radical change in the Jewish position.
The late eighteenth century is usually held to be the beginning of the modern history of the Islamic Middle East. After a long period of growing Western economic and political involvement in the area, Napoleon’s entrance (1798) and brief stay with his army in Egypt presaged an era of great Western influence and domination. The general changes wrought by this situation profoundly affected the life of the dhimmis in general and the Jews in particular. The institution of dhimmah eventually virtually disappeared and, with a few pockets of exception, the great ancient Jewish communities of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa went with it. Islamic-Jewish relations in the Middle East then took a form very different from anything previously known. The chronology of this period of change is from the nineteenth century onward.
In the nineteenth century, until World War I, the Western powers, France and Britain in particular, consolidated their presence in the Middle East. One prominent feature of this presence in some regions was a Western policy of equal rights for minorities, a direct challenge to the institution of dhimmah. Some indigenous Muslim powers responded to this in legislation, if not always in its implementation. Thus the Ottomans, in a two-stage legislation in 1839 and 1856, in principle provided a framework for a total equalization of dhimmis and Muslims. In spite of the less than total acceptance and application of these laws throughout the realm, they did reflect real changes being effected in other ways by the powers. Dhimmis were being liberated according to new Western ideas. By the end of World War I, this had to a great extent been completed.
The period between the two world wars saw a continuation of the Western powers’ presence in the Islamic Middle East. This encouraged stronger nationalist sentiment among indigenous peoples. The Jews, by no means uniformly Zionist, did in places respond positively to that movement, as their Muslim (and Christian) neighbors promoted their own new nationalist ideologies. The period 1929 to 1939 saw an exacerbation of Muslim-Jewish tensions in various places in response to the worsening conflict in Palestine. The World War II period witnessed a continuation of the troubles in the midst of the complex politics of that time.
In the postwar period, the tensions of previous years rose to new heights, with the intensification of the Palestine problem. Anti-Jewish disturbances occurred, for example, in November 1945 in several Arab countries, with greater or lesser severity. With the UN partition resolution of 29 November 1947, the situation became more acute, and in subsequent months more disturbances took place. Within twenty years the vast majority of the Jews in Arab countries had left, going mainly to Israel and, to a lesser extent, Europe and North America. North Africa, Turkey, and Iran were less affected, but gradually they too saw a diminution of their Jewish population. With Middle Eastern Jewry now concentrated in Israel, Islamic-Jewish relations in the Middle East (and elsewhere) were subsequently to be colored by the politics of the Arab-Israel dispute. Aside from the natural tensions which ensued here, a very prominent and original aspect of the new relations was an innovative Islamic thought concerning Judaism and Zionism.
Though derived from the traditional ideas concerning the Jews and Judaism, the new thought also represented a sharp departure from that foundation. The differences can be found in the existential import of the new thought as well as in certain new conceptions and formulations. Like much of modern Islamic thought, this genre too is a direct response to some aspect of Islam’s situation in the world. Unlike the majority of premodern Islamic discussions of the Jews, which have a more historical conception of Judaism and an academic way of discussing it, here the subject was given a practical and emotional significance which it had not had for centuries, if ever. At the same time, Judaism was given an essential nature-derived from sacred sources but removed from history-which might help to explain the new historical development. Old myths became new realities, giving rise to new concepts.
The beginning of this thought might be located in its earliest form in certain Islamic Arabic publications of the late 1930s. Prominent here was the Egyptian journal Al fat#. Loosely linked with more populist Islamic trends rather than with the official `ulama’ (community of religious scholars), Al fat# published many articles and editorials on the intensifying Palestine problem. This was a still early and fluid stage of that problem’s development, before the creation of Israel and the Jewish exodus from Muslim countries. There was as yet no clear doctrinal line or framework story; there was, rather, a continuous commentary, from an Islamic perspective, on the developing situation. Three points, however, were clearly made and reiterated: (I) fear of a gradual judaization (tahwid) of Palestine and a displacement of indigenous peoples; (a) concern over the security of Islamic sacred sites; and (3) most plaintively, an appeal to the Jews of Arab and Muslim lands not to abjure the centuries-old symbiosis of Muslims and Jews, Islam and Judaism, in favor of the new “un-Jewish” Zionism. Zionism was held to be as bad for the well-being of the Jews themselves as it was for its Muslim and Arab opponents.
Subsequent to Israeli statehood, a framework story emerged which informed almost all the wide variety of new intellectual trends: the new Jewish phenomenon of national movement and nation-state was held to be a recapitulation of the rebellious behavior of the ancient Israelites and the Jews of Muhammad’s time. The traditional stories here became interpretative models through which contemporary problems were given meaning. Tales of Muhammad’s trials with the alleged machinations of Medinan Jews, for example, were abstracted and read into modern Israel’s national character. Or, sometimes, modern Israel was little mentioned but present by implication. Either way, past and present were mixed so as to create an eternal present. The timebound traditional presentation of Jewish stories was here effaced; and an ahistoricity ensued which rendered stories universal in their applicability to historical events.
Examples of this approach abound in the voluminous new (Arabic) Islamic literature on Judaism as seen through the prism of modern events. From al-Azhar and other `ulama’ to Islamist fundamentalists to Muslim intellectuals writing from an Islamic perspective, many minds have attempted to wrestle with this aspect of Islam’s situation in this way. The large, two-volume proceedings of the 1968 al-Azhar Conference (Cairo, 1970) provide one interesting example of this line of thought. Written as responses of Muslim religious scholars to the shocking Israeli victory in June 1967, the papers in these volumes seek guidance in the early sources in confronting this modern catastrophe. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood’s publications, Al-da’wah and Ali`tisam, in the late 1970s elaborated on and applied this reasoning to President Anwar el-Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. In a proliferation of articles, these magazines argued not only that Sadat’s initiative was wrong in an Islamic sense, but that, if a peace agreement ensued, the Israeli Jews would cause offense to Islam in Egypt and would attempt to subvert the foundations of faith as their ancestors had done in Medina of the Prophet. Consonant with the new possibility of official Israeli Jewish presence in Egypt, and expressing a particular fundamentalist concern with internal Islamic moral values, the emphasis is on Jewish Israel as a cultural challenge within Muslim Egypt. This special angle in Sunni revivalist and fundamentalist circles can be traced back at least as far as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), whose long essay “Our Struggle with the Jews” (early 1950s) was seminal. On the other hand, with President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the subsequent Camp David Agreements, certain Islamic circles (particularly in al-Azhar) proclaimed support for a peaceful settlement, based on their own interpretations of Qur’anic verses. Noticeable here were a more pragmatic view and an absence of the common modern framework story of the Jews. Also, as might have been expected, Palestinian Islamic circles produced their own brands of thought on these issues, partaking of the larger themes created elsewhere, while providing a local Palestinian Islamic nationalist flavor. Especially striking here are the publications of Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist movement.
Jewish responses to their new situation in regard to Islam were not equal, quantitatively or qualitatively, to those of Islam. But they do exist, mostly unstudied, and deserving of serious research.
The Islamic attempts ideologically to confront the collapse and disappearance of the institution of dhimmah, the emigration of the Jewish communities from the Islamic Near East, and their reconstitution in Israel, considered illegitimate in some quarters, constitute part of a more general Islamic search for early exemplars which would provide a gloss on Islam’s modern situation. Of necessity, this approach usually could not include the great medieval models of Islamic-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction, even when calling for a return to the practices and ethos of that era. In removing this interaction by dismantling the legal, social, and political structures which supported it, history has altered Islamic-Jewish relations in an unprecedented way.
[See also Arab-Israeli Conflict; Dhimmi; MuslimJewish Dialogue; and People of the Book.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashtor, Eliyahu. The Jews in Moslem Spain. 2 vols. Jerusalem, 1960-1966 (Hebrew); Philadelphia, 1973-1979 (English). The basic work on the subject.
Chouraqui, Andre N. Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa. Translated by Michael M. Bernet. Philadelphia, 1968. Good survey written for a general audience.
Fischel, Walter J. Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam (1937). London, 1968. Standard general work.
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 2, The Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971. One of four superb volumes, particularly accessible to the general reader.
Landau, Jacob. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. New York and London, 1969. Standard general work.
Laskier, Michael. The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862-1962. Albany, N.Y., 1983. Standard general work.
Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam. Princeton, 1984. Standard work on the history of Jews in the Muslim world from Islam’s beginnings to the latter half of the twentieth century. Particularly good on intellectual and cultural aspects.
Maimonides, Moses. Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago, 1963. The standard translation of this classic work. The translator’s introduction and notes give much information about Islamic influence on Maimonides.
Nettler, Ronald L., ed. Studies in Muslim Jewish Relations. Vol. I. Reading, U.K., 1993. The first volume in a projected series of annual volumes. Contains a variety of articles on the subject.
Newby, Gordon D. “Tafsir Israiliyat: The Development of Qur’an Commentary in Early Islam in its Relationships to Judaeo-Christian Traditions of Scriptural Commentaries.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979): 685-697. Excellent study of this aspect of Islamic-Jewish cultural interchange.
Nissim, Rejwan. The Jews of Iraq: Three Thousand Years of History and Culture. London, 1985. Good survey for the general reader. Peters, F. E. The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Princeton, 1982. Excellent study of the beliefs and other features held in common by the three religions. Special emphasis is given to the ancient Near Eastern background.
Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia, 1979. Introductory survey of Jewish history in Arab lands and a much longer section of translated representative texts concerning various aspects of history. Covers the period from Islam’s beginnings to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia, 1991. Following the same format as the earlier volume (survey essay and translated sources), this book covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the late 1960s.
Tritton, A. S. The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of `Umar. London, 1970. Still the standard work on the subject. A very good overview, though somewhat dated in some of its details.
RONALD L. NETTLER

Islam in the Americas

Batoota — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 17:46:27 +0000

Persons of Islamic background were among the explorers, traders, and settlers who visited the New World from the time of Columbus. A considerable number of Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who concealed their faith after 1492) migrated to both Portuguese and Spanish America, but their increasing numbers threatened the Christian rulers, who had them exterminated by the Inquisition.

African Muslim slaves from Senegal, Gambia, the southern Sahara, and the upper Niger came to the Americas between the mid-1500s and the mid-nineteenth century. Estimates of the proportion of Muslims within the total numbers of African slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere range from 14 to 20 percent.
After abolition in the Caribbean, the British in Guyana transported between 1835 and 1917 large numbers of Indians as indentured servants. Most were Hindus, but a sizable minority (16 percent) were Muslims, who comprise more than 10 percent of the nation’s population today. In Trinidad and Tobago there is also a longstanding Muslim minority of about 6 percent. Suriname, long a Dutch colony, has few African Muslims left, but its Muslim population is 23 percent owing to the large numbers of Indian and Javanese Muslims who were imported for labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although many African slaves came from Islamic backgrounds, the conditions of slavery made it impossible for large numbers of them to sustain their religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. But there are records of very remarkable individual African Muslim slaves (see Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook, New York, 1984). Indian and other Muslim immigrants, however, were not slaves and thus were able to maintain their spiritual, cultural, and social institutions sufficiently well to preserve an Islamic identity.
Muslim Immigration to North America. Significant numbers of free Muslims did not start arriving in the Americas until the late 1800s, when Arabs from greater Syria, especially, began to arrive. Most of these people were poor, working-class males who made their living by peddling and menial jobs. They tended to assimilate into American society and often took American spouses, if a Muslim wife-whether from back home or among the immigrant community-was not available. They found it difficult to sustain a Muslim identity, but there was some activity in mosque and community building, for example, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Edmonton, Alberta, where strong and growing Muslim communities flourish today. This first “wave” (I follow here Yvonne Y. Haddad’s periodization in her pamphlet A Century of Islam in America, Washington, D.C., 1986) of immigration continued until World War I, after which a second wave continued through the 1930s, ending with World War Il.
A third wave of Muslim immigration after World War II included many people from the elites of Middle Eastern and South Asian countries seeking education and professional advancement. Although many returned to their home countries, a large number remained. The members of this third wave have tended to maintain their Islamic identity while assimilating into North American life at a moderate rate. Sometimes more observant and strict Muslims refer to these people as “`Eed [`Id] Muslims,” because of their supposed habit of attending the mosque only during the two canonical religious festivals each year, `Id al-Adha and `Id al-Fitr. But these people extended the establishment of Islamic centers and mosques, as well as larger-scale Muslim associations, such as the Federation of Islamic Associations, a somewhat loose organization of mosques in the United States, whose Canadian affiliate is the Council of Muslim Communities of Canada (CMCC). Another active organization that encourages the building of new mosques and cooperation among Islamic congregations is the Council of Masajid (“mosques”) of the United States, Inc. Still another is the Muslim Students Association of U.S.A. and Canada (MSA), which was organized by international Muslim students studying in North America in 1963. The MSA evolved into and is connected with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), currently the largest Muslim “umbrella” organization, with several affiliated associations pursuing a variety of Islam-related interests. [See Federation of Islamic Associations and Islamic Society of North America.]
A fourth wave of Muslim immigration to North America began in the mid-1960s and continues today. It was made possible by changes in U.S. immigration laws, which opened the doors to people from many parts of the world whose talents and occupational capabilities filled acknowledged needs. Large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East, Asia, and beyond migrated to America to take up permanent residence with citizenship. Among these were considerable numbers of Muslims, particularly from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Today the majority of Muslims in North America are immigrants, with Arabs more numerous in the United States and Pakistanis second, whereas the proportions are reversed in Canada.
The most recent wave of Muslim immigrants is also generally the most motivated to sustain and hand down a strong Islamic identity and establish permanent institutional and community structures to that end. There is much less interest in assimilating into North American life among the more recently arrived Muslims. The worldwide Islamic revival, including its “fundamentalist” aspects, in its North American circles has among its highest goals the establishment of an Islamic environment on that continent. It intends to do that by means of da’wah (missions), Islamic schools, publications, building new mosques and centers, becoming involved in politics, public relations, and developing Islamic financial institutions, such as interest-free banking.
Muslims who are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants live in all the metropolitan regions of North America, but in the United States there are particularly large communities in Boston, New York, the Detroit-Toledo corridor, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles/Orange County, whereas in Canada there is a large Muslim community in Toronto, with sizable ones also in Montreal, Windsor, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver.
Muslim African Americans. The second largest North American Muslim community is the Muslim African Americans in the United States. Three major reasons for conversion to Islam by many African Americans are: the consciousness among many of a lost Islamic heritage dating back to the time of slavery, the related proliferation of new, quasi-Islamic religious movements among African Americans in the twentieth century, and the strong trend of conversion to Islam by African Americans in correctional facilities.
The fact of Muslim slaves in the Americas has been mentioned above. In 1913 the Moorish Science movement was established in Newark, New Jersey, by Timothy Drew (1886-1929), who came to be known among his followers as Noble Drew Ali. He taught that black Americans would discover their true identity only through an educative process centered in his text called The Holy Koran. Noble Drew Ali considered black Americans to be “Asiatics,” or “Moors,” but not “Negroes.” Islam was seen as the true religion of Asiatics, whereas Christianity was a religion for the whites. The movement borrowed some aspects of Islam but followed its own course, gradually splitting up into a few small circles today.
The next quasi-Islamic movement to arise in the United States was the Nation of Islam. It was founded in Detroit in 193o by a foreign national of uncertain origin named W. D. Fard (with variants), who called for education, a common ritual, and strong community defense, all regulated by a strict ethic. One of Fard’s principle followers, the black American Elijah Poole (1897-1975) carried on the movement in 1934 after Fard’s mysterious disappearance. There was little Islamic about the movement except its name. For example, the doctrine came to regard Fard as Allah incarnate and Elijah Muhammad (i.e., Poole) as his prophet. White people were regarded as devils who had robbed the blacks of their preeminent place in the order of things. [See Nation of Islam and the biography of Elijah Muhammad.]
The Nation of Islam attracted many African Americans, who were inspired and helped by its message of hard work, abstinence, strong family values, and commitment to improving the general lot of black people. The Nation of Islam came to have organizations-in the form of mosques-throughout the urban United States. One of Elijah Muhammad’s most outstanding associates was Malcolm X (1925-1965), who was converted in prison and changed his name from Little to protest the humiliation of having been christened with a white, “slave” name. Malcolm X, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca and converted to normative Islam, was assassinated in 1965 by members of the Nation of Islam. Since then his image has grown as one of America’s most powerful visionaries for empowerment of black people. [See the biography of Malcolm X.] His embracing of mainstream Sunni Islam has been a major factor in the increasing identification of Muslim African Americans with the world Islamic community. The beginnings of this occurred in 1975 when, on the death of Elijah Muhammad, his son and designated heir to leadership, Wallace Deen Muhammad, announced that the Nation of Islam would henceforth leave behind much of his father’s teaching and move in the direction of normative Islam. Although this successor movement had a number of names, it now prefers to call itself simply “Muslim” and has effectively liquidated its organizational infrastructure, except for the leader’s (whose name became Warith Deen Muhammad) preaching and teaching mission in Chicago and the weekly newspaper Muslim j ournal, which covers news of interest to all Muslims.
Not all Nation of Islam followers agreed with the dramatic change brought about by Warith Deen Muhammad. One longtime associate, the former Louis X, has continued the Nation of Islam’s struggle to lift up and empower poor black people and strengthen them with the effective message of Elijah Muhammad. Minister Louis Farrakhan, as this leader came to be known, is a charismatic preacher who alarms much of white America with his provocative discourses. There are some aspects of Islam in the continuing Nation of Islam, but orthodox Muslims in America reject it as an authentic Islamic movement. One widely distributed pamphlet refers to it as “Farrakhanism,” a distinct religion, protected under the First Amendment, but not Islamic.
The conversion of large numbers of African Americans to Islam in prison started in the days of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X remains a beacon of hope for those who have been brought as low as prison. Nation of Islam chaplains have been very effective in preaching to and helping inmates, and their record of successful litigation in American courts for prisoners’ religious rights (e.g., Friday noon prayers and a pork-free Islamic diet) has improved the general lot of incarcerated persons.
Inmates declare Islam as their religion for a variety of reasons, including physical protection, but many come to lead exemplary lives both inside prison and after release. In some corrections systems, such as New York State and New York City, Muslim African American inmates make up a major proportion of the prison and jail populations. Although many incarcerated Muslims become model inmates, many also get caught up in a cycle of recidivism and reincarceration. This is a great challenge to the entire Muslim community that is only beginning to be addressed.
There is a considerable cultural, occupational, educational, and economic gap between most Muslim immigrants and most Muslim African Americans. Racism also plays a part in the separation of the two communities. But Muslim “chaplains,” as prison imams are often called by administrations, increasingly recognize that the support system and caring community of fellow Muslims that a Muslim inmate benefits from in prison is usually not available to poor urban blacks on release. Rather, the former, chronic conditions of life on the street in the American underclass often win out. Halfway houses and other measures are being called for, but resources and the will to innovate in this often discouraging and sometimes dangerous Islamic social work are scarce.
Challenges to Muslims in the Americas. In the Americas, the numbers, diversity, organizational development, and Islamic identity of Muslims are strongest in North America, but substantial Muslim communities exist throughout the hemisphere. In addition to the small but well-established communities in the Caribbean basin, there are other Latin American immigrant communities, composed mostly of people from Arab countries, in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. The Muslim populations of Argentina and Brazil, for example, are each at least twice the Muslim population of Canada (estimated at 200,000 in 1992).
In North America, and especially the United States, with its Muslim population of perhaps 4 million or more (no precise census has been conducted yet), the worldwide Islamic ummah is gathered in a kind of microcosmic form in a single (if complex) American social and political order. The great variety of Muslims there in
cludes numerous Shi`is of different types, although the vast majority are Sunni, reflecting the ratio worldwide. Muslims in North America are urgently concerned about building Islamic unity even as they acknowledge ethnic, racial, and cultural divisions and tensions.
Muslim congregations in North America range from narrowly ethnic enclaves (e.g., Turkish, Syrian, and Pakistani) to richly diverse communities. Most congregations try to have imams who are well trained in Arabic and to practice fiqh (jurisprudence) and the classical religious sciences. Thus they tend to import imams from Middle Eastern or South Asian Islamic countries. There are sometimes difficulties when imams fail to perceive the nature of North American society and the problems Muslims have coping with it. Often members of a local congregation want an imam who can provide counseling and other services similar to what Jews and Christians expect from their rabbis and ministers (see Waugh, 1982). But this problem is increasingly recognized, and initiatives to train foreign as well as native imams have begun.
The long-established Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, Ohio, has a membership of about six hundred families drawn from more than thirty national and ethnic backgrounds. Most of the members are Sunnis, but Shi`is are included, too. The center has a large Friday mosque, extensive educational and activity wings, a bookstore, clinic, mortuary, cemetery, recreation field, and extensive kitchen/dining facilities. Similar large centers exist in major urban areas, such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Toronto, and central New Jersey. In Houston, several mosques have banded together in a cooperative association with a central coordinating staff and a model for developing noncompetitive Islamic organizations and services in different quadrants of the metropolitan area. Although this octopuslike comity arrangement is not without problems, it might serve as a prototype for other urban regions with large, dispersed Muslim populations. In Oakland, California, there is a large Sunni mosque with an affiliated, full-time Islamic school that was originally a Nation of Islam congregation. Now, although it consists mostly of Muslim African Americans, it also numbers Arab Americans and other immigrants among its members.
Large Islamic Associations. The Islamic Society of North America, introduced above, represents the type of large-scale coordinating effort that many Muslims consider essential to the long-term well-being of the ummah (community) in North America. The ISNA, which has a headquarters campus near Indianapolis, Indiana, has both individual and institutional memberships, publishes a glossy magazine, Islamic Horizons, and holds an annual meeting each Labor Day weekend attended by around five thousand people in recent years. ISNA is essentially a Sunni organization, but it attracts the support of Muslims from many different ethnic and national backgrounds, including African Americans. ISNA strongly emphasizes Muslim family values, da’wah, Islamic education, youth activities, political activism, Islamic publishing, cooperative and continuing relations with Muslim groups and countries overseas, helping in the development of new mosques and centers, and so forth. ISNA also shares with other Islamic groups an urgent concern for developing a fiqh that is both true to the mainstream Islamic tradition and responsibly adaptive to new circumstances and problems found by Muslims living as minorities in the West.
Although large organizations such as ISNA offer the advantages of a wide communication network, educational research and development, publications, an image of Muslims seeking unity, and certain economies of scale, many Muslims prefer to pursue their Islamic goals at the local level. Large congregations in effect compete with ISNA by sponsoring their own public outreach and da’wah initiatives. The Islamic Society of Southern California, for example, sponsors an Islamic Education Service that has a television network and distributes sound and video cassettes of sermons, speeches, conferences, and panel discussions on a variety of contemporary topics including human sexuality, AIDS, relations with Christians and Jews, and spirituality. It publishes The Minaret, a sophisticated magazine with a national readership.
There is a feeling among many Muslims in North America that, although large-scale coordination of Islamic activities is desirable, the right means for this has not yet been devised. In 1992 the first North Americawide Islamic Coordinating Conference was held, in Indianapolis. It brought together the widest range of representatives of Muslim organizations in a spirit of mutual consultation and seeking a vision for the future. But the assembled participants proceeded cautiously, aware that the processes of Muslim unity and cooperation in North America are as diversely complex as the constituencies that represent the ummah there.
[See also Brazil; Canada; Suriname; Trinidad and Tobago; and United States of America.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, ed. The Muslims of America. New York and Oxford, 1991. Informative essays on organizations, Islamic thought, Muslims in prison, political activity, da’wah, women, and other topics.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, and Adair T. Lummis. Islamic Values in the United States: A Comparative Study. New York and Oxford, 1987. Well-documented study based on interviews and questionnaires. Husaini, Zohra. Muslims in the Canadian Mosaic: Socio-Cultural and Economic Links with Their Countries of Origin. Edmonton, Alberta, 1990. Good demographic and sociocultural data, with particular emphasis on Alberta.
Kettani, M. Ali. Muslim Minorities in the World Today. London and New York, 1986. Muslims in the Americas are covered, with statistics, on pages 191-213.
EI-Kholy, Abdo A. The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and Assimilation. New Haven, 1966. Careful empirical study that, though dated, still has considerable historical value.
Lee, Martha F. The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement. Lewiston, N.Y., 1988. Carries the story beyond Lincoln (below) into the period of Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America (1961). 3d ed. Grand Rapids, 1993. The most thorough study of the Nation of Islam, by a distinguished African-American sociologist.
Marsh, Clifton. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930-1980. Metuchen, N.J., and London, 1984. Useful information on the Moorish Science Temple and the ways in which Wallace (Warith) Deen Muhammad diverged from his father’s doctrine. Contains a list of African American masjids (mosques).
Melton, John Gordon, ed. The Encyclopedia of American Religions. 3d ed. Detroit, 1989. Contains an annotated listing of Islamic organizations in the United States, with addresses (pp. 825-842).
Waugh, Earle H. “The Imam in the New World: Models and Modifications.” In Transitions and Transformations in the History of Religions, edited by Frank E. Reynolds and Theodore M. Ludwig, pp. 124-149. Leiden, 198o.
Waugh, Earle H., Baha Abu-Laban, and Regula B. Qureshi, eds. The Muslim Community in North America. Edmonton, Alberta, 1983. Very useful source of information on such topics as survival strategies, socioreligious behavior of Muslims, Islamic studies, Pakistani Muslims in Canada, and Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Waugh, Earle H., Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, and Regula B. Qureshi, eds. Muslim Families in North America. Edmonton, Alberta, 1991. Sequel to the above, with excellent essays on religion, ethnicity, family life, sex/gender, women, mate selection, divorce, immigrant groups, and other topics.
Williams, Raymond Brady. Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry. Cambridge and New York, 1988. Contains reliable and informative treatment of South Asian Muslims in the United States.
FREDERICK MATHEWSON DENNY

Islam in South Asia

Batoota — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 13:49:37 +0000

Islam in South Asia
The experience of Islam in South Asia is at once vast and varied. It encompasses nearly 300 million residents of the subcontinent who either define themselves as Muslim or are so defined by others. These 300 million Muslims belong to myriad groups whose members speak different languages, live in separate spheres, and confront disparate social and economic circumstances. These groups differ from one another in almost every sense except in their identity as Muslims.
Moreover, South Asian Islamic culture is not limited to Muslims. Hindus attend festivals for Muslim saints and holy men, engage in poetic contests, and enjoy the music of a centuries-old Muslim culture. At the same time, Islam persists as a multivalent release valve, especially for marginal groups. It functions as a site of symbolic protest, an avenue of social mobility, and even an alternative religious identity; this was the case with the untouchables of South India, one group of whom converted to Islam en masse in recent decades (Abdul Malik Mujahid, Conversion to Islam: Untouchables’ Strategy for Protest in India, Chambersburg, Pa., 1989).
Islam in South Asia is an experience for women as much as for men. Despite the absence of women’s names from almost all accounts, one should not assume a bias against women. Rather, the deficit of female voices reflects the kind of narrative writing that prevailed in Asia, as in Europe, until the mid-twentieth century; the experience of South Asian Muslim women is no less dynamic for its concealment, and they have both thought and acted in distinctive ways worthy of sustained inquiry. The modern disciplines of sociology and anthropology have begun to discover the world of women, which is also the world of children, in South Asian Islam. (See, for instance, Patricia Jeffery, Frogs in a Well, London, 1979), and Hannah Papanek and Gail Minault, eds., Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia, Columbia, Mo., 1983.)
The more common approach to South Asian Islam is not to accent experience but to restate history-to fix and narrate dates, events, persons, and themes as if they alone provide access to the character of Islam in the subcontinent. To restrict the account to historical markings, however, is to ignore the human variety that does not admit of a single or even a composite historical narrative. Muslims of Kerala, Sri Lanka, or Kashmir each have their story. Unless it accounts for these peripheral branches, the single trunk narrative, however sensitively
constructed and skillfully deployed, risks being reductive rather than representative. One must thus take account of several cultural-political core areas here in order to grasp the spectra of contemporary experience and historical formation that characterize South Asian Islam. The greatest danger, as Peter Mayer has pointed out, is “to project the specific conditions of North Indian, Urdu-speaking Muslims over the whole subcontinent” (“Tombs and Dark Houses,” Journal of Asian Studies 40.3 [1981]: 486).
Kerala. Life in the South Indian coastal state of Kerala is above all reflected in the Mappila community, as the majority Muslim residents of Kerala are known. Their life is shaped by the cultural tradition of the South Arabian seacoast and is dependent on its trade. Arab traders had come to Kerala even before the advent of Islam. The indigenous language, Malayalam, is venerated in its own right, but in religious instruction it is combined with Arabic. There is a vast corpus of ArabicMalayalam religious writings, narrative poetry, and songs, including song-stories that celebrate the lives of Sufi saints such as Shaykh `Abd al-Qadir Jilani and Shaykh Ahmad Rifa’i, eponymous founders of important brotherhoods. These songs are sung mostly by men; other song-stories are memorized and sung by women, for example the romantic ballads and battle songs popular at annual feast celebrations.
Connection to an Arab past is also evident in the distinctive status accorded Mappilas of Arab descent who through marriage can trace their paternal line to the family of the prophet Muhammad. In Kerala, however, patrilineal descent shares prestige with a matrilineal system common to the Nayar caste influential in the history of North Kerala. Under this system descent is traced through female relatives, with the eldest sister enjoying preeminence, and property is controlled through a joint rather than nuclear family system. Moreover, religious architecture does not follow the expected pattern of domes and minarets; instead, like Kerala Hindu temples, Mappila mosques are marked by peaked roofs. During the past decade, however, the influx of Gulf petrodollars has funded an explosion of new mosquebuilding on familiar Middle Eastern architectural lines.
R. E. Miller has suggested that Mappila Muslims are as closely connected to Arabian Islam as they are isolated from Indo-Persian Islam, and indeed that the Gulf connection “has affected the Mappilas more profoundly than any other Indian Muslims” (“Mappila,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., 1960-, vol. 5, p. 459). However, the relationship remains partial and restrained by numerous factors, most of which are historically based. One is the allegiance of Mappilas to the Shafi’i school of law, which diverges somewhat from the Hanbali madhhab of Saudi Arabia. Another is the prominence accorded tangals, a Malayalam term for saintly individuals-not only practicing spiritual directors but also those related to families of illustrious saints. Still another is lack of consensus about the norms and practices of Sunni Islam. Almost all Mappilas are Sunni Muslims, but they do not interpret orthodox Islam with one mind. Some are traditional religious specialists who prefer a strict madrasah education without the inclusion of modern subjects or professions; others strive to be both traditionalists and modernists; still others are committed, outspoken reformers. A very few are secularists, content to retain only the cultural markings of Kerala Islam and eschewing institutional Islam. All these subgroups are united by their common commitment to Islam as the decisive emblem of cultural pride, but they differ on programs for its assertion and maintenance.
Other historical factors haved shaped the Mappilas. Numbering almost 7.5 million by the early 1990s, they extend their influence across South India. While they enjoy a sympathetic and symbolic relationship to the Arabian Peninsula, they also relate to other parts of the subcontinent, especially to the adjacent areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Mappilas had prospered through trade during the centuries before 1498, but when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut, the lucrative Arab trade was cut off, and new alliances were sought. They were disappointed by the Dutch, then by the British, and finally by the French. The latter seemed to offer some hope during the last part of the eighteenth century, when Muslim rulers from nearby Mysore state briefly controlled Kerala, but by 1792 the British had resumed their rule that was to persist until 1947
The economic status of Mappilas has declined relative to the rest of the Kerala since the serial occupation by European colonial powers. Insofar as Muslims tended to be more urban than the population as a whole, they reacted sharply to the loss of administrative posts, commercial links, and educational options. Their grievances were expressed in numerous sporadic revolts throughout the period of British ascendancy, culminating in the Mappila Rebellion of 1921, a watershed in Kerala Muslim history. It focused on the formation of an independent state, Moplastan, in southern Kerala, and was also fueled by the attempt of Mappila leaders to make common cause with North Indian Muslims on behalf of the beleaguered Ottoman caliph. Their efforts proved fruitless: they antagonized not only the British but also Hindus of Kerala who had initially been sympathetic to their cause. Repeatedly repressed, the Kerala Muslim community by the mid-1920s had sunk to its nadir, after which it began to recover and to reassert itself.
Sri Lanka. The experience of Sri Lankan Muslims relates closely to that of their Kerala coreligionists. The majority community is usually designated by the name given by the detested Portuguese, “Moors”; the other smaller subcommunities of Muslims in Sri Lanka are also frequently glossed as Moors. The Moors, like the Mappilas, are Sunni Muslims subscribing to the Shafi’i school of law; they, too, have been shaped by the location of their home straddling major trade routes in the Indian Ocean. A disproportionately urban population4o percent are citydwellers in a country that is only 20 percent urbanized-they trace their ancestry through both migration and conversion on a patrilineal model going back to the seventh century CE and the time of the prophet Muhammad. They are a small community, numbering perhaps 1.2 million of the total population of 15 million Sri Lankans. The majority of Sinhalas are Theravada Buddhists, with a minority of Tamil Hindus in one section of the island. It is with the Tamils that the Moors share their closest linguistic affinity, even though their political preferences are strongly Sinhala. Most Moors regard Tamil as their mother tongue, and the great song-poems they recite on popular and religious feast days are written in Arabic Tamil; the Arabic Tamil literary corpus of the Moors is regarded as a significant subset of the Arabic Tamil literature of South India.
The Moors thus share more with the Mappilas, despite linguistic and cultural differences, than either group does with the large North Indian Muslim community. Historical events make the separation of South Indian Muslims from their North Indian coreligionists even sharper. Like the Mappilas, the Moors were devastated by a Portuguese invasion in 1505. Portuguese control of Sri Lanka was even greater than their intervention in Kerala, for they succeeded in cutting off Sri Lankans from the mainland. The Moors ceased to have relations with Tamil Muslims, at the same time that the Portuguese curtailed and in time closed down the madrasahs. The succeeding Dutch colonialists pursued an explicitly commercial agenda, showing little interest in direct religious confrontation but not encouraging the restoration of institutions destroyed by the Portuguese. Their benign neglect of Islam was shared by their successors, the British.
For more than three centuries the Moors were forced to develop in isolation from other subcontinent Muslims; when they did experience a revival, it came not from Delhi or Mecca but via Kerala and Tamil Nadu, in the nineteenth century. It was brought by Sufi orders that had been introduced into Kerala in the eighteenth century and then spread to Sri Lanka during the nineteenth. Chief among them was the Qadiriyah, but there were also notable adherents to other orders, such as the Shadhiliyah, the Chishtiyah and the Naqshbandiyah.
To commercial and social ties was added the common bond of Tamil Arabic. The first translator of the Qur’an into Tamil Arabic was a nineteenth-century Sri Lankan scholar, Shaikh Mustafa. Another Sri Lankan provided the first Tamil Arabic version of the famed Hanafi legal compendium, the Hidayah of Marghinani (d. 1197). The late nineteenth century also saw the establishment there of the first traditional Arabic madrasah since 1505.
There are three features of special note about the nineteenth century. First, it saw the diffusion of Islamic learning and observance on a new scale, with the introduction of more frequent and rapid travel to other parts of the Muslim world, the spread of journalism and print media, and the advocacy of Pan-Islamic causes, such as support for the Ottoman caliph/sultan in Istanbul. Second, there was a revival of multiple expressions of Islamic piety; some were linked to renewed stress on original Arabic sources-Qur’an, hadith and fuqh-but others extended to speculative, popular forms of piety deriving from Sufism. The latter development flies in the face of standard interpretations of Islamic movements during the colonial period, which tend to stress either accommodation to Western influence, as in the case of Muhammad `Abduh and Sayyid Ahmad Khan, or antagonism against Western influence, as in the case of the Wahhabis or neo-Wahhabis. Both developments were thought to undercut Sufism in general and the major brotherhoods in particular; yet throughout South Asia, and not just in the cultural-political core area of Kerala-Tamil Nadu-Sri Lanka, one finds Sufi orders and a Sufi worldview integrally linked to the Islamic movements and prominent personalities of this period.
Finally, the revival of Islam was related to a dynamic expression of scriptural norms and a renewed interest in ritual activities among other religious communities in
South Asia, including Theravada Buddhist activists in Sri Lanka, Shaiva reformers in Tamil Nadu, and Advaita modernists in Bengal. It was a crucial time for rethinking the categories of foreign rule, and Muslims shared with other religious communities, largely in urban centers, the concern to resist external pressures to conform. The Muslim heroes from Sri Lanka in this period, like their coreligionists, chose to restate their own norms and advocate their own values. Foremost among them were Siddi Lebbe, founder of the newspaper Muslim nesan and other educational institutions in Kandy; his successor, I. L. M. Abdul Azeez, who, in addition to journalistic and community activities, wrote the first comprehensive history of Sri Lankan Muslims (Ethnology of the Moors of Ceylon, 1907); and perhaps the most skillful minority politician in the subcontinent, A. R. A. Razik, who assured both Muslim support of the nationalist movement and the inclusion of Muslim officials in the governments that have ruled Sri Lanka since 1947
North India. The experience of North Indian Muslims is charted above all by a set of cultural and linguistic shifts unknown in the South Indian core area. Islam was introduced there not by sea but by land, through Central Asia, and more by military conquest and forced migration than by trade and commerce. It embodies Turkish and Persian rather than Arabic ethnic/linguistic features. Lumping North India and South India as South Asian Islam is already a shorthand, simplifying and also distorting a complex historical process. The communities did not really meet until the late colonial and early modern period. Their delayed interaction is charged with significance; before addressing that interaction, we must first examine the northern historical prologue that is at variance with the pattern in Kerala and Sri Lanka.
Apart from early Arab conquests in the region of Sind, it was Turco-Afghan groups displaced by rival groups in Central Asia who became the vanguard of the emergence of Muslim polities in the subcontinent. The expansion of Turco-Afghan military might and political power was gradual rather than sudden. There was no single pitched battle but rather a series of small-scale skirmishes, not unlike those that took place simultaneously among regional Indian rulers. The Muslim advance occurred in several stages over long intervals. It was not until the mid-ninth century that the Saffarids came to control most of present-day Afghanistan. More than a century later the Ghaznavids controlled much of the Indus River region; at the end of the twelfth century the Ghurids finally conquered Delhi and established a pattern of Muslim rule that continued through the Mughal period up to the fateful Battle of Plassey in 1757. There the British prevailed and, as a result, they extended military and then political control over most of India until 1947.
The Turco-Afghan ruling elites were Muslim but not Arab. They maintained and developed Persian as the preferred language, not only in the court and bureaucracy but also in the culture at large. Persian poetry marked off the elites from the non-elites, binding North Indian Muslims to other urban elites of the `ajam, as the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim segment of Asia was known. The Delhi sultans organized themselveswhether in court life, army protocol, or administrative practices-along lines that dated back to the last preMuslim dynasty of Iran, the Sassanians. They also based their legitimacy as rulers on Persian notions of semidivine kingship: though not quite God’s emissary, the sultan could reckon himself as God’s shadow on earth and expect of his subjects a commensurate and abject obedience. Such a notion of divine authority was alien to Islam, but it did not compete openly with the notion of central authority that pertained elsewhere until the mid-thirteenth century. The Delhi sultans continued to acknowledge the caliph in Baghdad as the nominal leader of the ummah or Muslim community. They did not become, like the Umayyad caliphs of Andalusia, rival claimants to rule over the ummah.
Within South Asia the new rulers established powerful institutions that bore the impress of Islam. The capital city was to be adorned as the chief center of Muslim ritual observance. Because the sultan was expected to acknowledge the force of the shari’ah, even though that law might conflict with other dynastic or local laws, he also had to endow institutions crucial to Muslim collective identity-mosques (of which one must be a central mosque or jami` masjid), madrasahs or religious schools, and hospitals. While the ruler could expend funds from the central treasury, private individuals preferred to create charitable trusts (awqaf; sg., waqf) in order to establish and perpetuate such institutions.
None of these developments, however, accounts for the rapid growth of the Muslim population in North India from the twelfth century through the twentieth. Even when the Delhi sultans were pious, observing scrupulously the spirit as well as the letter of Muslim ritual requirements, they were not committed to extend the Muslim population base or to deepen the Islamic character of the Muslims under their rule. The latter task was left to the `ulama’, but the former task was not deemed important. It is difficult to attribute to the ruling elite the rapid growth of Islam in North India, from less than half a million in 1200, to 15 million in t 600 and more than 6o million by 1900 (roughly calculated on the basis of K. S. Lal, Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, Delhi, 1973, the standard albeit flawed work on this subject). Even though some of the elite patronized the arts, especially poetry, and others endowed madrasahs, mosques, and other charities, none was explicitly concerned to expand the base of Muslim society. Why then did so many persons become Muslim?
It is first necessary to establish how many did become Muslims, and that is far from simple. During the Mughal period records of population by religion were not kept; that practice was introduced by the British, as an element of the decadal census figures beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The total population of India was around 284 million in 1901, of whom more than 25 percent or approximately 63 million were Muslim (Lal, p. 156). By 1991 the total population for all of South Asia approached 950 million, while the number of Muslims in the three nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was not less than 275 million.
It is difficult to explain these figures without recourse to speculation, and of all the speculative explanations the one that seems the most plausible focuses on the activities of another subset of elites that worked parallel with the official apparatus of Turco-Afghan rule but not in tandem with it. These were the tariqahs or Sufi brotherhoods. They date back to the time of the earliest military conquests. Middle Eastern or Central Asian in origin, they were elites; nearly all their members had privileged birth, religious training, and geographic mobility that set them apart from most of their generation. Yet their ethos was elastic rather than elitist.
The impact of the tariqahs is probably related to the fact that their great shaykhs followed a pattern of jurisdiction known as vilayet. Each vilayet demarcated a region or subregion of spiritual authority that then became the responsibility of a major shaykh or his successors to rule. The rule was to confer blessing or benefit on those who came to khanqahs, listened to shaykhs, sang at musical assemblies, and observed loyalty to the way. It also made these figures authorities parallel to ruling elites. If the kingdoms depended on arms for expansion, the Sufis depended on good will.
Domination and extraction were the hallmarks of the ruling groups, collaboration and inclusion the strategy of the brotherhoods. In terms of the expansion of a Muslim population base in North India, the latter seem the more likely candidates for success, though the actual process remains unclear.
What is clear is that by the end of Sultanate period and the beginning of the Mughal period in the sixteenth century, India had become a major node within the larger Muslim world. Muslim military expansion had provided the structure of dominance that continued through the Mughal period; Islamic India also provided a haven of retreat and opportunity for migrants from elsewhere in the Muslim world. From the medieval to the modern period the numbers of Muslims grew both by conversion and by immigration until they became a majority community in parts of northwestern and northeastern India, and a significant minority community in other parts of the subcontinent. The Mughal dynasty, by dominating North India, inspired a continuous cultural definition and renewal for the late medieval and early modern Muslim world. These transient heirs of Timur commanded the allegiance of the most populous, and arguably also the most powerful and wealthy, state within dar al-Islam.
Neither the power nor the prestige of Mughal India, however, could forestall its decline and eventual collapse. The last great Mughal was Awrangzib. During his nearly fifty-year reign indigenous groups such as Sikhs in the Punjab, Jats in Central India, and Marathas in the Deccan challenged and often defeated Mughal military forces. His heirs suffered an even worse fate: in 1739 an Iranian-Afghan raider, Nadir Shah, was able to plunder Delhi and take away the famed Peacock Throne.
There were, however, forces for reform that thrived even in the shadow of crisis, and the eighteenth century saw the ascent of such brilliant religious figures as Shah Wali Allah (d. 1763) and his successors Khvajah Mir Dard and Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan. All of them lived and worked in the region of Delhi forging a legacy for future generations of North Indian Muslims.
Also surviving into the 18th century were remnants of Shi i polities that had flourished throughout South Asia in different periods, appearing as alternative regional kingdoms in the Deccan, Kashmir, Awadh, and Bijapur. Despite the pattern of Sunni domination, in both the South Indian core area and most of the North Indian region one must note the distinctive characteristics of Shi’i community life; for two recent approaches, see Juan R. I. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859 (Berkeley, 1988), and Vernon J. Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shi’i Devotional Rituals in South Asia (Columbia, S.C., 1993)
British Colonial Period. The most profound change for the Muslims of North India came not through the decline of the Mughals, the attrition of indigenous groups, or the persistence of Shi’i polities, but rather through the advent of the British. From the fifteenth century onward, commercial expansionism emanating from northwestern Europe and claiming long-distance maritime routes gradually affected all of Africa and Asia. The rise of capitalist states in one part of the world transformed the entire network of international trade. Until the end of the eighteenth century this unprecedented expansion provided some space for urban Muslim traders and religious figures, who were able to use the routes of intensified international commerce to visit other parts of the Muslim world and to further support for Islam as the locus of religious and community identity. But by the nineteenth century a new international culture challenged the older Islamic framework. Overwhelming European domination of economic and political arteries reinforced the alleged superiority of a scientific, capitalist culture. The British who ruled India could not only claim control of public space, they could also allege that the basis of that control was a superior way of life.
This transformation of political authority and cultural outlook affected all religious communities, but it pitted Muslims against Hindus in a new relationship as minority versus majority. Muslims had always been a minority, but they had never been singled out or deprived of access for that reason. Hindus had always been a majority, but they had never assumed privilege or calculated a collective strategy on the basis of numerical strength. In the eyes of the British, Islam and Hinduism represented two distinct and bounded cultures. Although their mutual interaction and influence was at times acknowledged, it was more usual to perpetuate their differences as historically determined and irreversible. If objective knowledge could demonstrate that Hindus and Muslims were antagonistic, it was argued, then administrative control was needed to mediate that antagonism and ensure peace in the public domain. Census definitions of identity, beginning in the late nineteenth century, made religious categories binding. Recruitment into the Indian army and the application of personal and family law also presupposed and reinforced religiously based identity. To the extent that those defined as Muslims or Hindus (or Sikhs, Parsees and others) accepted these strictures and tried to operate within them, they began to compete publicly, both for regional opportunities and for influence within the emerging national movement. A new generation of religious reformers emerged; they all fought British control, but they also opposed other indigenous groups who similarly articulated a scriptural basis for Muslim or Hindu identity.
Such an appeal to scriptural authority had been previously unknown. During the Mughal period conflict was widespread, bitter, and destructive, but it was waged on a cluster of interests: religion intermingled with land, language, and race as expedient claims for struggle. Nineteenth-century British Christian missionaries singled out native religion as an object of contempt. For North Indian Muslims the twin bases of their religious identity were put at risk: the prophethood of Muhammad and the sanctity of the Qur’an. Christians ridiculed the former as pretension and the latter as a testament of forgeries. What resulted were polemical exchanges, but also multiple efforts by Muslim elites to reclaim Islam as an authentic banner of public loyalty. One school of thought suggested accommodation to European values along with the retention of the kernel of Islamic faith. “Travel lightly but travel as Muslims” became the slogan of Muslim modernists, best typified by the Aligarh reformer and educator Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Another response was to reject all association with Europe and to retreat into a textualist bunker, counterattacking both European and Hindu influences. This became the strategy of the Deoband madrasah and other `ulama’-directed reform movements in North India. Still another reaction was to crystallize Islam into a new millenarian creed articulated by a charismatic leader, as did the Ahmadiyah under the direction of Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian in northwestern India. There was also a groundswell of localized Islam-based mass movements, such as that of Mawlana Ilyas, a Sabirl Chishti popularist, who founded the Pan-Indian and now international reform movement known as Jama’at-i Tabligh. [See Ahmadiyah; Tablighi Jama’at.]
The most significant reaction, however, was that of the Khilafat (or Caliphate) movement, which affected the entire subcontinent. It was felt by Muslim elites in North India and also by emerging elites in Kerala. It is impossible to discuss twentieth-century South Asian history without accenting the hope engendered by the Khilafat movement. It countered the prevailing trend, favored by the British Raj, of politicizing Muslims into units of religiously based representation, sequestering them from Hindus as separate electorates while adjudicating their grievances under an independent legal system. Because the Ottoman sultan remained the titular leader of the world’s Muslims through World War I, the turmoil that took place in Turkey during the 1920s had repercussions throughout South Asia. In the name of a global Muslim community, others who were discomforted by national politics took up with zeal the cause of the Ottoman caliph. For a brief moment the Khilafat Committee and the noncooperation movement headed by Mohandas K. Gandhi cooperated, but the depth of suspicion was too great. When two of the leaders of the movement, Shaukat and Muhammad ‘Ali, were tried on charges of sedition in 1921, it was Muslims from Kerala who protested most loudly. The Khilafat trial fueled the Mappila Revolt in Kerala, turning Muslims against the British but also against Hindus. Efforts to retain Hindu-Muslim cooperation through the Congress Party failed. [See Khilafat Movement.]
The Khilafat movement also failed, at least in its avowed intent. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished by Kemal Ataturk in 1928; the Mappila Revolt was put down with gruesome efficiency; and the National Muslim Party came into being as a direct response to the Nehru Report of 1928, which allotted Muslims only 26 percent of the seats in a future all-India independent parliament, instead of the 33 percent they sought.
Subsequent events reflected and at the same time intensified the deeprooted conflict over community representation. Consensus was never attainable, as Farzana Shaikh has made clear (Community and Consensus in Islam, Cambridge and New York, 1989), because the struggle over who represented the community ensured internal debate as well as external confrontation. Muslims were divided among themselves: opposed to British colonial rule, they were also fearful of Hindu dominance in a “secular” post-independence polity. In 1930 Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, proposed the idea of a separate Muslim state within the Indian federation. Later the acronym Pakistan was coined, and despite arguments over what territory would become Pakistan, in 1947 the British withdrew from the subcontinent, leaving as their legacy two independent and hostile polities. Pakistan was divided not only from India but also within itself. It consisted of two wings, a western Urdu-speaking minority and an eastern Bengali-speaking majority. It was a mismatch destined to fail, and in 1971, with assistance from India, the former East Pakistan led the only successful secessionist movement since World War II, from which Bangladesh emerged as the third major nation-state in the subcontinent.
In the meantime, a truncated but still vital Muslim minority community continued to claim India as homeland and to participate, though not with one voice, in the events of its post-independence public life and cultural struggle. The grim events of the 1980s, including the shrill claims, counterclaims, and bloodshed over a Hindu-Muslim site of worship in North India, suggest that the seeds of religious conflict planted a century earlier under British rule continue to bear bitter fruit. Although it is possible for Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs to plan for common goals, too often leaders using religious shibboleths will undermine and so preclude long-term commitment to an identity that places homeland over religion. Yet neither fascism nor fundamentalism is the most likely future ideology for the Republic of India. To secure Bharat as the domain of all divinities and devotees remains the hope of secular India; it is also the goal shared by silent majorities among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.
[See also Afghanistan; Bangladesh; India; Kashmir; Mughal Empire; Pakistan; Popular Religion, article on Popular Religion in South Asia; and Sufism, article on Sufi Orders.]
Education, History, Politics, Religion, Socio-Economic, and Communal Problems (Delhi, 1991).
Additionally one must call attention to the antigovernmental, universalist view of Sufi masters and their legacy, best set forth in Khaliq Ahmad Nizami’s overview essay, “Hind. V. Islam,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 4, pp. 428-438 (Leiden, 1960-). This essay epitomizes the life work of the most productive scholar of South Asian Islam. Its multiple insights into the traditions that molded the community of North Indian Muslims may be usefully supplemented by consulting any of Nizami’s more than forty books and countless articles, in both Urdu and English. See Mohammad Ahmad, comp., The Literary Contribution of K. A. Nizami (Delhi, n.d.). The publisher of this volume, Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delhi, intends to bring out all of Professor Nizami’s works in alternative English and Urdu volumes by the end of the 1990s.
Also of interest for a different approach to South Asian Islam are the several monographs in the New Cambridge History of India, a series edited by Gordon Johnson (Cambridge and New York, 1987-), relating Islam and Muslims to the larger political trends of the subcontinent during the past five hundred years. Divided into four topical segments-“The Mughals and Their Contemporaries,” “Indian States and the Transition to Colonialism,” “The Indian Empire and the Beginnings of Modern Society,” and “The Evolution of Contemporary South Asia”-these thirty monographs will encourage a revisionist view of both Mughal and post-Mughal history.
Finally, the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies has announced its intention to publish an atlas of Muslim social and intellectual history under the editorship of the Centre’s director, Farhan Nizami. The first volume will be devoted to South Asia, integrating rural with urban patterns of development, while also accounting for the emergence of distinctive mystical orders and scholarly institutions that shaped all phases of South Asian Muslim society. Together with the relevant monographs in the New Cambridge History of India, the Oxford atlas will set a new standard for future research into the largest community of Muslims in the modern world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRUCE B. LAWRENCE
At present there is a vast and numbingly circular literature on Islam in South Asia. It is characterized by sweeping narratives, mostly focused on dynastic histories into which economic, social, cultural, and religious history is spliced. It is also rigidly diachronic: the unspoken assumption is that all history must be teleological, that we begin at the beginning (with Muslim raids, conquests, and empire-building) and then move through the centuries toward some putative end. In the case of South Asian Islam, it is always a grim end, since the advent of the West and the bitterness of the colonial/postcolonial eras confirm the prejudgment that Islam is in political decline and, with few exceptions, reduced to a hopeless, private sphere of personal piety.
For a representative sample of this view, see Peter Hardy, “Islam in South Asia,” together with its several bibliographic entries, originally published in The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 7, pp. 390-404 (New York, 1987), and reprinted in The Religious Traditions of Asia, edited by Joseph Kitagawa, pp. 143-164 (New York and London, 1989).
Several nonstandard sources have been given in the text above, and a comprehensive (though not exhaustive) bibliographical compilation of more than three thousand English-language entries is now available. See Mohammed Haroon, Muslims of India: Their Literature on Islam in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
Islam is the religion of about 220 million people in Southeast Asia who live in a “Muslim archipelago” extending from southern Thailand, through Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, and north to the southern Philippines. There are in addition isolated pockets of Muslims in Burma (Myanmar), northern and southern Thailand, and Cambodia; however, the major Islamic presence is in the “archipelago,” and the language of Islam there is Malay or one of its variants. This last fact has two important consequences for the understanding of Islam in the region: the consequences of geography and indigenous settlement patterns, and the crucial importance of language.
The typical settlements of the archipelago from prehistory to the recent past have been riverine or on estuaries. Trade has always been important. Beginning in the late twelfth century, the Arab-controlled trade of the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent reached the islands of the archipelago. The Arab traders represented both a source of wealth and a window on the glamorous civilizations of West Asia. The impact of Islamic philosophy and the accounts of the great Muslim kingdoms of West and Central Asia (and later India) offered the indigenous rulers both a justification and a model for rule. The processes of physical transmission and intellectual acceptance are of course complicated, but the important point is that Islam was successful in the archipelago, despite preexisting Hinduism and Buddhism, because it was initially accepted and later imposed by rulers (rajas, later sultans) on the populations. This process took considerable time, and indeed, one may argue, it is not yet over.
In regard to language, Malay or one of its variants has always been the language of Islam in the archipelago. Arab speakers and readers have always been present in some areas, and at some times in considerable numbers. Islam was, however, transmitted in Malay, the language of all classes. Islam thus came early to be associated with the state (ke-rajaan) and with the Malay language; this relationship has persisted into the present.
Early Literature. The literature of Islam in Malay from the sixteenth to nineteenth century comprises a chronicle of royalty, an explanation of the world, various dogmas of faith, simple guides for life, and a theory and justification of power and its forms and expressions. Malay forms include sejarah (chronicle), hikayat (history), and translations in the fields of theology, the history of Islam, the life of the Prophet and his Companions, and apocryphal tales of individuals and kings in the Arabic and Persian worlds. This has been a rich heritage for the intellectual culture of Southeast Asian Islam. Yet it was far more than mere heritage, received, held, and copied; it was not static, as some nineteenthcentury European scholarship supposed. Instead, from the seventeenth century onward there was a positive flowering of Malay scholarship on Islam in all its forms.
On the more general side, there exist various genres that explain the nature of religion and introduce the reader to the necessary Arabic history and ritual. In this group are popular tales about the Prophets and other persons mentioned in the Qur’an. There are a number of named texts (e.g., Hikayat Anbiya, Hikayat Yusuf), all taken from Arabic sources; together they may be said to form a historical hagiography given in popular terms, with contents that are by no means theologically sophisticated. A closely related class concentrates on the prophet Muhammad himself, his life, the miracles attributed to him,, and the deeds of his companions. Major texts include Hikayat Nur Muhammad and Hikayat Nabi Bercukur. These works are all without named authors; no scholastic doctrine is stated, although there is considerable emphasis on didactic elements.
On the scholastic side, there is a group of works in theology, dating from the seventeenth century, which represents a burst of indigenous creativity unequaled in later Southeast Asian Islamic thought. Doctrine is discussed within the threefold classification of knowledge (al-kalam, al fiqh, al-tasawwuf). In addition, there were extensive translations and reworkings of established Arabic texts, ranging from commentaries on the Qur’an and hadith to works on Sufism and the varieties of rituals (dhikr, du’a’, rawdtib).
Four outstanding contributions to Islamic writing were produced in the seventeenth century in the Sultanate of Aceh, in both Malay and Arabic. The author Hamzah Fansuri was famous for his sha’ir (a genre of poetry) but most famous for his mystical writings. In his Sharab al-ashikin he discusses the four stages of the mystical path-the law, the path of renunciation, selfknowledge, and gnosis. His other famous work is the Asrar al-arifin, an exposition of the nature of God. Both works are still studied and remain highly influential in Southeast Asia today. An important commentary on Hamzah was written by the second of the great seventeenth-century authors, Shams al-Din. Only one of his works has survived complete, an orthodox Mirat almumin. His main interest was the doctrine of the unity of existence; he saw man as a mere appearance of the absoluteness of God. In his words, “Man is but a puppet in God’s shadow play.” As with Hamzah, selfknowledge is the first step toward perfect knowledge. The arguments of both scholars have been discussed in detail, but the striking feature is that intellectual Islam in the Malay world was, in its origins, speculative and mystic.
Naturally there was a reaction, and this is found in the work of al-Raniri, who was not just a translator from Arabic but also a great systematizer. His Bustan alsalatin is a compendium of Islamic knowledge for his time. He was also a polemist, and his attacks on unorthodoxy, especially Hamzah (which he compared with the nihilism of the Vedantas), are still read today. At the close of the seventeenth century there seems to have been a return to “practical” mystic practices in the writings of Abd al-Rauf, who published a translation of alBaydawi on the Qur’an as well as textbooks on dhikr and rawatib.
The archipelago seems to have a fondness for the mystical and speculative side of Islam, with a desire to find the outer permissible limits of doctrine. Given the very strong pre-Islamic cultures of the area, this is perhaps not surprising. The adoption or adaptation of such a universal theology, with its political implications, always involves tensions, and often inconsistency. Thus, in the late nineteenth century in Patani (now in southern Thailand), Shaykh Daud Patani worked as a brilliant translator from Arabic but was essentially a medieval man; in contrast was Shaykh Mohammed Zain, somewhat younger, whose fatwas disclose a determined effort to adapt-and if necessary to change-the world of Islam in his place and time. Neither can be classed simply as “orthodox” or “heretical”; they are both entirely within the Islamic tradition of Southeast Asia, in which intellectualism and royal power were clearly differentiated from social reality. [See also Malay and Indonesian Literature.]
Ethnography. The Muslim world of Southeast Asia is complex in its languages and cultures. Further, the translation of the Qur’anic injunction into daily life has been a complex and often inconsistent process, and it remains so today. There has been no single explanation of what constitutes acceptable Islamic practice for all of Southeast Asia. Instead, there are many culturally devised variations within the Islamic spectrum. Three structural features appear especially important.
First, there is a reasonable diversity of actual religious practices. These range from highly orthodox practices with emphasis on scripture and scholarship to various forms of “modernism” in which dogma is reinterpreted to cope with contemporary conditions. Notable in the latter respect is the fact that the nation-states of the area are avowedly secular. Secularism as such has become identified as the main problem for Islam. Paradoxically, this has resulted in a greater degree of tolerance for diversity of religious practice rather than the opposite. Pressure for conformity, in fact, seems to come from the state or from government-sponsored religious publications. The growing number and variety of millennial movements, especially since the 1960s, is part of this rich diversity.
Second, Islam is, like Judaism and Christianity, a religion of revelation. Its meaning is thus to be sought by each person in reading the holy words of God. Alternatively, understanding can be sought in recognized texts of interpretation and in commentaries. The essential scholarship of Islam is in Arabic and was for the most part written before the close of the twelfth century. This is part of the Muslim heritage in Southeast Asia; it describes Islam, and it is how one “knows” Islam. At the same time, the facts of life in the region are by no means easily assimilable in such terms. For example, local marriage practices, systems of land tenure, contracts of sale and purchase, adoptions and family relationships, punishment for crimes, and explanations of social and political ideas all operate under quite different principles from the ideals and revealed prescriptions of Islam. From the purist’s point of view, the difference is often seen in terms of a conflict between adat and Islam.
Adat (Ar., `adat) means “custom” and usages in the widest senses, as well as in legal prescription; there is no doubt that serious differences, practical as well as intellectual, did and still do exist between it and Islamic law. It is common, however, to find a wide degree of relativity for each term. A tendency toward compromise, syncretism, and local sophistry was the norm rather than the exception. As with religious practices themselves, the ethnography of Islam shows that formal doctrine is but one element in the social manifestation of theology. This is unsurprising, since the same situation can be found in any Muslim society.
A third important referent is the fact that the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” have always been used as an idiom for conceptualizing an identity and so legitimizing a status. What is a “Muslim,” and what does it mean to be one? In the European colonial period, especially in the late nineteenth century, these were important questions. For example, a whole range of rights, duties, and privileges depended upon holding Muslim status; these same rights were devised to “heretical Muhammadans.” The legal system of the Netherlands East Indies was even posited on the view that it was local custom (adat, not shari`ah) that should form the basis of laws for the indigenous peoples. [See Adat.]
Finally, it is to be noted that in the postindependence period, Islam has become institutionalized in governmental ministries and offices of religious affairs. There is in effect a developing sociology of Islamic institutions, especially in Malaysia, Singapore, Borneo, and Indonesia.
Islam and the State. The Islamic response to the realities of dominion in Southeast Asia is complex because state histories are complex. Even the definition of “state” itself is debatable, and it has certainly changed over time.
The premodern state. The sultanates of the Malayan peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and the southern Philippines and Borneo cannot really be described as “Islamic” states. Thus, for example, while shari`ah was important in written texts, it did not solely determine either administration or personal law or finance; rather, it was a part of a system in which pre-Islamic practices continued. The respective balances between shari`ah and other elements of course varied from place to place. Comparing the Sejarah Melayu with the roughly contemporaneous Adat Aceh illuminates the varying emphases on religion and its place in the indigenous state systems.
There is, however, no question of the legacy of rule and theories of government bequeathed to Southeast Asia by the medieval Islamic tradition. The ruler (sultan) is himself khalifah (caliph) or al-insan al-kdmil. He draws an important justification for his position from these attributes and, in turn, is a focus of power for the officers of religion in his state. He might trace his genealogy back to Rum ( Constantinople) through Persia, or back to Adam through Sulayman-an almost physical transferance of power from the heartlands of Islam to its outer dominions. The legacy is not just the code of shari `ah and commentary, but also ideas of rule and sovereignty and of perfection in the ruler.
There were of course reactions against this, most notably from the various Muslim reform movements, such as Wahhabiyah; however, the reaction was itself expressed in terms of Islamic philosophy. The important point is that in the period up to establishment of firm European control, there was a Muslim theory of state in the archipelago, as well as a vibrant, sometimes violent argument about the theological and practical nature of this state.
The European colonial state, 1800-1940. In this period of a century and a half, the Muslim policies of the Malayan peninsula and of Sumatra and Java became subordinated to the British and the Dutch, respectively. Their subordination was military and economic butmore important in the long term-intellectual as well. Formerly at least the ethos of the sultanates, and in most cases much more than that, Islam became much reduced in status.
The state came to be defined in European terms. While the precise nature of the constitutional and political theories differed, there was no doubt that the Muslim archipelago was dependent territory and that ultimate sovereignty lay in Europe. Within this scheme, whether British, French or Dutch, there was simply no room for Islam as the basis of a theory of state. There was of course resistance, sometimes armed, but essentially religion had to give way to European secular formalism. The consequences of this persist; by the midnineteenth century Islam had become irrelevant to the definition of the state.
There was a second fundamental redefinition in the colonial period. The formal status of Islam declined to that of a mere religion, and only one among others. Regulation made Islam a private, personal religion and a personal law (not even the latter in the Netherlands East Indies). The state was secular, and religion was totally divorced from it. The only exception was in British Malaya, where the sultans were theoretically heads of religion in their states, but this concession was so heavily regulated as to render it nugatory.
Islam was in fact reduced from an essential of the state, its basic foundation, to mere individual belief. As though this were not enough, the religion itself became subject to government fiat at a very basic level. The respective colonial bureaucracies so regulated many of the fundamental institutions of Islam that even today it is impossible, or very difficult, to see Islam except in the terms imposed then. For example, “Islamic law” is not the shari`ah it is certain selected principles expressed in European form and administered in European-style courts. Similarly, licensing restraints (which still exist) were placed on zakdt, the building of mosques, the publication of literature, and the teaching of Islam. In short, the religion had become just one of the matters that clerks in ministries were charged to regulate.
Modern states. The reference to “modern states” is primarily to Malaysia and Indonesia, the heartlands of Southeast Asian Islam. The relatively small Muslim population of Myanmar (Burma) comprises two groups. The first includes the descendants of Indian immigrants (1880-1940), most of whom either left during World War II or in the 1960s; some, mostly from the economically depressed classes, remained. This class also includes the “Zerbadi,” the offspring of Indian Muslim males and Burmese females. There are no data on the numbers or situation of these people, but they have been consistent targets of Burmese racial chauvinism, so it is possible that they no longer survive as a discrete group. Second, the Rohingha of the Arakan are Muslim in religion but Arakanese in all else. They have been and are now subject to considerable aggression on the part of the Burmese army.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, two factors have determined the position of Islam in the postwar period. First, the newly independent states are modeled on the European secular tradition. They have constitutions, bureaucracies, national economic and social policies, and, to varying degrees, political pluralism. Political ideology ranges from variants of parliamentary democracy to versions of presidential and corporate rule. Essentially, however, the state is defined in terms of rational secularism.
Second, and contrasted with this, in the new states Islam for the first time gained a legitimate political voice. It was no longer a proscribed vehicle of protest and anticolonial agitation. Islam and Islamic activists in both the Netherlands East Indies and in British Malaya, especially in the former, had a long and proud history of resistance to the European imperium. But with the legitimization of at least some political pluralism with independence, the focus has changed: Islamic parties have entered the new political process as contributors rather than as resisters. This has not happened in Thailand or the Philippines, where Muslim minorities still resist the central governments, occasionally violently, in the name of Islam.
In Malaysia and Singapore, however, the Islamic political parties very quickly found themselves in a rather serious dilemma. How could the democratic political process within a secular state and their participation in it be reconciled with classical theories of ummah and the functions of imam, qadi and `ulama’, Theoretically the dilemma is irreconcilable, because an Islamic government, once established, has no mechanism by which it can be replaced. A further complication in both states has been that Islam was very heavily organized in the prewar period, and such important functions as the teaching of religion, the collection of zakdt and fitrah (charity/tax), the hajj, and judicial administration had become fully controlled by the state bureaucracy. This process continued after independence with the establishment of ministries of religion and departments of religious affairs. The public existence of Islam, whether in politics or in other sectors, had become accommodated within the institutions of the nation-state. This again is the dilemma of contemporary Islam: its participation in the politics and institutions of the secular state is combined with varying degrees of nonacceptance of the principles on which such states are based.
The history of Islamic politics in Southeast Asia is the history of “varying degrees of nonacceptance.” As already mentioned, the Muslims of southern Thailand have in the past resorted to violence (the Patani Liberation Front), as have the Moro of the southern Philippines (the Moro National Liberation Front); resistance in both areas continues. [See Patani United Liberation Organization; Moro National Liberation Front.]
In Indonesia (go percent Muslim) the history of Islamic political parties has been complex and characterized by the formation of large overarching groups, followed by their splitting into various specific interest and ideological groups. The interesting point about these regroupings and the shifting alliances that went with them is that they were not based on differences of doctrine. One cannot explain the sometimes bewildering political changes in such terms as “traditionalism” or “modernism.” Instead, differences arose over competition for the political posts available to Muslim representatives in alliance with secular parties. The detailed history is unedifying, probably because the Muslim parties have never held power or even the balance of power; yet the experience has not been without profit for Muslims. The Islamic perspective is politically important and has been recognized in the fields of family law and in parts of the education system, but no further. To some extent, Islam still remains an ideology of resistance in Indonesia, albeit in a more sophisticated form than before World War II. More recently, under the New Order government, Islamic political movements have been subsumed under a general “United Political Party” that emphasizes Pancasila as the national ideology.
In Malaysia, about half the population is Muslim, and Islam is recognized in the constitution as the official religion of the country. The rulers (sultans) of the various states in Malaysia are guardians of Islam in their own states. Each state has a Department of Religious Affairs, and there is also a National Council for Religious Affairs. Muslim political representation is divided into two unequal parts. On one hand is UMNO (United Malay National Organization), an ethnic Malay secular and nationalist party that has been dominant since independence. It accommodates Islam to a reasonable degree, but not to the extent of allowing religion to determine policy in any sphere. On the other hand, there has been a succession of “Islamic” parties concentrated almost entirely in the east coast and in the northwest, the rural heartlands of Islam. The latest party is the PAS (Patani Islam Se-Malaysia), whose program is avowedly Islamic, but at a fairly primitive level-women should not be allowed to work at night, and thieves should have their hands cut off. Although the Islamic parties have controlled states in the Malaysian Federation, they, like the Indonesian parties, have never come close to forming a national government. [See United Malay National Organization; Partai Islam Se-Malaysia.]
In summary, the history of Islam in Southeast Asia falls into three parts. Initially (fifteenth to eighteenth century) it was an ideology of rule in the Malayspeaking lands and the inspiration for an extensive and complex literature. Second, in the period of high colonialism it became subordinated to European forms of government, heavily bureaucratized, and politically suppressed. In literature, there was little except repetition until the inspiration of the West Asian reform movement reached Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth century. Even here, however, most of the Islamic revival was derivative of West Asian models. Finally, with independence came real political accommodation between Islam and the state in the areas of Muslim majority, Malaysia and Indonesia. Islam as a truly alternative way of life is not seriously espoused by any political party; that remains the aim only of various fringe groups (“fundamentalists”). There is currently little in the way of original literary work; instead there is a vast array of rather naive short books and pamphlets of an almost entirely admonitory and didactic nature.
On the other hand, and on a more positive note, both Malaysia and Indonesia have established “Islamic Banks.” These operate on a variety of Muslim contracts which eschew interest (riba); instead profits stem from various sharing and commission arrangements. The central banks of Malaysia and Indonesia exercise supervisory control. [See Banks and Banking.]
Islam in the Pacific. Islam is not a historical religion in the Pacific basin. Its presence in this region is the result of postwar immigration. The majority of immigrants are from Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, and to a lesser extent the Muslim Balkans. There is also a small representation from the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia.
The main areas of Muslim population are in Australia and New Zealand but there are increasing numbers in Japan, Korea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, and Papua New Guinea. In these last six states Muslim missionary work has been carried out with some vigor since the 1970s. A small but steady stream of local converts is now appearing. In the more developed states such as Japan and Korea they are supported with quite elaborate administrative structures including various sorts of councils and advisory bodies. There is even an “Islamic Company” in Japan.
The main centers, however, remain Australia and New Zealand. Until fairly recently Islam has had a low profile in both countries but international politics and missionary activity have greatly raised its public profile. In addition, internal disputes within the Muslim communities are now often reported in news media. Community organizations are often invited by governments (especially in Australia and New Zealand) to offer the Muslim position on such subjects as women, the family, and the custody of children.
There have been occasional difficulties with the host communities (for example, objections over locating mosques in suburban areas) but they are all of a relatively minor nature. There are also signs that conversion is proceeding among the native populations. There is little in the way of any serious political problem facing Islam or the Muslims.
[See also Australia and New Zealand; Brunei; Cambodia; Indonesia; Malaysia; Myanmar; Philippines; Singapore; Thailand; and Regional Islamic Da’wah Council of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benda, Harry J. The Crescent and the Rising Sun. The Hague, 1958. Islam and the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, 1942-1945• Boland, B. J. The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia. The Hague, 1971.
Boland, B. J., and I. Farjon. Islam in Indonesia: A Bibliographical Survey, 1600-1942. Dordrecht, 1983.
Gowing, Peter G., and Robert D. McAmis, eds. The Muslim Filipinos. Manila, 1974
Hooker, M. B., ed. Islam in Southeast Asia. Leiden, 1983. Contains papers on history, sociology, philosophy, literature, law, and politics, plus an extensive bibliography.
Hooker, M. B. Islamic Law in South-East Asia. Kuala Lumpur, 1984. Contains chapters on Islamic legal history, Burma, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The only general survey for the area, but now somewhat dated.
Hooker, M. B., ed. The Laws of South-East Asia. 2 vols. Singapore, 1986-1988. Volume 1 contains an article on Muslim texts (pp. 347-434) and an extensive bibliography (pp. 539-554).
Majul, Cesar Adib. Muslims in the Philippines. Quezon City, 1973. Al-nahdah (Journal of the Regional Islamic Da’wah Council of Southeast Asia and the Pacific). A quarterly with useful information on contemporary Islamic affairs in the area.
Ner, Marcel. “Les Musulmans de I’Indochine francaise.” Bulletin de iIEcole Francaise d’Extreme Orient 41 (1941): 151-too. The only general account, focused mainly on the Cham of Cambodia.
Taufik Abdullah and Sharon Siddique, eds. Islam and Society in Southeast Asia. Singapore, 1986. Valuable collection of papers on all aspects of Islam in the region.
Yegar, Moshe. The Muslims of Burma. Wiesbaden, 1972. Good account of the history of the mainly immigrant Indian Muslim community in Burma.
M. B. HOOKER

Islam in the Middle East and North Africa

Batoota — Fri, 30 May 2014 08:44:08 +0000

Islam in the Middle East and North Africa
Revelation in the Middle East comes in a variety of versions. Islam is one of them and, like Judaism and Christianity, it is constitutive of an entire civilization. Islamic civilization evolved according to its own dynamics, covering the periods of sacred foundation (634-750), scriptural formation (750-1050), classicism (1050-I8oo), and modern transformation (18oo-present). The focus in this article is on the latter period in which, largely in response to the modern Western concept of rationality, Muslim thinkers sought and still seek to formulate the elements of an authentically rational Islam.
Revelation and Theology. The sacred story of Islam begins with Abraham’s foundation of a shrine, the Ka`bah, devoted to God (Allah) the One, in Mecca. It includes accounts of peoples sliding back to paganism as well as biblical figures and Arab prophets calling them to return to God’s law; the youth, prophetic calling, and community leadership of the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina; the rededication of the Ka’bah to the God of Abraham; the unification of Arabia under Islam and the Arab-Islamic conquest of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran; the murder of Caliph `Uthman and the subsequent struggle for leadership between Caliph `All and governor Mu’dwiyah. The story concludes with the allegedly worldly rule of the Umayyad caliphs and the emergence of religious scholars liberating Islam from the caliphal embrace.
This sacred story is obviously built on empirical historical facts. At a minimum, the establishment of an Arab caliphate in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, the minting of caliphal coins with religious inscriptions (earliest extant specimens dating from 690/691), and the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem with its Qur’anic verses and anti-Christian pronouncements (69o/69i) are indubitable events. But, as in Judaism and Christianity, there is considerable disagreement over what else actually happened.
A growing number of contemporary scholars have come to the conclusion that the sacred story of Islamic origins should not be read as a secular history with the addition of a few religious flourishes. Scholars using the form-critical method have shown that the sacred story is inseparable from the community of religious scholars (`ulamd’) that during the formative period (c.750-1050) was engaged in shaping the holy scripture (Qur’an), extrascriptural tradition (sunnah), theology (kaldm), and law (shara`ah) of Islam in opposition to the older revelations of Christianity and Judaism. Our understanding of Islamic origins depends almost entirely on the scholars of the formative period, who wanted to present a sacred Islam that emerged fullblown in precaliphal times and in remote western Arabia during the early seventh century in order to provide the nascent Islam of their own time with its distinctive identity and to elevate it over the older revelations. Thus the sacred story of Islam is not the same as its history, which begins fully, in the empirical sense, only in the mid-eighth century. Two important characteristics of Islam date from the formative period.
First is the rejection of caesaropapism. In less than a century Arabs succeeded in creating a caliphal empire stretching from Iberia to northwestern India (c.712). This empire contained a hodgepodge of orthodox and heterodox Christian and Jewish groups, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and various other populations. It was wracked by wars among the Arab ruling class (658-661, 683-692) and eventually by a revolution resulting in a change of caliphal dynasties from the Umayyads to the `Abbasids (750) [See Caliph.]
Both dynasties sought to consolidate their power through caesaropapism, a policy of claiming divine sanction for the caliphate and imposing doctrinal unity on the empire. Religious scholars were engaged to devise the desired doctrines, although other scholars resented government control and offered alternative doctrines for the empire. In the course of the 9oos a majority of the religious scholars managed to achieve independence from caliphal dictates; eventually, in 1063, it was a much chastened caliph who pronounced Sunnism, the scholars’ anticaesaropapist version of Islam, as the official orthodox religion.
Although the religious scholars overcame caliphal control, they maintained the caliphal policy of fusing emergent Islam with the cultural and legal traditions of the empire’s core countries, Syria and Iraq. They thereby succeeded in creating a religio-legal Islam that was largely independent from political regimes and their vicissitudes. Within this Islam the sacred story of a small and simple early Islamic community in Mecca and Medina, complete with divine law and communal institutions but without an empire, provided the inspirational core: Islam did not depend on imperial and dynastic political structures and was indeed better off without them. Contrary to widespread contemporary opinion, original Islam-that is, the scholarly Sunnism shaped in the period 750-I05o-did not fuse religion and state. Although Sunni scholars required their rulers to be good Muslims, they adamantly opposed caesaropapism.
The Shi’I minority of Islamic civilization, the origins of which are rooted in the ruling class rifts of the seventh century, opposed Sunnism by upholding the notion of caesaropapism for the caliphs. However, the legitimate Shi`i leaders (imams) were not put to the test: these leaders, descended from the fourth caliph ‘Ali, were excluded from power, and their line died out altogether in 874. It was only with the Egyptian Fatimids (909-1171), who put forth a disputed claim to the line of `All, and the Iraqi Buyids (945-1055), that the Shi’Is acquired a first experience with legislation.
A similar situation existed under the $afavid shahs in Iran (I6oo-1’722). Interestingly, however, from the end of the seventeenth century some Shi’i scholars began to oppose the legislative independence (ijtihdd, discussed below) of the shah. After the Afghan invasion and during the chaotic interregnum of the eighteenth century, religious scholars rediscovered the advantages of independence, which they managed to maintain under the subsequent Qajar dynasty (1796-1924). They succeeded in acquiring the right to collect a tax, the “share of the imam” (khums); they never deigned to regard the Qajars as more than caretakers ruling in the name of the Mahdi (the rightly guided one or messiah) who would arrive at the end of time. Thus over the centuries Shi’i scholars also came to reject caesaropapism, essentially restricting it to the eschatological figure of the Mahdi. In fact, bolstered by fiscal powers, their rejection became even more resolute than that of their Sunni colleagues, who in the nineteenth century again lost their guardianship over religion to the modernizing state.
The second important characteristic is the emphasis on divine oneness (tawhid). The famous “I am that I am” of Exodus 3.14 is perhaps the most succinct expression of this oneness but in its tautology it does not say anything about the relationship between oneness and Creation. Not surprisingly, the temptation to resort to further, metaphorical explanations has always remained strong, but if taken literally these explanations, borrowed from analogies with Creation, produce nonsense. Even the name “God” is a problematic metaphor because it implies the human characteristic of personality. Muslims were particularly sensitive about divine metaphors, coming, as they did, after the Jews and Christians. They accused the latter of falsification and polytheism in their scriptures and insisted on an uncompromising divine oneness.
One school of scholars during the formative period of 750-1050, the Mu’tazilah, drew a sharp line between God’s eternal essence of oneness and his Qur’anic attributes, such as knowledge (`ilm), power (qudrah) and will (irddah), which they considered created. They did so as staunch partisans of divine oneness (ashdb al-tawhid), which did not admit of creation, but they were quickly mired in theological absurdities: what was God like before he created his own attributes? Why did he create them? Could he have created different ones? Therefore other scholars drew the conclusion-“without [questioning] how” (bi-ld kayfa)-that God was inexplicably one as well as being endowed with distinct qualities. These latter scholars eventually-through the theology of the Sunni thinker Ash’ari (d. 935)-carried the day, presumably because they were more honest than their opponents in admitting that formal logic did not permit the conceptualization of indivisible oneness without implying composition. The theology of divine oneness, “without questioning how,” became a cornerstone of Islam, the new unitary revelation superseding all less rigorous ones. [See Tawhid.]
Mysticism and Brotherhoods. No orthodoxy is ever strong enough to enforce an absolute prohibition of questioning. Inevitably some Muslims challenged the formal logic that made divine oneness appear inexplicable. Today it is well recognized that the bivalent formal logic built on the rule of the excluded middle (“either/ or, no intermediates”) is a special case in the larger field of multivalent logic. During the classical period of Islam (1050-i8oo), when no formalism was yet available for multivalence, mysticism (tasawwuj) instead assumed the informal role of making divine oneness comprehensible. The Spaniard Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240), who lived in Damascus, was perhaps the most articulate among the mystics of the classical period. The complex concept of “oneness of being” (wah, dat al-wujud) is attributed to him by his disciple al-Qunawi (d. 1273/74). In contemporary terms, it may be expressed as follows: one experiences God by stripping away all finite phenomena (sensations, concerns, memories, self) and slipping into a state of infinite latency or undifferentiated consciousness -an experience that, when named, is the actual infinite (oneness of being or God, in al-Qunawi’s rendering). With this ingenious joining of a contemplative experiential state with the name of God, Ibn al’Arab! liberated the theological oneness of the formative period from its seeming inexplicability and provided a sophisticated vocabulary for pious Muslims to express both their experience and their understanding of God. [See the biography of Ibn al-`Arabi. ]
Religious scholars who prided themselves on mastery of the formal logic required for the practice of law found it difficult to accept Ibn al-`Arabi’s careful counterbalancing of experiential undifferentiated consciousness and complex metaphysical concepts. For example, Tag! al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyah of Damascus (d. 1328) virulently attacked the mystic for having allegedly preached pantheism by identifying the everyday experience of people and things with the omniscient and omnipotent God of scripture. Accordingly, he condemned saintly (wah) mystics whose tombs were visited by believers calling on their intercessory powers (shafd’dt) or seeking divine blessings (barakat). Ibn Taymiyah was careful, however, not to attack mysticism as such, since it was based on a piety that had legal standing. He censored what in his consideration went beyond piety, namely the alleged pantheism of oneness mysticism and saint worship. [See the biography of Ibn Taymiyah.]
Ibn Taymiyah remained a lonely critic. The period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary outburst of mystical Islam in the form of brotherhoods (sg., tarigah), which were unabashedly dedicated to oneness of being, saint cults, ecstatic rituals, and miracles, often without concern for Ibn al’Arabi’s careful conceptual distinctions. It was this Islam that was carried in the renewed expansion of Islamic civilization-peaceful as well as military-into Central and Southeast Asia as well as Saharan Africa. In the original Islamic countries, where the highly literate Islam of the legal scholars had failed to penetrate into the illiterate countryside, brotherhoods with their emphasis on mnemonics succeeded and successfully encompassed peasants and nomads. Eventually even the scholars, although sometimes scandalized by the dancing, swaying, handclapping, and shouting of the mystics, eventually deigned to join the more decorous brotherhoods. [See Sufism, article on $u$ Orders.]
Ibn Taymiyah was also unsuccessful in another respect. As mentioned above, during the period 750-1050 religious scholars shaped the heterogeneous pre-Islamic legal heritage of the caliphal provinces into a unified body of rulings invested with Muhammad’s authority. By the twelfth century authoritative compendia (sg., mukhtasar) had appeared that “commanded the good and forbade the evil” (lit. al-amr bi-al-ma’ruf wa-al-nahy Can al-munkar ); that is, they ostensibly ruled on everything, from the obligatory (wajib), recommended (mandub), and permissible (mubah) to the disapproved (makruh) and forbidden (haram), making scholarly Islam a moral as well as a legal code.
With the growth of these compendia, the original accounts (hadiths) of Muhammad’s rulings receded into the background. Religious scholars became intolerant toward colleagues who resisted legal dependence (taglid) on compendia and, going back to Muhammad’s rulings, practiced independence (ijtihad) of judgment. A turning point was reached in the period 1400-1500: although Ibn Taymiyah continued to render independent decisions, the claim of, for example, the Egyptian Suyuti (d. 1505) to be the “leading independent scholar (mujaddid) of the tenth century [A-1]” was met with strong opposition. The prestigious centers of legal Islam, especially Cairo and Mecca, demanded strict conformity with the compendia.
In practice, however, independent decisions continued to be promulgated, even if their authors eschewed the title of “independent scholar.” For example, Ottoman religious scholars in the sixteenth century, such as Bali Efendi (a mystic of the Helveti [Ar., Khalwatf brotherhood), ruled on the permissibility of cash trusts in addition to the existing real-estate endowments (sg., wagf ). Similarly, the legal status of guns, coffee, tobacco, and hashish was debated. Legal dependence on compendia, although binding in theory, was attenuated in practice.
Outside the prestigious centers of law religious figures were less diffident about claiming the title of “independent scholar.” For example, Ahmad al-Sirhindi (d.
1624) in Mughal India, a mystic of the Nagshbandi brotherhood and an avid reader of the Prophet’s rulings, claimed the title of “mujaddid of the second millennium.” In addition, he replaced Ibn al-`Arabi’s concept of oneness of being with that of oneness of appearances (wahdat al-shuhud): a mystic who attains the experience of undifferentiated consciousness should not call this experience “oneness of being” but rather “oneness of appearances,” because God, “without questioning how,” could neither be experienced nor comprehended. Sirhind! thus brought together independence from the law compendia and a theologically acceptable, albeit diminished mysticism. [See the biography of Strhindi.]
In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new combination of legal independence and diminished mysticism attracted a number of religious figures who were able to make an impact in some of the more remote provinces of Islamic civilization. These figures acted in a situation of political decentralization from which the Mughal and Ottoman empires began to suffer after several centuries of territorial expansion and the beginning of European political and commercial encroachment. In India Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) was the first to preach the new brand of Islam to local rulers. Two generations later Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1831) provided the Pathans of the northwestern frontier with a new religious unity in their defense against neighboring Sikhs and Afghans. In Arabia Muhammad ibn `Abd alWahhab (d. 1787), a Najd! educated in mysticism as well as in Ibn Tayrrnyah’s writings, inspired Muhammad ibn Sa’ud (1746-1765) to embark on a campaign of destroying saints’ tombs, renewing legal independence, and unifying Arabia under the nominal authority of the Ottoman sultan. [See the biographies of Wali Allah, Barelwi, and Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab.]
Reform and Revolution. The English colonial takeover in India (1784) and the French or English military invasions of Egypt, Yemen, and Algeria (1798-1830) shocked the surviving Muslim rulers into the realization that their only chance for preserving independence was a recentralization of power. The Ottoman and Moroccan sultans, Egyptian and Tunisian viceregents, and Iranian shahs struggled to adopt Western military technology in an attempt to reverse the decentralization process of the previous century and regain sovereignty. Administrative and legal reforms followed, and a small number of professionals emerged-the officers, diplomats, engineers, doctors, and journalists who were to become the vanguard of modernization in Islamic civilization.
In the past, civilizations of Europe and Asia had borrowed from each other without experiencing major cultural and social disruptions. Christians rediscovered Aristotle via Muslim philosophers in the twelfth century; Muslims adopted Western firearms technology in the fourteenth; and neither found themselves compelled to transform the foundations of their civilization because of these borrowings. In the Islamic countries of the nineteenth century, however, cultural and social disruptions proved to be unavoidable. After all, the West itself, in the course of its scientific-industrial revolution during the previous two centuries, had undergone the profound cultural transformation we call “modernity.”
At the heart of this ascendant modernity in the West was the ideology of mechanism, according to which reality was atomic in structure and fully determined by the laws of motion. These laws were “rational,” that is, they followed the rule of the excluded middle in formal logic. Since all atoms were equal to each other, the new principle of justice was equality, under which all traditional hierarchical institutions were viewed as “irrational” and had to be replaced by democratic structures. Religion, one of the traditional institutions, was required to be “rationalized” in order to escape the anathema of “irrationality.” By the mid-nineteenth century the ideology of modernity had become dominant in England and was well on its way to conquering the Continent and the New World.
Among Muslims the first reaction to the pressures of Western modernity in the mid-nineteenth century was the discovery of rationality in an Islamic civilization that had somehow failed to produce modernity by itself. The most prominent representative of “Islamic rationalism” was the mystically educated Iranian ShN Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), an indefatigable orator in the lecture halls, coffee houses, and salons of the Islamic world from India to Cairo and Istanbul. Central to his thought was the notion that reason (`aql) once reigned supreme in Islamic religion, philosophy, and science, but it was later disfigured by fanaticism (ta`assub) and tyranny (istibddd), thereby causing stagnation in Islam. Only through a return to the original thinkers, said Afghani, would Muslims be able to modernize themselves on their own, without having to undergo the humiliation of European colonialism.
Afghani never identified the fanatics and tyrants with any precision, although he blamed the authors of the twelfth-century legal compendia for their excessive conservatism. But since he also held up Muslims from
Muhammad to Mulla $adra (d. 164o) as paragons of rationality, as one would expect from an intellectual deeply steeped in mysticism, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact period in Islamic history when fanaticism and tyranny supposedly overpowered reason. Furthermore, by explicitly including mysticism in his definition of rationality, Afghani remained within he mainstream of classical Islamic thought. Although he made the concept of rationality thematic, his interpretation remained fundamentally different from that of Western modernity. [See the biography of Afghani]
At the same time, in the Sunni part of the Islamic world politicians carried the modernization of Islam much further. Their interest in the establishment of an efficient centralized administration functioning according to the principles of what Max Weber later called “goal-oriented rationality” naturally led them to clean up what appeared to them as the mumbo-jumbo of mysticism and to subject the leadership of the brotherhoods and shrines to state control. They thereby established the modern, “rational” equivalent of the former caliphal caesaropapism.
Egypt is a typical case. Here state administrators were appointed in 1812 to supervise all brotherhoods, as well as al-Azhar University, which had previously been autonomous. Subsequent regulations issued in 1.881, 1895 and 1905 reduced the number of processions and pilgrimages. Customary practices such as self-flagellation or the eating of burning coals, glass, and serpents were abolished. Drumming, singing, twirling, and leaping during an ecstatic session (hadrah) were outlawed. The contemplative litanies (sg., dhikr) had to be purged of all words requiring panting. Strict administrative and financial controls were imposed on the brotherhoods. Thus, step by step, formerly autonomous religious institutions were rationalized and incorporated into the state, at least on paper.
In the early 18gos the direct and indirect disciples of Afghani, loosely grouped in a movement devoted to a “return to the ancestors (salaf),” joined government efforts at religious reform. The most prominent figure in this movement (the Salafiyah), was Muhammad `Abduh (1849-1905), an Egyptian educated in mysticism, theology, and law, who was a member of the administrative council of al-Azhar and the grand mufti for the religious courts, both since 1882 under the protectorate authority of Great Britain. [See Salafiyah.]
In 1905 `Abduh published his Essay on Oneness (Risdlat al-tawhid), a restatement of al-Ash`ari’s theology of “without questioning how.” With this explicit return to the formative period he inaugurated the modern reformist program of rationalizing Islam. God, according to `Abduh, revealed himself through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, an upright but not saintly human being, and called him to lead a corrupt society back to the path of righteousness. The Prophet succeeded through the rational persuasiveness of his message; no miracles were necessary. Even though `Abduh as a former mystic was willing to admit the existence of “knowers” (`urafd’) of God, he left no doubt that mysticism and sainthood had no place in rational Islam. That Ash’ari’s “without questioning how” nevertheless constitutes an ultimate residue of irrationality according to the either/or logic of modernity is passed over in silence. [See the biography of `Abduh.]
The efforts at rationalizing mysticism by the centralizing governments and at creating a rational Islam by reformist intellectuals did not produce immediate results in the general population. It is true that the Republic of Turkey, which succeeded the Ottoman Empire in 1921, outlawed the brotherhoods; moreover, in many countries modern education was expanded during the interwar period. But the great mass of the population remained ensconced in its traditional rural employments until well after World War II. The peasants saw no reasons voluntarily to desert their local brotherhoods or the saints who continued to heal them of afflictions, end droughts, and bless fields and women with fertility. Even when some rurals began to migrate to towns and cities in the 192os as a result of administrative urbanization and early industrial ventures, most joined urban brotherhoods.
Nevertheless, during the interwar period reformed Islam began to attract a few converts in urban areas, mostly from the ranks of modern-educated midlevel employees in the administration or services. These converts were organized in a number of private educational, social action, and welfare organizations founded by a new generation of Salafiyah intellectuals who were impatient with `Abduh’s reform from within and wished to return to the anticaesaropapist tradition of Sunni Islam. Characteristically, whereas Afghani and `Abduh were still steeped in the mystical tradition, the new generation represented a transitional group no longer fully at home in it.
Among these intellectuals was the Egyptian Hasan alBanna’ (1906-1949), founder in 1928 of the Society of Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan al-Muslimun), who had roots in the Hasafiyah brotherhood. The Algerian `Abd alHamid Ibn Bad-is (1889-1940), founder of the Association of Religious Scholars ((Jam’iyat al-`Ulama’) in 1931, was familiar with mysticism only as an academic subject during his studies at Zaytunah University in Tunis. However, Abu al-A’15 Mawdudi (1903-1979), founder of the Indian (later Pakistani) Islamic Association (Jama’at-i Islam!) in 1941, was a failed university student before becoming a journalist and self-taught Islamic reformer. Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was a modern-educated schoolteacher who had spent time as a postgraduate in the United States before he assumed, in 1951, the directorship of propaganda (da’wah) in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever their backgrounds, these activists considered themselves as modern, practical, goal-oriented Muslims in contrast to what they regarded the irrational Islam of mysticism. [See also Muslim Brotherhood; Zaytunah; and the biographies of the figures mentioned in this paragraph.]
When colonialism ended in the Islamic world after World War II (beginning with Pakistan in 1947 and culminating with Algeria in 1962), the new governments were no more willing than the older ones to accept autonomous religious and legal establishments. Islam in its reformed version became the official or privileged religion (except in Lebanon and a number of sub-Saharan African and East Asian countries) and as such was taught in the systems of compulsory primary education. Ambitious state industrialization plans were adopted, and a massive urbanization process was set into motion; together with compulsory education, these became potent forces of religious change.
This change became manifest in the 1970s when the first postcolonial generation of Muslims with a modern education graduated from primary school. These young urban Muslims were completely divorced from the heritage of the brotherhoods, which now, for the first time in more than five hundred years, were reduced to marginal status in society. To be sure, mysticism is still today a force in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and Sudan below the middle-class levels of society, but Islamic reform has become socially and culturally dominant.
Without mysticism the contemporary adherents of reformed Islam, or Islamists as they are generally called, are caught in two intellectual dilemmas. First, even though during the European Enlightenment (165018oo) modernity began with demands for a rational religion, once religion was rationalized with the help of the bivalent formal logic of either/or, this logic could easily be turned against religion altogether. Either everything, including God, is explicable, or it is not-and if not, why should something inexplicable be believed in? Islamists inevitably find themselves on the defensive against secular modernists who push this logic to its full agnostic consequences.
Second, since Islamists can no longer fall back on mysticism and are unwilling to accept multivalent logic with its broader definition of rationality, theirs is a rather narrow world. They share this world with the secular modernists, who are similarly narrow. Both are correct in concluding that organized mysticism in its traditional sense of brotherhoods and saintliness is now beyond resurrection. In fact, it is even difficult to imagine how the spiritual mysticism of Ibn al-`Arabi or Mulls Sadra, with its classical metaphysical vocabulary, can be revived. Nevertheless, without the adoption of some form of multivalence the Islamists will not be able to accommodate all faithful Muslims.
For the time being, the freshness of the Islamist phenomenon still obscures its intellectual dilemmas. The Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, although itself the result of a decade of preparation, is less than half a generation old. Its leader Ruhollah Khomeini (i9o21989) was extraordinarily inspiring in confronting the “either” of secular modernity with an attractive religious “or” building on existing anti-imperialist resentments. The West (especially the United States), according to Khomeini, has become the contemporary embodiment of Satan by creating the “oppressed” (mustad’afun, Qur’an 4.75, 98) of the Third World. Since Satan exists, so must God, whether he is incomprehensible or not; hence it is only a return to divine law (the shari `ah) that will restore dignity and justice to the oppressed. [See Mustad’afun and the biography of Khomeini.]
In the Iranian revolutionary constitution divine law is under the protection of the regime of the leading legal scholar (veldyet-i fagih; Ar., wildyat al fagih), who is assisted by the counsel (shurd) of the lesser scholars in an elective assembly (majlis). Together they interpret the law and issue rulings of absolute (mutlaq) binding power so that opposition to these rulings equals apostasy. This elevation of a single scholar to the position of supreme legal authority is quite unprecedented in ShN Islam, where in the absence of the Mahdi leadership is supposed to be exercised by the shah and the collective of religious scholars. This power of the leading scholar is mitigated, of course, by the institution of parliament. [See Wilayat al-Fagih; Majlis.]
Khomeini resembled the early reformers in another respect: he was fully educated in the unadulturated “oneness of being” tradition descending from Ibn al’Arab! to Mulls Sadra. As a young religious scholar in Qom during the 192os, he composed several commentaries on mysticism that earned him the hostility and later jealousy of his reform-minded colleagues. Although practical constitutional concerns dominated Khomeini’s thinking in the i 98os, he nevertheless remained faithful to his mystical antecedents, as is exemplified by the reissue of his commentaries in 1982-1986 and by his curious letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in January 1989 extolling the superiority of Ibn al-`Arabi’s spirituality over Marxist materialism. This stern man, unpredictably pragmatic as well as otherworldly, dared his less knowledgeable contemporaries to challenge him on a field of Islam the definition of which he reserved to himself- reformist mutterings about the alleged irrationality of his mystical convictions notwithstanding.
Even though Khomeini personally succeeded with a revolution al-Afghani only dreamed of, his achievements will be fuel for scholarly debate for years to come. His own broadly inclusive Islam of the classical period was no longer alive for the majority of Iranians, and the revolution certainly was unable to resuscitate it. The revolutionary epigones of Khomeini in both the Slu’i and Sunni parts of the Islamic world face the much less exalted task of convincing Muslims of the superiority of a religious over a secular modernity. Meanwhile, the nonrevolutionary majority of Muslims range themselves somewhere in the undefined middle, intuitively aware that rationality transcends facile either/ors.
[Each country of the Middle East and North Africa is the subject of an independent entry.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Surveys
A good concise overview of the evolution of Islam is Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, vol. 1, The Formative Period, and vol. 2, The Contemporary Period (London, 1990-1993). Formative and classical Islam are discussed from the perspective of mysticism in Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy (London, 1993; French original, 1964). Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (London, 1992), addresses the dilemmas of “rational” Islam in modernity from a comparative vantage point. A wellinformed, detailed overview of the contemporary currents in Islam is Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Yahrhundert (Leiden, 1990). Reformed Islam in its historical evolution is discussed by John Obert Vol], Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Boulder, 1982), and in its social setting (in the Arab Middle East) by Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World (New York, 1982).
Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Revelation and Theology
Volume 1 of Rippin (above) contains an evaluation of the form-critical method (first applied by John Wansbrough) and its results in the study of the sacred story of Islam (e.g., Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Yehuda D. Nevo). The most up-to-date and complete discussion of al-Ash’ari’s theology is Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ash’ari (Paris, 1990).
Mysticism
Ibn al-`Arabi’s complex thought is expertly considered by William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-`Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, N.Y., 1989). Ibn Taymiyah has yet to find his critical intellectual biographer; his attitude toward mysticism is accessible through Ibn Taimiya’s Struggle against Popular Religion, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon (The Hague, 1983). On Islamic law in the classical period; see Wael B. Hallaq, “Was the Gate of ljtihad Closed?” and “On the Authoritativeness of Sunni Consensus,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16.1 (1984): 3-41, 18.4 (1986): 427-454. The controversy over the beginnings of reformed Islam (did it begin in some Islamic provinces during the eighteenth century?) is examined in Nehemia Levtzion and John Obert Voll, eds., Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), and R. S. O’Fahey, Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition (Evanston, Ill., 1990).
Reform and Revolution
The standard biography of al-Afghani is Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Ja-mal al-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley, 1968). On the reform of Islam by the Egyptian state, see F. de Jong, Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Leiden, 1978). Muhammad `Abduh’s Risalat al-tawhid is available in English under the title The Theology of Unity, translated by Ishaq Musa’ad and Kenneth Cragg (New York, 198o). His standard intellectual biography is by Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt (New York, 1968). The interwar and early post-World War II reform movements are covered by Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London, 1969); Ali Merad, Le riformisme musulman en Algerie de 1925 d 1940: Essai d’histoire religieuse et sociale (Paris, 1967); Sheila McDonough, Muslim Ethics and Modernity: A Comparison of the Ethical Thought of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mawlana Mawdudi (Waterloo, Ont., 1984); and Ahmad S. Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Beirut, 1992). The most detailed study on Iranian Islamic revolutionism is by Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1993). Khomeini’s mysticism has been studied by Alexander Knysh, “Irfan Revisited: Khomeini and the Legacy of Islamic Mystical Philosophy,” Middle East Journal 46 (1992): 631-653. The literature on contemporary (including revolutionary) Islam is immense. A few books stand out: John L. Esposito, Islam and Politics, 3d ed. (Syracuse, N.Y., 1991); Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh, translated by John Rothschild (Berkeley, 1985); and Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, 1990).
PETER VON SIVERS
The history of Islam in Africa is almost as old as the history of the religion itself. Islam may have arrived in Ethiopia even before the beginning of the Islamic calendar era, when a few believers, persecuted in Mecca, crossed the Red Sea and went to the Habash of Abyssinia in search of asylum. Ethiopians celebrate this event to the present day.
Islam’s earliest African convert may have been Bilal (Bilal ibn Rabah), the slave who was freed as a result of the Prophet’s intervention. Bilal became the first muezzin in Islamic history and a favorite companion of the prophet Muhammad.
Cultural Diffusion: Religion and Language. With the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, two processes were set in motion that have remained of relevance for Africa as a whole ever since-the processes of islamization and arabization. Islamization was the gradual transmission of the Islamic religion as more and more conquered peoples embraced the faith. Arabization was the transmission of the Arabic language. Arabization in North Africa took much longer than islamization, but when North Africans became native speakers of Arabic, it was only a matter of time before they came to identify themselves as indeed Arabs. It was not just their language, it was their very identity.
Up the Nile Valley, the twin processes of islamization and arabization continued. Increasing numbers of northern Sudanese were not only converted to Islam, but increasingly saw themselves as part of the Arab world. The Arabic language became their mother tongue, long after Islam had become their faith.
The establishment of British control in the Sudan (1898-1955) slowed down the processes of islamization and arabization farther south; southern Sudan was effectively insulated from the arabized north on British orders. Christianization was encouraged in the south, but islamization was essentially banned. The foundations of a religious apartheid system were being laid under British control.
This ethnoreligious compartmentalization had devastating consequences after Sudan’s independence in 1955 The first Sudanese civil war between north and south lasted from 1955 until 1972 and was widely perceived as a war between the Arabo-Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. The second Sudanese civil war broke out in 1983, partly in protest against President Ja’far Nimeiri’s decision to make Islam the state religion and the shari’ ah the law of the land. The southern military leader, Colonel John Garang, continued to rebel against the north despite the overthrow of Nimeiri and the succession of other regimes in Khartoum. Islam was further consolidated politically under the government of General `Umar Hasan Ahmad alBashir.
Despite the war, the Arabic language continued to spread in southern Sudan. Indeed, this was probably the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where arabization proceeded faster than islamization. Elsewhere, it was the religion rather than the language that was making the greatest inroads into African life.
In southern Africa, and especially in South Africa, Islam arrived as a victim. The importation of Muslim Malay slaves into South Africa in the eighteenth century created a distinct context for the religion in subsequent generations. While Islam in northern Africa was brought directly by the Arabs, Islam in southern Africa was partly a legacy of Southeast and South Asians. In North Africa Muslim majorities lived with deepening westernization; in southern Africa, Muslim minorities later experienced even more rapid westernization. For North Africa this westernization had come mainly through the region’s proximity to Europe and colonization; for southern Africa it occurred mainly through the massive white settlement locally, despite the region’s remoteness from Europe. Finally, in southern Africa there was islamization without any significant arabization.
East and West Africa also present contrasting models of islamization. Basil Davidson has argued that Islam in sub-Saharan Africa owed “nothing to Arab conquest but much to Berber influence.” The trans-Saharan trade went back to pre-Phoenician times and had resulted in the settlement of Berber communities in parts of West Africa. But later, “Islam could more effectively bind all these communities together,” whether in Sudanic Africa, the connecting oases, or North Africa (Africa in History, New York, 1991, p. 134).
Davidson does concede that there were two major Moroccan military invasions, the destructive Almoravid raids of the eleventh century and the Moroccan invasion of Songhay in 1591. But these incursions from the north did not help Islam in West Africa and, according to Davidson, might even have undermined it. Of more lasting significance was the quiet spread of Islam as a result of Berber settlements, trans-Saharan trade, and the broader historical intercourse between the Berber peoples and their Southern neighbors. It was not the sword of the Arab but rather the socializing of the Berber that laid the foundations of Islam in West Africa.
By contrast, in East Africa the Arab factor has been pronounced in the arrival and expansion of Islam from the earliest days into the twentieth century. Major religious leaders were overwhelmingly people who claimed Arab descent, if not indeed descent from the prophet Muhammad himself. One adverse consequence of this Arab leadership was that it prolonged the image of Islam as a “foreign” religion. Another was that Arab leadership inhibited the emergence of dynamic indigenous African Muslim leaders, in contrast to the towering role of local African leaders in West African Muslim affairs. This may be why Islam in West Africa continued to expand numerically and geographically even under the dominion of Christian imperialist powers, while its spread in present-day Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda was arrested because the foundations of the religion in the hinterland had not yet been adequately africanized.
In earlier centuries Islam in both West Africa and East Africa had been a major spur in state formation. In West Africa these included the imperial states of Kanem-Bornu (thirteenth to nineteenth centuries), Mali (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), and Songhay (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries). In East Africa Swahili city-states such as Kilwa, Pate, and Mombasa lasted until they were disabled by the Portuguese following Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1492. Zanzibar under the Omani Sultanate later fell under British “protection.” The British departed in 1963; in January 1964 a revolution by indigenous Africans (themselves mainly Muslims) overthrew the Arab sultanate.
Islam was also a major force in the history of urbanization. In ancient Mali and Songhay the social tensions were sometimes between the islamized towns and the far less islamized countryside. Monarchs sometimes played the forces of the countryside against the towns; a good example is Sunni `All, ruler of Songhay, in the late fifteenth century.
Agents of Islamic Expansion. Underlying the whole sage of religion and society are the five modes by which Islam has spread in Africa. The most spectacular mode is expansion by conquest. This mainly affected Arab North Africa, which was islamized initially by the sword. Sub-Saharan examples of islamization by conquest are few, but some did take place, as in the case of the Almoravids’ devastating incursions into West Africa from 1052 to 1076. Ibn Khaldun confirms that the conquerors did force Africans to become Muslims, but this harmed the image of Islam rather than helping it. Such invasions are therefore not useful in explaining the spread of Islam: people were subsequently converted despite the memory of the Almoravids.
The second agency for the expansion of Islam was Muslim migration and settlement in non-Muslim areas. Arabs from Yemen and Oman, settling in East Africa, were among the founders of the Swahili civilization in what is today Tanzania and Kenya. The rapid islamization and arabization of North Africa was achieved not only through conquest but also through migration and settlement. Doctrinally, this mode of transmission of the Message goes back to the great hijrah itself, the prophet Muhammad’s own mid-career migration from Mecca to Medina. Migration may sometimes be of victims rather than victors. This is true of the Malay slaves and laborers imported into South Africa, who have kept the flame of Islam burning in South Africa for three hundred years.
The third agency for the spread of Islam was trade, in particular the trans-Saharan trade. The camels that crossed the great desert carried varied commodities in each direction, but perhaps the greatest commodity of all was cultural diffusion-the spread of Islam from North Africa to West Africa especially. Today countries like Guinea, modern Mali, Senegal, and Niger are overwhelmingly Muslim. Arab and Swahili traders in eastern, Central, and southern Africa also played a part in carrying the torch of Islam to parts of what are today Uganda, Zaire, Malawi, and Mozambique.
The fourth agency for the spread of Islam was purposeful missionary work (da’wah). In earlier centuries this was carried on by traveling imams, healers, and teachers. Muslim healers acquired such a reputation that to the present day many of their African patients are non-Muslims, including Christians. Their healing techniques have employed verses of the Qur’an, including the popular prescription of writing out the verse in washable ink on a slate, then washing it into a bowl and having the patient “drink the sacred verse.”
In more recent times Islamic missionary work has included written materials for use in madrasahs and schools. Books or pamphlets have been written in African languages to explain the religion not only to students but also to non-Muslims. Pamphlets in the Swahili language have poured forth from Zanzibar, the Kenyan coast, and the coast of Tanzania. In the twentieth century the Qur’an was translated into Kiswahili, first by the controversial Ahmadiyah movement and later by Sunni scholars. Some Muslims believed that translations of the Qur’an were a sinful imitation of the holy book, but the chief Muslim jurists of East Africa have given fatwas contradicting that doctrine; they have argued that if it is not sinful to translate the Qur’an orally in a sermon in a mosque, it is not sinful to translate it in writing.
In parts of Africa, the most active missionary group for Islam has been the Ahmadiyah movement, founded by the nineteenth-century Indian religious militant Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The movement is widely regarded as heretical by African Muslims and has had a hard time gaining legitimacy in countries such as Nigeria. The main issue is that members of the Ahmadiyah do not regard the prophet Muhammad as the last of the prophets; they only acknowledge him as the greatest. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was, to his followers, a prophet in his own right, though not as great as Muhammad. In Nigeria in the twentieth century the Ahmadiyah have sometimes been denied the privilege of foreign exchange to enable them to make the pilgrimage to Mecca because they were not recognized as Muslims; the Saudi authorities also wanted the Ahmadiyah to be controlled at its source. Nonetheless, the movement continues to be one of the most active missionary forces in Africa. [See Ahmadiyah.]
Sunni and Shi’i missionary work entered a new stage in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of oil wealth in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, and other parts of the Muslim world. It became possible for the cause of Islam in Africa to command considerable financial resources. Schools and mosques could be built, clinics were subsidized, and scholarships to study abroad offered. On the whole, this wealth was used not so much to attract new converts as to support the welfare of those who were already Muslims, but there were incentives for new conversions as well. Sunni Islam is still by far the main beneficiary of such conversions, for even Shl’! Iran has sometimes been ready to subsidize Sunni missionary work in Africa in a spirit of Muslim unity. The Isma’ili movement under the leadership of the Aga Khan (more Shi`i than Sunni) sometimes explicitly committed its missionaries to the propagation of Sunni Islam rather than of its own denomination. The fifth and last agency in Africa’s historical experience has been periodic revivalist movements. These may take the form of an internal, morally purifying jihad, or they may occur under the leadership of a self-proclaimed Mahdi. Among the most spectacular of these revivalist movements were those that unleashed the jihad led by Usuman dan Fodio in what is today Nigeria. Inspired in part by a glorified vision of the ‘Abbasid dynasty centuries earlier, the nineteenth-century Mahdist movement partook of both revivalism and conquest. Its long-term consequence was the relative unification of much of Hausaland, formerly a loose and contentious federation, under a single sovereign. Usuman’s son, Muhammad Bello, became the first amir al Mu`minin (commander of the faithful) in the region, and Islam expanded under his control. [Seethe biography of Dan Fodio. ]
Also notable was the movement in eastern Sudan led by Muhammad Ahmad ibn `Abd Allah. This Muslim reformation started in 1881 in the wake of many years of Turco-Egyptian rule, compounded by British manipulation. Unlike Dan Fodio’s jihad, that of Muhammad Ahmad was also a struggle for national independence; religious revivalism intertwined with political nationalism. Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi, appointed by God to reunite the Muslim ummah. His vision extended well beyond the Sudan; in a sense, he wanted to fuse Pan-Islamism with Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. His dream was too big for his base, and too vulnerable to the new European imperialism, and his movement was finally defeated, but his religious and political legacy lives on in the political configuration of the Sudan. [See Mahdi; Mahdiyah.]
In Africa since independence two issues have been central to religious speculation-Islamic expansion and Islamic revivalism. Expansion involves the spread of religion and the number of new converts; revivalism calls for a rebirth of faith among those who are already Muslims. Expansion is a matter of geography and populations, while revivalism is a matter of history and nostalgia. The spread of Islam in postcolonial Africa is basically a peaceful process of persuasion and consent, but its revival is often an angry process of rediscovered fundamentalism.
In sub-Saharan Africa the central issue concerning Islam is not the revivalism that has created such strife in North Africa, but rather the speed of Islamic expansion. It is not often realized that there are more Muslims in Nigeria alone than in any Arab country, including Egypt. Muslims in Ethiopia constitute nearly half of the population. Islam in South Africa is three centuries old; the four most populous countries in Africa-Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Zaire-account for well over 120 million Muslims. Nearly half the population of the continent is now Muslim.
Eclecticism and Missionary Competition. Of the three principal religious traditions of Africa-indigenous, Islamic, and Christian-perhaps the most tolerant is the indigenous tradition. Precisely because the two latter faiths are universalist in aspiration, seeking to convert the whole of humanity, they are inherently competitive; Christianity and Islam have often been in competition for the soul of the African continent, and this rivalry has sometimes resulted in conflict.
Indigenous African religions, by contrast, are basically communal rather than universalist. Like Hinduism and modern Judaism-and unlike Christianity and Islam-indigenous African traditions have not sought to convert humanity. Thus they do not compete with one another. The Yoruba do not seek to convert the Igbo to Yoruba religion, nor vice versa; nor do either the Yoruba or the Igbo compete for the souls of the Hausa. Over the centuries Africans have waged many kinds of wars among themselves, but before the universalist creeds arrived hardly ever religious ones.
In contemporary Africa, indigenous tolerance has often mitigated the competitiveness of Christianity and Islam. An example is Senegal, which is more than 8o percent Muslim. Its Christian founder-president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, presided over postcolonial Senegal for two decades in political partnership with the Muslim leaders of the country, the marabouts. His designated successor was Abdou Diouf, a Muslim married to a Roman Catholic, and several of Diouf’s ministers are Christian. Senegalese religious tolerance has also continued in other spheres. What in other Islamic countries might be regarded as provocative has been tolerated in Senegal. A Christian festival such as a First Communion, accompanied by feasting, merrymaking, and singing, may be publicly held in Dakar in the middle of the Islamic fast of Ramadan, and the Christian merrymakers left undisturbed (Susan MacDonald, “Senegal: Islam on the March,” West Africa 3494 [6 August 1984] P. 1570).
Predominantly Muslim countries south of the Sahara have in general been above average in religious tolerance. The capacity to accommodate other faiths may be part of the historical Islamic tradition in multireligious empires, but far more tolerant have been indigenous African traditions. In Black Africa this indigenous tolerance has often moderated the competitive propensities of Christianity and Islam.
The former president of Uganda, Milton Obote (a Protestant), used to boast that his extended family in Lango consisted of Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants “at peace with each other.” Obote’s successor, Idi Amin Dada (a Muslim), had a similarly multirefigious extended family and once declared that he planned to have at least one of his sons trained for the Christian priesthood. However, Amin’s general record was not one of tolerance. Eventually, he found political refuge in Saudi Arabia as a guest of the custodians of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Tanzania’s population has a Muslim plurality, but Roman Catholic Julius K. Nyerere dominated the nation as president from 1961 to 1985 with no challenge to his religious credentials. His successor as president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, is Muslim; Nyerere remained head of the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi. A truly ecumenical Tanzania was forged-a Muslim head of state was accompanied by a Christian head of the ruling party. Once again the competitiveness of Christianity and Islam was moderated by the more tolerant tendencies of indigenous African culture. (However, Muslim Tanzanians accepted Christian leadership more graciously than Christian Tanzanians have accepted Muslim leadership.)
The nearest that Islam has come to providing a secretary-general of the United Nations was when Salim Ahmed Salim of Tanzania was a candidate. Later Salim became secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity. The most important Muslim in the history of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was Ahmadou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, who served as director-general from 1974 to 1987. He was both the highest-ranking African and the highest-ranking Muslim in the United Nations system. M’Bow became a controversial figure; the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore withdrew from UNESCO partly in protest against his leadership. However, his regime brought UNESCO much closer to Third World concerns than it had ever been. In both Salim’s and M’Bow’s cases, African and Muslim aspirations for leadership in the United Nations were obstructed by the United States in the face of broadly based African support.
Nonetheless, there are situations in Africa when even indigenous culture fails to ameliorate religious divisions between Christians and Muslims. This is true of the north/south divide in Sudan, with an overwhelmingly Muslim and arabized north and a Christian-led black southern region; the religious differences have reinforced other historical, cultural, and ethnic divisions. Similar ethnoreligious cleavages in postcolonial Africa have manifested themselves from time to time in Ethiopia, Chad, and Nigeria. When the Christian/Islamic divide coincides with ethnic frontiers, the competitiveness of Christianity and Islam overwhelms the natural ecumenism of indigenous Africa.
In his book Consciencism Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founder-president, traced the genesis of the contemporary African heritage to these three forces-indigenous traditions, Islam, and what Nkrumah called the “EuroChristian impact.” It was the synthesis of these three forces that Nkrumah called “Consciencism.” These three forces are sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes antagonistic, and sometimes independent, parallel lines in a nation’s history. One must distinguish between Western religious impact on a country like Nigeria (in the form of Christianity) and Western secular impact, which ranges from capitalism to the English language. Let us take the religious domain first.
What is the balance between Muslims, Christians and followers of African traditional religions? The situation in Nigeria provides an important case study. The hardest figure to estimate is the third, partly because African traditional religion can be combined with either Christianity or Islam. Millions of Nigerians follow both indigenous religions and Christianity; further millions of Nigerians are both traditionalist and Muslims. Beyond this, many Nigerian intellectuals empathize with Kwame Nkrumah’s affirmation, “I am a MarxistLeninist and a non-denominational Christian and I see no contradiction in that.” Postcolonial Muslim countries such as Guinea, Algeria, Iraq, and Somalia have produced hybrid Muslim-Marxists; some would describe the Nigerian scholar Bala Usman as such. But can one be both a Muslim and Christian? Here lies the rigid line of mutual exclusivity. Although Christianity and Islam are much closer to each other than either is to Marxism or African traditional religion, in reality the two Semitic religions tend to be mutually exclusive.
There are occasions when African Muslims are tempted to say “The best way of being a Christian is to be a Muslim.” This is because Jesus is a major figure in Islam. Muslims recognize the virgin birth of Jesus and accept many of the miracles he performed; they accept the bodily ascent of Jesus to heaven on the completion of his earthly career. But although theoretically Islam does encompass a version of Christianity, in reality no Muslim is likely to describe himself as a Christian, or vice versa. What does combine easily with other creeds are African traditional religions.
Imperative of Expansionism. Because of the syncretism discussed above, it is difficult to quantify the followers of the indigenous tradition in Africa’s religious experience. With regard to the number of Christians and Muslims in postcolonial Nigeria, the most reliable percentages recognized by the outside world were based on the 1963 census, which gave 47 percent of Nigerians as Muslim and 35 percent as Christian. Since 1963 the balance may have changed. We have no current and reliable figures for Nigeria, but on the basis of experience elsewhere in Africa, the end of colonial rule slowed the spread of Christianity without necessarily slowing that of Islam.
On the whole, colonial rule was favorable to Christian expansion, so its end was bound to be costly to Christianity, at least in the short run. The factors that slowed the spread of Christianity after Nigerian independence included the postcolonial decline of the prestige of Western civilization in Africa, the decline of the influence of Christian missionaries, and the shift in Christian missionary focus from commitment to salvation in the hereafter to commitment to service in the here and now. In addition, the postcolonial prosperity of oil-rich Arab countries has given Islam resources for missionary work in Africa that are unprecedented in modern Islamic history. Islam is beginning to be economically competitive with Christianity in the rivalry for the soul of Africa.
Although in the competition between Islam and Christianity in Nigeria Islam may be winning, in the competition between Islam and secular westernization, Islam is probably losing for the time being. The greatest threat to Islam is not the Passion on the Cross but the ecstasy of Western materialism; it is not the message of Jesus but the gospel of modernity; it is not the church with a European face but capitalism in Western robes. As young Nigerian Muslims are mesmerized by disco music and the nightclub, their faith is endangered more than by a Christian preacher. Western materialism is a greater threat to African Islam than is Western Christianity.
The strongest and most resilient indigenous culture in West Africa may well be Yoruba culture; it is certainly the most persistent of the three major heritages of Nigeria. Igbo society has been all too ready to be westernized; Hausa society has been all too ready to be Islamized. Yoruba culture, however, has absorbed both westernization and Islam and still insisted on the supremacy of the indigenous. Christianized Yoruba are usually Yoruba first and Christians second; islamized Yoruba are usually Yoruba first and Muslims second. No system of values in Nigeria has shown greater indigenous resilience than the Yoruba.
The best illustration in Nigeria of Islam triumphant is among the Hausa-Fulani, and of westernization triumphant, among the Igbo. But the best illustration in Nigeria of the triple heritage at work-with the indigenous as the first among equals-is the Yoruba experience. Yorubaland is capable of producing distinguished westernized scientists with startling tribal facial scarifications, or remarkable commodities for traditional medicine and sorcery sold alongside both the Qur’an and the Christian Bible in the streets of Ibadan. On the other hand, if Nigeria consisted of only these three major groups, the Islamic factor would predominate more clearly. The alliance between Hausa-Fulani Islam and Yoruba Islam would have overwhelmed any alliance between Igbo Christianity and Yoruba Christianity in the postcolonial era. However, among the smaller minority peoples of Nigeria the balance tilts in favor of Christianity and indigenous religions. The small ethnic groups were once the least alienated of all the groups, but they were also among the most exposed to Christian missionaries. The minorities exhibit some of the purest forms of Africanity and some of the most westernized.
The three forms of power in Nigeria have been economic and educational power, held for a while by Ibo and Yoruba; political power, held for a while by northerners under Hausa-Fulani leadership; and military power, held subtly and sometimes unknowingly by minority groups. The first to recognize their own power were the Igbo and Yoruba. Well before independence, the Igbo and Yoruba saw that they stood a chance of inheriting Nigeria because of their economic skills and Western educational qualifications. The Hausa-Fulani were slower in recognizing the political power of their own numerical superiority. On the eve of independence the Muslim north was so nervous about southern power that there was a strong separatist sentiment among the Hausa-Fulani. It was not the Igbo who were first tempted by secession, but the Muslim north. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo began to worry that Nigeria was going to be another India, partitioned along religious lines. These Nigerian leaders, and even Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, began to condemn what they called “Pakistanism.”
This meant that southerners in Nigeria were very selfconfident, while northerners were insecure and nervous about independence. However, within a few years the North became increasingly self-confident, while the south was frustrated and insecure.
Some writers have attributed this reversal of fortune to the brilliant regional leadership of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. The former editor of West Africa magazine, David Williams once put it in the following terms:
When the Sardauna of Sokoto entered party politics in 1951 . . . the leading politicians of Nigeria’s then northern region were convinced that their own region . . . was threatened by political and even economic domination by the two Southern regions.
When he was assassinated in 1966 the politicians in the Southern regions were denouncing political domination by `the north.’ It was the towering personality and political skill of the Sardauna . . . which produced this reversal. (Financial Times, 24 February 1986)
Before long separatist sentiment became a characteristic of the south rather than the north-“Pakistanism” in reverse. Southern separatism took its most tragic form in Biafra’s bid to secede. The latest version of southern separatism is captured in the debate about confederation, a looser form of Nigerian union. The ghost of “Pakistanism” has been changing shape. The south is still self-confident and strong economically and educationally, but it has become insecure politically.
The last groups to discover their power are the minorities of Nigeria, the smaller ethnic groups. This selfdiscovery began during the civil war under General Yakubu Gowon’s administration and gathered momentum during the 1970s. But self-discovery can sometimes result in precipitate acts of self-assertion; this is one possible interpretation of the “Dimka affair” and the events that resulted in the assassination of President Murtala Muhammed in 1976. The minorities had been a sleeping giant without realizing it. The new awakening has had brief moments of danger, but the power is becoming domesticated.
Islam and Foreign Policy. The triple heritage affects foreign policy as well as domestic politics. Among African regions, the best illustration of the triple heritage is West Africa. Here the three forces of indigenous Africanity, Islamic culture and the Western impact are truly balanced as can be seen in the Nigerian experience. Nigeria’s policy toward the Middle East and the Arab
Israeli conflict has certainly been affected by its triple heritage within Nigeria. Some Nigerian Christians tend to support Israel, sometimes forgetting that there are more Christians among Palestinians than among Israelis. Again, it is ironic that Nigerians who favor a secular state at home support Israeli interests, when it has been Palestinians who demand a secular state encompassing Christians, Muslims and Jews. Israel, on the other hand, is not a secular state. Nonetheless, many Nigerian Christians give special support to Israel, and much of the explanation lies in the tensions of the triple heritage-especially the latent stresses in relationships between Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians. Muslim attitudes to Israel are probably inherent in their being Muslim, but Christian attitudes to Israel are a reflection of the domestic politics of Nigeria.
Two issues arose when Nigeria applied for and was admitted to full membership of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). One issue concerned the method by which admission was sought and then announced. The other issue concerned the legitimacy of Nigeria’s membership in itself. The method of application and announcement was a matter of style; what was a matter of substance was whether or not Nigeria’s membership was legitimate or defensible. There was first the question of short-term defensibility. Did former president Ibrahim Babangida’s effort to have a more regionally representative Armed Forces Ruling Council and other powerful institutions go too far for Muslim Nigerians? Had the balance in the governing bodies tilted in favor of Christians? If so, there could have been a short-term advantage in compensating Nigerian Muslims with a foreign policy bonus like membership in the OIC. In the long term, however, some question whether a secular state such as Nigeria can afford to be a member of a religious organization like the OIC. [See Organization of the Islamic Conference.]
Christian Strategies in Nigeria. Aspects of Christian culture have been incorporated into Nigeria’s national lifestyle almost unnoticed. The Christian sabbath Sunday and its eve Saturday are days of rest nationally, but the Muslim sabbath, Friday, is not. The national calendar of Nigeria is the Euro-Christian Gregorian calendar; the timetable for the nation’s business is never worked out on the basis of the Islamic calendar. Nigeria’s Independence Day falls on a different day according to the Islamic calendar than according to the Christian, but it is always celebrated according to the latter. The criminal law of Nigeria, and much of the civil law, partly on Euro-Christian concepts of justice. form of cultural domination lies in the preferEnglish over Hausa as the official language of
Nigeria. Theoretically, upon independence the country could have either chosen the indigenous language with the biggest number of speakers, Hausa, or the language of the departing imperial power, English. Or Nigeria could have adopted both Hausa (the numerically preponderant) and English (the politically convenient) as national languages. Countries that have sought compromises of this kind include Tanzania and Kenya (Swahili and English), and Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco (French and Arabic).
For understandable political reasons, independent Nigeria preferred the functionally convenient English language to the numerically preponderant Hausa language. The Hausa language is saturated with Islamic imagery, expressions, and concepts; English has been deeply influenced by Christian civilization. From a religious point of view, the adoption of English as a national language has had consequences vastly different from what would have ensued upon the adoption of Hausa. Hausa would have introduced non-Muslim Nigerians to wider Islamic perspectives, but English has instead introduced non-Christian Nigerians to Euro-Christian literature and idiomatic Christian-influenced usage.
Islam between Revivalism and Expansion. Islamic revivalism in postcolonial Africa has had contradictory causes. Sometimes it has arisen out of economic disadvantage and desperation, almost echoing Karl Marx’s portrayal of religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature and the soul of soulless conditions.” At its most dramatic in postcolonial Africa, Islamic revivalism has emerged out of famine and drought, as if the physical barrenness of the soil has given rise to spiritual fertility. Susan MacDonald notes, in discussing Senegal and the Sahel, that “Persistent drought and the spreading desert have caused poverty, misery and hardship. This diversity has created a favourable terrain for increased religious fervour” (op cit., p. 1568).
Islamic revivalism in Muslim Ethiopia and Somalia was at one time a consequence of drought and famine. While in the 1960s and 1970s Somali poets sang about the ravages of “amputation” (lamenting the political fragmentation of the Somali nation and dreaming of reunification), poets and writers of the 1980s like Nuruddin Farah have lamented the agonies of hunger and deprivation, as well as the curse of domestic tyranny. Problems of political and economic refugees have merged. By the 1990s, the poets lamented anarchy and banditry in Somalia.
In Sudan Islamic revivalism has also drawn sustenance from social and economic deprivation. Nimeiri’s declaration of the shad `ah was partly in response to new hardships in the country in the 1980s and to the regime’s need for new allies among orthodox Muslims. The Bashir regime subsequently took the crusade of Islamization even further.
On the other hand, Islamic reformers in search of new interpretations were more vulnerable to fundamentalists than ever. The most dramatic martyrdom of an Islamic reformer in Sudan was the execution of Mahmud Muhammad Taha in 1985. His modernist Islamic ideas got him into trouble with the more orthodox `ulamd’. He was accused of apostasy under Islamic law and subsequently executed. But while revivalism in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel was in part the product of hardship and desperation, revivalism in Libya arose with new wealth and confidence. In this respect, revivalism in Libya had something in common with fundamentalism in Iran. Both were the outcome of a convergence of oil wealth and the threat of Western hegemony.
Underlying the outward confidence of both forms of Islamic revivalism, however, is the constant threat of Western cultural hegemony. The fear of Western imperialism is a constant inspiration behind Islamic fundamentalism. The ayatollahs in Iran were radicalized by American imperialism; Qadhdhafi was radicalized by the threats of Western imperialism and Zionism. Economic deprivation, economic wealth, and the threat of cultural disruption from the West have all played their part in sustaining the new wave of Islamic revivalism.
As for the geographical expansion of Islam, it is more modest in East Africa than in West. The reasons are both colonial and postcolonial. European colonization of West Africa earlier in the century never really arrested the spread of Islam, although it did considerably aid the spread of Christianity. Both introduced religions expanded at the expense of indigenous beliefs, but drew few converts from each other.
By contrast, Islam in East Africa was seriously harmed by the advent of European colonial rule. During the European colonial period Islam in East Africa continued to be Arab-led, whereas the leadership of Islam in West Africa had already been deeply indigenized. In East Africa it appeared as if Arab and European missionary efforts were two rival foreign forces. However, even the nineteenth century jihads in West Africa were entirely indigenous African phenomena. This degree of africanization in West Africa sustained that region’s Islam against the counterforce of European colonization.
Second, Islam in East Africa was hurt by the image of the Arab slave trade, especially when that image was exploited by Euro-Christian propaganda during Western colonization. Colonial schools in East Africa dramatized the Arab role in the slave trade and underplayed the Western, trans-Atlantic slave trade. East Africans emerging from colonial and missionary schools learned far more about the Arab slave trade, and far less about the trans-Atlantic flow, than did young colonial West Africans. Islam in East Africa therefore suffered more from anti-Arabism that did Islam in the western part of the continent.
After independence Muslims in West Africa were strong enough numerically and politically to take up the reins of power in countries like Mali, Guinea, and Niger. In Nigeria under civilian rule Muslims were also triumphant from 196o to 1966 and, to some extent, from 1979 to 1983. In Senegal a Roman Catholic rose to the presidency with Muslim support; in Cameroon a Muslim, Ahmadou Ahidjo, did the same. And in Gabon a Christian ruler, Omar Bongo, converted to Islam.
In East Africa, Somalia and Sudan had Muslim majorities which inherited postcolonial power. But in Uganda it took the military coup of Idi Amin Dada to put Muslims in supreme power from 1971 until 1979; succeeding regimes in Uganda have politically marginalized Islam to levels below those it enjoyed before the rise of Idi Amin.
Tanganyika under the Catholic Nyerere united with Zanzibar under the Muslim Abeid Karume in 1964. From that year until 1985, the country had a Christian president and a Muslim vice-president. Since then both the president and the vice-president have been Muslims.
In Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi, and in Southern Africa generally, the chances of a Muslim head of state in the foreseeable future appear remote. (Malawi’s Bakili Muluzi’s electoral victory and ascendance to the presidency in May 1994 is an interesting exception, however.) Kenya’s Muslim population is estimated at about six million, a quarter of the total, but with disproportionately small political influence. The spread of Islam in Kenya may have been helped by two factors-the missionary activism of the Ahmadiyah movement and the new financial aid given to Muslim institutions by the Muslim members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). But while the support of Libya and Iran to African movements may have helped the cause of Islamic revivalism among those already converted, the radicalism of Iran and Libya has sometimes caused political anxiety in countries like Kenya and even Zaire, and has slowed Islam’s expansion into new ethnic and geographical areas.
Islam in African Art. In architecture and in verbal arts, the impact of Islam on sub-Saharan Africa has been that of a stimulus, opening up new horizons of creativity. In sculpture and the performing arts, Islam has often been an inhibition rather than a stimulus. In painting the impact of Islam has been mixed-stimulating in some respects, repressive in others.
In West Africa one of the most important milestones in the islamization of architecture came after the legendary pilgrimage to Mecca of Mansa Musa, emperor of ancient Mali (r. 1312-1337). His legend emphasizes how he traveled in golden splendor through Cairo to the holy cities of Islam; but more fundamental for the future of West Africa was Mansa Musa’s decision to bring back an architect (al-Sahil) from Arabia. New mosques rose with impressive minarets and domes in Timbuktu. Mansa Musa also presided over the use of a revolutionary new building material, brick instead of pise or pounded clay. The architectural civilization of Muslim West Africa was changed forever. Timbuktu became a major center of learning, and the new mosques were at once places of worship and centers of scholarship.
The architectural changes affected private homes also, many of them now built with a flat roof and a central dome. Subsequent influences from the Maghrib helped to stimulate local African innovations, culminating in subsequent centuries in such splendid creations as the Mouride mosque in Touba, Senegal.
In East Africa the Muslim stimulus in architecture came from the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, contributing to the rise of Islamic city-states on the East Africa coast such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Sofala, and Pate. The deserted ancient city of Gedi on today’s Kenya coast preserves much of the Afro-Islamic character in its ruins.
While Islam was a creative stimulus in African architecture, it may have been a stumbling block for African sculpture, the performing arts, and painting. It is to this inhibiting tendency of Islam that we should briefly turn.
Islam is in a problematic relationship with African sculpture than with African architecture. One reason is Islam’s uncompromising monotheism and concomitant wariness of idolatry. Yet African sculpture sometimes depicts deities or offers protection against magic. The tension between Islam and the African art of masks and figurines can be traced back to idolatry in pre-Islamic Mecca.
Pre-Islamic Arabs had worshipped idols in the very places where Muslims now circumambulate the Ka’bah in Mecca. According to Islamic tradition, the prophet Muhammad himself destroyed some of those idols with his own hands. In order to discourage the return of idolatry, arts such as sculpture and painting became circumscribed in terms of what they could represent; in time, according to some schools of Islam, to paint an animal was regarded as an attempt to imitate God. Thus the depiction of living organisms became increasingly taboo. Mosques were decorated with verses of the Qur’an rather than with creatures from nature; the culture of letters was sacralized. Islam was a stimulus to creative calligraphy, but a block to portraiture.
Islam’s uncompromising stance on this subject has often militated against African masks and bronze figures. The rich tradition which produced the bronzework of ancient Benin and Ile-Ife, and much later inspired such European artists as Picasso, was threatened quite early by this school of Islam. Of course, some African Muslims did mix the culture: syncretism is part of Africa’s religious history. But in general, Islam’s distrust of representational and organic art remained in continuing tension with this form of African art.
There has also been conflict between Islam and African dance. Islam distrusts African dance for two principal reasons-the dance’s apparent proximity to idolatry and to sexuality.
In later centuries even African governments that were not Muslim also tended to avoid celebrating indigenous gods. Today almost all African countries celebrate some Christian festivals. African countries that are Muslim celebrate festivals like `Id al-Fitr, `Id al-Hajj, and sometimes the Prophet’s birthday. Some countries, such as Nigeria, celebrate all of those, Christian and Muslim, and a few secular ones. What no African country has really celebrated nationally in the twentieth century are the indigenous religious traditions.
Fear of neglect of African indigenous ritual is not peculiar to Islam as a tradition: African governments themselves fall short. But Islam and missionary Christianity have also distrusted African dance for reasons unconnected with idolatry: for its presumed sexuality, and perhaps because certain dances are performed by women. In the case of Christian missionaries the distrust of the dance sometimes resulted in banning it in missionary schools, and their dislike of African patterns of dress sometimes led to special innovations to satisfy the rules of Christian modesty in dress. Islamic rules of dress have often been even more severe for women.
On the issue of African languages and literature, Islam has played a more stimulating role, though sometimes dialectically. On the one hand, Islam appears to be linguistically intolerant: liturgy has to be in Arabic, and the muezzin calls the believers to prayer in Arabic. On the other hand, Islam and the Arabic language have created whole new indigenous creoles in Africa, or have profoundly enriched indigenous tongues. Such AfroIslamic languages include Kiswahili and Hausa, arguably the two most successful indigenous tongues of the continent. In the verbal arts of Africa, Islam has been a great creative stimulus.
It may fairly be asked whether indigenous African traditions of poetry have been enriched by interactions with other traditions, including Islam. In regard to the range of subject matter treated by poets, Islam has sometimes been an inhibiting factor; Islamic values made certain topics sinful. On the other hand, in terms of depth of meaning and sophistication of the craft of versification, Islam has probably been immensely enriching.
While the art of African fiction in indigenous languages has been greatly influenced by contact with the West, African poetry in indigenous languages has been more enriched by contact with Islam. African languages with the most complex poetic forms are probably disproportionately within civilizations that have been in contact with Islam. The most remarkable preoccupation with poetry is probably found in Somali culture. Despite their political troubles, the Somalis developed an exceptional culture of oral and even extemporaneous poetry. Their greatest modern national hero, Muhammad Abdilleh Hassan (Muhammad `Abd Allah Hasan), was both a savior of his nation and a hero of his language.
As for the art form of song, in a way an even older aesthetic, is there a tense relationship with Islam? It probably depends on the themes of the songs. There may be certain themes in African culture that appear immodest by Islamic criteria, even if not by Islamic criteria of beauty. But song is of course a major part of Islamic as well as of African culture.
As for more recent trends in painting, there have been Muslim artists who have broken out of the confines of doctrine and painted people, sculpted animals, or drawn living forests. These artists have seen themselves not as imitators of God but as sparks of the Almighty. Human genius at its best is but a spark of the First Cause. Painter Ali Darwish of Zanzibar sometimes immersed himself in both living forests and dazzling calligraphy. Ibrahim Noor Shariff painted galloping horses in a “fourth dimension.” To him Islam was always a stimulus, and human genius was a spark from the radiance of God. Such aesthetic reformers may be the wave of the future for Muslim artists in Africa.
[See also African Languages and Literatures; and entries on specific countries.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. “The Islamic Factor in African Politics.” Orbis 8 (1964): 425-444. Early reminder of the significance of Islam in modern and contemporary Africa, written before the political importance of Islam received much attention.
Cruise O’Brien, Donal B. “Islam and Power in Black Africa.” In Islam and Power, edited by Alexander S. Cudsi and Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, pp. 158-168. Baltimore, 1981. Helpful discussion giving some emphasis to the role of Sufi orders.
Davidson, Basil. The Story of Africa. London, 1984. Chapter 8, “The Impact of Islam,” places the expansion of Islam in the broader context of African history.
General History of Africa. Vol. 6, Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s. Edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi. Berkeley, 1989. Vol. 7, Africa under Colonial Domination, 1880-1935. Edited by A. Adu Boahen. Berkeley, 1985. Researched and published as part of a major project by UNESCO under the leadership of Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow. The coverage of movements provides interpretations that go beyond the stereotypes of imperial scholarship.
Levtzion, Nehemia. “Islam: Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 7, pp. 344-357. Broad survey with emphasis on the medieval period.
Lewis, I. M., ed. Islam in Tropical Africa. 2d ed. Bloomington, 198o. Contains an extended historical introduction and a number of important interpretive case studies.
Mazrui, Ali A. “African Islam and Competitive Religion: Between Revivalism and Expansion.” Third World Quarterly 10. 2 (April 1988): 499-518. Important contemporary interpretation of the different developments within African Islam.
Mazrui, Ali A., and Toby Kleban Levine, eds. The Africans: A Reader. New York, 1986. Collection of readings, prepared for use along with the excellent television series, “The African: A Triple Heritage,” that provides an excellent source for understanding the “triple heritage” interpretation of African realities.
Nyang, Sulayman S. Islam, Christianity, and African Identity. Brattleboro, Vt., 1984. Helpful introduction to some important issues. Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Influence of Islam upon Africa. 2d ed. London, 1980. Broad survey by one of the most influential scholars on the subject. Provides useful information despite the Christian missionary viewpoint.
AM A. MAZRUI

ISLAM

Batoota — Fri, 30 May 2014 07:01:19 +0000

ISLAM. [This entry consists of an overview of the origins and development of the classical Islamic tradition and eight historical surveys that trace the spread of Islam throughout the world:
An Overview
Islam in the Middle East and North Africa Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Islam in Central Asia and the Caucasus Islam in China
Islam in South Asia
Islam in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islam in Europe
Islam in the Americas
For further discussions of classical Islam, see Sunni Islam and Shi i Islam. For further discussion of Muslim religious life in global perspective, see Popular Religion.]

An Overview
Islam is the second largest of the world’s religions. Muslim countries extend from North Africa to Southeast Asia, but the one billion members of the Islamic community stretch across the globe. Muslims constitute a majority in more than forty-eight countries and a significant minority in many others. Though the Arab world is often regarded as the heartland of Islam, the majority of Muslims are in fact to be found in Asia and Africa, homes to the largest Muslim communities: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, and Nigeria. Islam has grown significantly in recent years in the West, where it is now the second largest religion in many parts of Europe and the third in the United States.
The term Islam is derived from the Arabic root s-l-m, which means submission or peace. Muslims are those who surrender to God’s will or law and as a result, Muslims believe, are at peace with themselves and with God. To embrace Islam is to become a member of a worldwide faith community (ummah). Thus, believers have both an individual and corporate religious identity and
responsibility or duty to obey and implement God’s will in personal and social life.
Islam stands in a long line of Middle Eastern, prophetic religious traditions that share an uncompromising monotheism, belief in God’s revelation, prophets, ethical responsibility, and accountability, and the Day of Judgment. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are children of Abraham (Ibrahim), although they belong to different branches of the same family. Jews and Christians are spiritual descendants of Abraham and his wife, Sarah, through their son Isaac, and Muslims trace their lineage back to Isma’il, Abraham’s first-born son by his Egyptian servant, Hagar. Islamic tradition teaches that Abraham, pressured by Sarah, who feared that Isma’il as first born would overshadow her son, Isaac, took Hagar and Isma’il to the vicinity of Mecca, where Isma’il became the father of the Arabs in Northern Arabia.
Origins and Early Development. Arabia is the heartland of Islam where, in the seventh century CE, Muslims believe, the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, he preached God’s message, and he established the first Islamic community. Pre-Islamic Arabian society, with its tribal, polytheistic ethos, provided the context for the rise of Islam. Tribal gods and goddesses served as protectors of individual tribes, were feared rather than loved, and were the objects of cultic rituals (sacrifice and pilgrimage). Mecca, the commercial and religious center of Arabia, possessed a central shrine, the Ka’bah, a cube-shaped building that housed the 36o idols of tribal patron deities, the site of a great annual pilgrimage. Arabian polytheism also included belief in a supreme high god. Allah (“the god”) was the creator and sustainer of life, but remote from everyday concerns, and thus not the object of cult or ritual.
The value system or ethical code of Arabian society was not attributed to God, but was the product of a tribal tradition. The key virtue or basis for Arabia’s code of honor, manliness (muruwah), emphasized bravery and the preservation of tribal and family honor. Tribal justice was guaranteed not by God but by the threat of group vengeance or retaliation. Arabian fatalism denied meaning or accountability beyond this lifeno resurrection of the body, divine judgment, eternal punishment or reward.
The monotheistic message of the Qur’an and preaching of Muhammad did not occur in a vacuum. Monotheism had been flourishing in Arab (Judaism and Christianity) and Iranian cultures (Zoroastrianism) for centuries preceding Muhammad’s ministry. Both Jewish and Christian Arab communities had also been present in Arabia itself before Muhammad. Finally, in addition to biblical monotheism, a local or indigenous monotheistic presence existed among pre-Islamic Arab monotheists, called hanifs. The Qur’an (3.17) and Muslim tradition portray them as descendants of Abraham and his son Isma’il. Muhammad’s travels as a caravan leader and his personal relationships brought him into contact with pre-Islamic forms of monotheism.
God, the Qur’an, and the Prophet Muhammad. At the center and foundation of Islam is Allah, the God, whose name appears more than 2,500 times in the Qur’an. In a polytheistic society, Muhammad declared the sole existence of Allah, the transcendent, allpowerful, and all-knowing Creator, Sustainer, Ordainer, and Judge of the universe. The absolute monotheism of Islam is preserved in the doctrine of the unity (tawhid) and sovereignty (rabb, ruler or lord) of God that dominates Islamic belief and practice. As God is one, God’s rule and will or law are comprehensive, extending to all creatures and to all aspects of life. [See Tawhid.]
The Qur’an underscores the awesome power and majesty of God and the Day of judgment, but it also reveals a merciful and just judge. Its initial chapter and subsequent chapters begin with: “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate”. The Qur’an declares that its author is the Most Merciful (36.5), in it is a Mercy (29.51) and its motivation is the Mercy of God (21.107). The lesson of God’s mercy proclaimed by the Qur’an has been institutionalized by the Muslim practice of beginning important matters, such as a letter, public speech, or book, with the phrase: “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate.” God’s mercy exists in dialectical tension with his justice. Reward and punishment follow from individual ethical responsibility and accountability before an all-knowing and just judge. Thus, Islamic ethics follows from human beings’ special status and responsibility on earth.
For Muslims, the Qur’an is the Book of God (kitab al-Allah). It is the eternal, uncreated, literal word of God (kalam Allah), sent down from heaven, revealed one final time to the prophet Muhammad as a guidance for humankind (2.185). Islam teaches that God’s revelation has occurred in several forms: in nature, history, and scripture. God revealed his will for humankind through a series of messengers (including Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad): “Indeed, We sent forth among every nation a Messenger, saying: `Serve your God, and shun false gods’ ” (16.36).
Although God had sent a revelation to Moses and Jesus, Muslims believe that the scriptures of the Jewish community (Torah) and of the Christian church (the Evangel or Gospel) are corrupted versions of the original revelation. The current texts of the Torah and the New Testament are regarded as a composite of human fabrications, nonbiblical beliefs that infiltrated the texts, and remnants of the original revelation. Thus, the Qur’an does not abrogate or nullify, but rather corrects the versions of scripture preserved by the Jewish and Christian communities (5.19). From a Muslim viewpoint, Islam is not a new religion with a new scripture. Rather than being the youngest of the major monotheistic world religions, it is considered by Muslims to be the oldest religion. Islam represents the “original” as well as final revelation of the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.
History, Muslim belief, and legend portray Muhammad (570-632) as a remarkable man and prophet. Although we know a good deal about Muhammad’s life after his “call” to be God’s messenger, historical records tell us little about Muhammad’s early years prior to becoming a prophet. The Qur’an has served as a major source for information regarding the fife of the Prophet along with Prophetic traditions (sg., hadith; reports about what Muhammad said and did) and biographies that reveal Muhammad’s meaning and significance in early Islam. Muhammad serves as both God’s human instrument in bearing witness to and preaching his revelation and the model or ideal whom all believers are to emulate.
At the age of forty during the month of Ramadan (610), Muhammad the caravan leader became Muhammad the messenger of God. On “The Night of Power and Excellence,” as Muslims call it, he received the first of many divine revelations which would continue over a period of twenty-two years (610-632). These messages were finally collected and written down in the Qur’an (The Recitation), Islam’s sacred scripture.
For the powerful and prosperous Meccan oligarchy, the monotheistic message of this would-be reformer, with its condemnation of the socioeconomic inequities of Meccan life, constituted a direct challenge not only to traditional polytheistic religion but also to the power and prestige of the establishment, threatening their economic, social, and political interests. The Prophet denounced false contracts, usury, the neglect and exploitation of orphans and widows. He defended the rights of the poor and the oppressed, asserting that the rich had an obligation to the poor and dispossessed. Muhammad rejected polytheism, claimed prophetic authority and leadership, and insisted that all true believers belonged to a single universal community (ummah) that transcended tribal bonds.
Creation of the Islamic Community. After ten years of preaching, faced with limited success and mounting persecution, Muhammad and two hundred of his followers emigrated in 622 to Medina. This migration, known as the Hijrah, marked a turning point in Muhammad’s fortunes and a new stage in the history of the Islamic movement. Islam took on political form with the establishment of an Islamic community/state at Medina. The significance of the Hijrah (and of community in Islam) is reflected in its adoption as the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Muhammad became prophet-head of a religio-political community. He established his leadership in Medina, subdued Mecca, and consolidated Muslim rule over the remainder of Arabia through diplomatic and military means and conversion. [See Hijrah. ]
Muhammad’s impact on Muslim life and history cannot be overestimated. The reformism of the first Islamic movement under the leadership of Muhammad became the reference point and model for later Islamic renewal or revivalist movements. Moreover, his character and personality inspired uncommon confidence and commitment, so much so that the practice of the Prophet, his sunnah or example, became the norm for community life. Muslims observed, remembered, and recounted stories about what the Prophet said and did. These hadiths were preserved and passed on in oral and written form. The corpus of tradition literature reveals the comprehensive scope of Muhammad’s example. Traditions of the Prophet provide guidance for personal hygiene, dress, eating, marriage, treatment of wives, diplomacy, and warfare. [See Hadith.]
The reformist spirit of the Qur’an and of the Prophet’s message affected religious ritual as well as politics and society. A process of adaptation or islamization characterized much of early Islam’s development. Although some pre-Islamic Arabian beliefs and institutions were rejected and others introduced, the more common method was to reformulate or adapt existing practices to Islamic norms and values. Rituals such as pilgrimage (hajj) and prayer (salat) were reformulated and reinterpreted. The Ka’bah in Mecca remained the sacred center for annual pilgrimage. However, it was no longer a shrine associated with tribal idols, which were destroyed, but rather rededicated to Allah, for whom, Muslims believe, Abraham and Isma`il had originally built the Ka’bah or House of God.
Muhammad introduced a new moral order in which the origin and end of all actions was not self or tribal interest but God’s will. Belief in the Day of judgment and resurrection of the body added a dimension of human responsibility and accountability that had been absent in Arabian religion. Tribal vengeance and retaliation were subordinated to belief in a just and merciful creator and judge. A society based on tribal affiliation and manmade tribal law or custom was to be replaced by a religiously bonded community, governed by God’s law.
The Qur’an proclaimed that God “made you into nations and tribes” (49.13). As God had previously called the Jews and then Christians to a covenant relationship, the Qur’an declared that Muslims now constituted the new community of believers who were to be an example to other nations (2.143) with a mission to create a moral social order: “You are the best community evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong” (3.110). This command has influenced Muslim practice throughout the centuries, providing a rationale for political and moral activism. Government regulations, Islamic laws, the activities of religious officials and police who monitor public morality or behavior have all been justified as expressions of this moral mission to command the good and prohibit evil. [See Ummah. ]
The Paths of Islam: Law and Mysticism. Islam’s message was formulated in the formative centuries of classical Islam, providing a way of life whose letter or duties were delineated by Islamic law and whose spirit was embodied in the emergence of Islamic mysticism or Sufism. Islam emphasizes practice more than belief. As a result, law rather than theology is the central religious discipline and locus for defining the path of Islam and preserving its way of life. Islamic law (shad `ah), and with it a system of Islamic courts and judges (qadis), developed during the first Islamic centuries. Islamic law is a comprehensive law which combines a Muslim’s duties to God and to society, incorporating regulations governing prayer and fasting as well as family, penal, and international law. The Straight Path of Muslim life is set forth in an idealized blueprint. The four sources of law came to be identified in Sunni Islam as the Qur’an, the example (sunnah) of the prophet Muhammad, reason (rules derived from the Qur’an and sunnah by analogy, qiyas) and community consensus (ijma’). Both Sunni and Shi’i Islam accept the Qur’an and sunnah of the Prophet as authoritative textual sources, but the Shi is have maintained their own collections of traditions that also include the sunnah of ‘Ali and the imams. In addition, the Shi’is reject analogy and consensus as legal sources, since they regard the imam as the supreme legal interpreter and authority. In his absence, qualified religious scholars serve as his agents or representatives, interpreters (mujtahids) of the law. Their consensus guides the community and is binding during the interim between the seclusion of the imam and his final messianic return. [See Sunnah; Shari ah; Qadi; Consensus; and Law.]
While God, the Qur’an, and the prophet Muhammad unite all Muslims in their common belief, the Five Pillars of Islam provide a unity of practice in the midst of the community’s rich diversity. The pillars are the common denominator, the five essential obligatory practices that all Muslims must follow: (1) the profession of faith; (2) worship or prayer; (3) almsgiving; (4) fasting; and (5) pilgrimage to Mecca.
1. Profession of Faith. A Muslim is one who proclaims (shahddah, witness or testimony), “There is no God but the God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” This brief yet profound testimony marks a person’s entry into the Islamic community. It affirms Islam’s absolute monotheism and acceptance of Muhammad as the messenger of God, the last and final prophet. [See Shahadah.]
2. Worship or Prayer. Five times each day Muslims throughout the world are called to worship (salat, worship or prayer) God. Facing the holy city of Mecca, Islam’s spiritual homeland, Muslims recall the revelation of the Qur’an and reinforce a sense of belonging to a single, worldwide community of believers. On Friday, the noon prayer is a congregational prayer which usually takes place in a mosque (masjid, place of prostration). Since there is no clergy or priesthood in Islam, any Muslim may lead (imam, leader) the prayer. [See Salat; Imam.]
3. Almsgiving. The third pillar of Islam is the zakat, a religious tithe (or almsgiving) on accumulated wealth and assets, not simply income. Payment of the zakat instills a sense of communal identity and responsibility, the duty to attend to the community’s social welfare. [See Zakat.]
4. Fasting. Once each year, Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan. From dawn to dusk, abstention from food, drink, and sex are required of all healthy
Muslims. The primary emphasis is not so much on abstinence and self-mortification as such but rather on spiritual self-discipline, reflection, and the performance of good works. The month of Ramadan ends with a great celebration, Feast of the Breaking of the Fast, `Id al-Fitr, one of the great religious holy days and holidays of the Muslim calendar. Family members come from near and far to feast and exchange gifts in a celebration that lasts for three days. [See Sawm; Ramadan; `Id alFitr. ]
5. Pilgrimage. Ramadan is followed by the beginning of the pilgrimage season. Every adult Muslim who is physically and financially able is expected to perform the pilgrimage (h ajj) to Mecca at least once in his or her lifetime. In recent years, almost two million Muslims a year from every part of the globe make the physical journey to the spiritual center of Islam, where they again experience the unity, breadth, and diversity of the Islamic community. The pilgrimage ends with the celebration of Great Feast (`Id al-Kabir or `Id al-Adha), the Feast of Sacrifice, which commemorates God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isma`il (Isaac in Jewish and Christian traditions). [See Hajj; `Id alAdha. ]
jihad, “to strive or struggle” in the way of God, is sometimes referred to as the “sixth pillar of Islam,” although it has no such official status. In its most general meaning, jihad refers to the obligation incumbent on all Muslims, as individuals and as a community, to exert (jihad) themselves to realize God’s will-to lead a virtuous life and to spread the Islamic community through preaching, education, and example. However, it also includes the struggle for or defense of Islam, holy war. Despite the fact that jihad is not supposed to include aggressive warfare, this has occurred, as exemplified by early extremists such as the Khawarij and contemporary jihad groups such as Egypt’s Jama`at al-Jihad (which assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981). [See Jihad.]
The development of Islamic law was paralleled in the eighth and ninth centuries by another movement, Sufism or Islamic mysticism. If law is the exterior or outer path of Islam’s duties and obligations, Sufism is the interior or inner path which emphasizes detachment from the distractions and deceptiveness of this world. It focuses more on an interior spiritual life of personal piety, morality, and devotional love of God. By the twelfth century what had been primarily circles of spiritual elites were transformed into a mass, popular movement. A vast network of orders or brotherhoods spread Sufism from the Atlantic to Southeast Asia, as its combination of the esoteric and the ecstatic offered a spirituality that won the hearts of educated and uneducated alike. Its attractiveness to the masses of Muslims and its strength as a missionary vehicle came from its spiritual vision and ritual practices as well as its more inclusive, accommodationist, and syncretist tendencies. As such, Sufism was experienced as a challenge to the law-centered, Islamic orthodoxy of the `ulama’, (religions scholars), many of whom denounced its esoteric claims and accommodation of “foreign, un-Islamic” doctrines and practices. Sufi orders became international in organization and scope, extending from North Africa across Central Asia to Southeast Asia. [See Sufism.]
The Muslim Community in History. The period of Muhammad and the first four caliphs of Islam, the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs (632-661), is remembered by Sunni Muslims as the best of times, the normative period to which the community has often returned for guidance and inspiration. During this time, the spread of Islam and conquest of Arabia were completed, and Islamic rule was extended throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa. In successive centuries, two great caliphates, the Umayyad (661-750) in Damascus and the `Abbasid (749-1258) in Baghdad, oversaw the consolidation of Muslim power, the expansion of Islamic empire as a world political force, and the development and flourishing of Islamic civilization. [See Rightly Guided Caliphs; Umayyad Dynasty; `Abbasid Dynasty.]
Muslim armies, fired by their new faith and lured by the spoils of war, overran the Eastern (Roman) Byzantine and the Sassanian (Persian) Empires. The purpose of the early wars or jihads was not conversion but conquest, booty, and the spread of Islam’s (God’s) rule. As Islam spread to new territories, inhabitants were offered three choices: (i) conversion to Islam and full membership or citizenship; (2) “protection”-Jews and Christians, known as “People of the Book” (i.e., those who possessed a sacred book) in exchange for payment of a head or poll tax (jizyah) possessed a more limited form of citizenship as “protected people” (dhimmi), by which they were allowed to practice their faith and be ruled in their private lives by their religious leaders and law; or (3) combat or the sword for those who resisted and rejected Muslim rule. Much of Islam’s expansion throughout history was the result of the activities of merchants, traders, and mystics, as well as soldiers, who proved effective missionaries in carrying the message of Islam from Africa to Southeast Asia, from Timbuktu to Sumatra, and from Central Asia to Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy. [See Jizyah; Dhimmi.]
After the destruction of the `Abbasid Empire by the Mongols in 1258, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century the Islamic world consisted of a string of local states or sultanates. Among the most powerful sultanates or empires were the Ottoman (Turkey and much of the Arab world and Eastern Europe), the Safavid in Persia, and the Mughal in the Indian subcontinent. [See Ottoman Empire; $afavid Dynasty; Mughal Empire.]
Sectarianism: Sunni and Shii Islam. The issue of leadership after the death of Muhammad led to a major split in the Muslim community and gave rise to its two major branches or divisions: the Sunni, who today represent about 85 percent of the world’s Muslims, and the Shi’i, who constitute 15 percent. The Sunni majority believe that Muhammad died without designating a successor. Thus, the elders of the community selected or elected a caliph (khalifah or successor of the prophet Muhammad) to be political leader of the Islamic community-state or caliphate. The Shi’i minority believe that Muhammad did in fact designate the senior male of his family, his son-in-law and cousin, `All ibn Abi Talib, to lead the community. The Shi’is or partisans of `All, maintained that the leader (imam) of the Muslim community should be a descendant of the family of the Prophet. Thus, `All’s followers believed that he, and not the first caliph Abu Bakr, should have succeeded the Prophet.
Shi’i were among the early opposition to the Umayyad caliphs. The founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Mu`awiyah, was a provincial governor who had challenged ‘Ali when he had “finally” succeeded Muhammad and become the fourth caliph of Islam; subsequently he seized power at `All’s death. Husayn, the son of `All, led a small band of followers against the army of Yazid, Mu`awiyah’s son and successor, in 68o in which he and his army were slaughtered at Karbala (in modern-day Iraq). The martyrdom of Husayn and its ritual commemoration became a central religious paradigm for Shi’i Islam and its history as a righteous and aggrieved minority community living under Sunni Muslim rule. Thus the Shi’ l developed their own distinctive vision of leadership and history, centered on the martyred family of the Prophet and based on the belief that leadership of the Islamic community rightfully resided in the imamate, the religiopolitical leaders and descendents of `Ali or his sons Husayn and Hasan. [See Karbala; and the biographies of `All ibn Abi Talib and Husayn ibn `All.]
The fundamental difference between Sunni and Shi`i Islam is their institutions for leadership, the imamate and the caliphate. For Shi’i Islam the Imam is not just the political successor (caliph) of the prophet Muhammad but the religiopolitical leader of the community. Though not a prophet, for Muhammad is the last of the prophets, Shi’ i belief came to regard the Imam as religiously inspired, perfect and sinless. ‘Ali and his wife Fatimah, the daughter of Muhammad, along with their children Hasan and Husayn came to constitute a holy family in Shi’i piety; their tombs are the objects of veneration and pilgrimage. Whereas Sunni Islam came to place religious authority for interpreting Islam in the consensus (ijma`) of the `ulama’, who represented the collective judgment of the community, for Shi’i Islam continued divine guidance could be found in the Imam, who is the final religious authority. Thus, the lives and traditions of `All and the other great Imams of Shiism, after the Qur’an and the sunnah of the Prophet, are sources of guidance for Shi’i Islam. Similarly, Sunni and Shi’i Islam developed differing concepts of the meaning of history. For Sunni Muslims, early Islamic success, power, and wealth were the signs of God’s guidance and reward for a faithful community as well as validation of Muslim belief and claims. For Shi’i Muslims, history is the theater for the oppressed and disinherited minority community to restore God’s rule on earth and the authority of the Imam over the entire community of believers. A righteous community was to persist in the struggle, as had ‘Ali against the Sunni caliph Mu`awiyah and Husayn against Yazid, to reestablish God’s will, the righteous rule of the Imam. Realization of a just social order under the Imam was to become a messianic expectation for centuries as Shi’i Muslims continued to struggle and live under Sunni rule.
Historically, Shi`i Islam split into two major branches in the eighth century, dependent on their recognition of either twelve or seven Imams or descendants of Muhammad-the Ithna `Ashari (Twelvers) and the Isma`ilis (sometimes called the Seveners). The numerical designation of each was caused by the death or disappearance of their Imam and disruption of hereditary succession. The Twelvers believe that the twelfth Imam (Muhammad al-Muntazir, or Muhammad the Awaited One) disappeared in 874. His disappearance was theologically resolved by the belief that the imam had gone into hiding or occultation. Shi i were to await his return as the Mahdi (expected one) who would restore the Shi’i community to its rightful place and usher in a reign of justice and peace. [See Ithna `Ashariyah; Isma`iliyah; Mahdi.]
Modern Islam. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries the Islamic world has witnessed a protracted period of upheaval and renewal. Muslims struggled with the failures of their societies, the impact of European colonialism, and subsequent superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and responded to the intellectual and moral challenges of a changing world. In the nineteenth century across much of the Muslim world, a series of revivalist movements rose up: the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, the Mahdists in Sudan, the Sanusi in Libya, the Fulani in Nigeria, and the Padri in Indonesia. Though quite different in many respects, these shared a common concern about the decline of Muslim fortunes and a common conviction that the cure was a purification of their societies and way of life by a more faithful return to pristine Islam, to the teachings of the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet. Many called for the suppression or reform of Sufism, rejected historical assimilation of foreign, un-Islamic “innovations” (beliefs and practices), and claimed the right, to interpret (ijtihad) Islam. However, they did not seek to reinterpret or reformulate Islamic law and practice in light of contemporary needs, but rather to return to and restore the practice of the early Islamic community. These religiomoral movements created communities of like-minded believers, committed to the creation of Islamic societies. They were often transformed into political movements that established Islamic states, forerunners of modern states.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Islamic modernist movements responded to the intellectual and political challenge of Western hegemony. Wishing to bridge the gap between their Islamic heritage and modernity, between traditional religious and modern secular leaders, men such as Jamal al-Din alAfghani and Muhammad `Abduh in the Middle East and Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal in South Asia sought to rejuvenate and restore the pride, identity, and strength of a debilitated Islamic community. They advocated what was essentially a process of Islamic acculturation, emphasizing the compatibility of Islam with reason, science, and technology. All argued for Islamic reform, for the need to reinterpret Islam in light of the new questions and issues which were brought by modern life. Maintaining that Islam and modernity, revelation and reason, were compatible, they advocated religious, legal, educational, and social reforms to revitalize the Muslim community.
Islamic modernism inspired movements for reform and national independence but remained attractive primarily to an intellectual elite. It failed to produce a systematic reinterpretation of Islam or develop effective organizations to preserve, propagate, and implement its message. This limitation contributed to the emergence of Islamic organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jama’at-i Islam! (Islamic Society) in South Asia. The founders of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hasan al-Banna’) and the Jama’at-i Islam! (Abu al-A’la Mawdudi) criticized secular elites for simply emulating the West and Islamic modernist reformers for westernizing Islam. In particular, they condemned the tendency of most Muslim countries to adapt uncritically Western models of development and thus westernize Muslim societies. Instead they proclaimed the self-sufficiency of Islam as a response to the demands of modern life. Islam, they asserted, offers its own alternative path to capitalism and communism/socialism; it is a total, comprehensive way of life. The objective of these Islamic reformers was to establish effective organizations to implement an Islamic system of government and law through social and political action.
During the post-World War II era, most of the Muslim world regained its independence. Many of the newly emerging independent states, including Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq, and Pakistan, were carved out by European colonial powers, who created states with artificial or arbitrarily drawn boundaries and even appointed their rulers. Thus, political legitimacy and national identity/unity compounded the problem of nation building and remained critical issues. Although Turkey chose a secular path and Saudi Arabia emerged as a selfdeclared Islamic state, the majority of Muslim nations, guided by Western-oriented elites, combined Westerninspired political, economic, legal, educational development with a minimal recognition of the role of Islam in public life. Because the West provided the models for modern development, the presupposition and expectation was that modernization and development would necessarily lead to progressive westernization and secularization. Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979-1980 shattered this assumption and for many raised fears of the spread of “militant Islam,” “Khomeineism,” or “Islamic fundamentalism.”
Islamic Revivalism or “Fundamentalism.” Much of the reassertion of religion in politics and society has been subsumed under the term “Islamic fundamentalism.” Although fundamentalism is a common designation, in the press and among many experts, it is used in a variety of ways. For a number of reasons, it tells us everything and yet, at the same time, tells us nothing. First, all those who call for a return to foundational beliefs or the fundamentals of a religion can be called fundamentalist. In a strict sense, this could include all practicing Muslims who accept the Qur’an as the literal word of God and the sunnah of the prophet Muhammad as a normative model for living. Second, understanding and perceptions of fundamentalism are heavily influenced by American Protestantism. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, for example, defines fundamentalism as “a movement in twentieth century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching.”
For many liberal or mainline Christians, fundamentalist is a pejorative or derogatory term applied rather indiscriminately to all those who advocate a literalist biblical position and thus are regarded as static, retrogressive, and extremist. As a result, fundamentalism often has been regarded popularly as referring to those who are literalists and wish to return to and replicate the past. In fact, few individuals or organizations in the Middle East fit such a stereotype. Indeed, many fundamentalist leaders have had the best educations, enjoy responsible positions in society, and are adept at harnessing the latest technology to propagate their views and create viable modern institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and social-service agencies. Third, the term fundamentalism is often equated with political activism, extremism, fanaticism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism. While some Islamic activists or Islamists engage in radical religiopolitics, most work within the established order.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the many faces and postures of fundamentalism is to consider the following. Fundamentalism is a term that has been applied to the governments of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. Yet the term fundamentalism reveals little about the nature of governments and of their Islamic character. Mu`ammar al-Qadhdhafi has claimed the right to interpret Islam, questioned the authenticity of the traditions of the prophet Muhammad, silenced the religious establishment as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, and advocated a populist state of the masses. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, by contrast, have aligned themselves with the `ulama’, preached a more literalist brand of Islam, and used religion to legitimate a conservative monarchy. Qadhdhafi’s portrayal as an unpredictable, independent supporter of worldwide terrorism stands in sharp relief against the image of low-key, conservative, proAmerican King Fahd. Similarly, the foreign policy of the clerically run ShN state of Iran contrasted sharply with the military regime which implemented Pakistan’s Islamic system (nizdm-i Islam) under General Zia ulHaq (1977-1988). Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini was highly critical, even condemnatory of the West, often at odds with the international community, and regarded as a radical terrorist state, while Pakistan under the Islamically oriented Zia ul-Haq was a close ally of the United States, had relations with the West and the international community, and was generally regarded as moderate.
Islam reemerged as a potent global force in Muslim politics during the 1970s and 1980s. Contemporary Islamic revivalism embraced much of the Muslim world from Sudan to Indonesia. Governments in the Muslim world as well as opposition groups and political parties increasingly appealed to religion for legitimacy and to mobilize popular support. Islamic activists have held cabinet-level positions in Jordan, Sudan, Iran, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Islamic organizations have constituted the leading opposition parties/organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the West Bank and Gaza, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Where permitted, they have participated in elections and served in parliament and in city government. Islam has been a significant ingredient in nationalist struggles and resistance movements in Afghanistan, the Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia, in Kashmir, and in the communal politics of Lebanon, India, Thailand, China, and the Philippines.
Islamic activist (fundamentalist) organizations have run the spectrum from those who have participated within the system, such as the Muslim Brotherhoods in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan, the Jama`at-i Islami in South Asia, Tunisia’s Hizb al-Nahdah (Renaissance Party), and Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front. At the same time, radical revolutionaries, such as Egypt’s Society of Muslims (known more popularly as Takfir waal-Hijrah, Excommunication and Flight), al-Jihad (Holy War), and the Jama’at al-Islamiyah (Islamic Group), as well Lebanon’s Hizbullah (Party of God) and Islamic Jihad, have used violence and terrorism in their attempts to destabilize and overthrow prevailing political systems. [See Fundamentalism.]
Roots of the Resurgence. To speak of a contemporary Islamic revival can be deceptive if revivalism is equated with the conclusion that Islam had somehow disappeared or been absent from the Muslim world. It is more correct to view Islamic revivalism as a revitalization movement that has led to a higher profile of Islam in Muslim politics and society. Thus, what had previously seemed to be an increasingly marginalized force in Muslim public life reemerged in the 1970s, often dramatically, as a vibrant sociopolitical reality. Islam’s resurgence in Muslim politics reflected a growing religious revivalism in both personal and public life that swept across much of the Muslim world and had a substantial impact on world politics.
The indices of an Islamic reawakening in personal life are: increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer, fasting), proliferation of refigious publications, audio- and videotapes, greater emphasis on Islamic dress and values, and the revitalization of Sufism. This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islam’s reassertion in public life: an increase in Islamically oriented or legitimated governments, organizations, laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions. Both governments and opposition movements have turned to Islam to enhance their authority and to muster popular support. Governmental use of Islam has been illustrated by a cross section of leaders in the Middle East and Asia: Libya’s Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, Sudan’s Ja’far alNumayri (Nimeiri), Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq, Bangladesh’s Muhammad Ershad (Irshad), Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed. Most rulers and governments, including more secular states, such as Turkey and Tunisia, aware of the potential strength of Islam, have shown increased sensitivity to and anxiety about Islamic issues and concerns. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 focused attention on “Islamic fundamentalism” and with it the spread and vitality of political Islam in other parts of the Muslim world. However, the contemporary revival has its origins and roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s when events in such disparate areas as Egypt and Libya as well as Pakistan and Malaysia contributed to experiences of crisis/failure as well as power/success that served as catalysts for a more visible reassertion of Islam in both public and private life.
Although political Islam has varied significantly from one country to another, there are recurrent themes: the belief that existing political, economic, and social systems had failed; a disenchantment with and at times rejection of the West; a quest for identity and greater authenticity; and the conviction that Islam provides a self-sufficient ideology for state and society, a valid alternative to secular nationalism, socialism, and capitalism.
The experience of failure triggered an identity crisis that led many to question the path and direction of political and social development and to turn inward for strength and guidance. The Western-oriented policies of governments and elites appeared to have failed. The soul searching and critique of the sociopolitical realities of the Arab and Muslim world, which followed the 196’7 Israeli war and the crises in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Lebanon, extended to other Muslim areas, embraced a broad spectrum of society, and raised many questions about the direction and accomplishments of development. More often than not, despite the hopes and aspirations of independence, the mixed record of several decades existence was a challenge to the legitimacy and effectiveness of modern Muslim states. A crisis mentality fostered by specific events and the general impact and disruption of modernity spawned a growing disillusionment and sense of the failure of modern Muslim states.
Politically, modern secular nationalism was found wanting. Neither liberal nationalism nor Arab nationalism/socialism had fulfilled their promises. Muslim governments seemed less interested and less successful in establishing their political legitimacy and creating an ideology for national unity than in perpetuating autocratic rule. The Muslim world was still dominated by monarchs and military or ex-military rulers; political parties were banned or restricted, elections often rigged. Parliamentary systems of government and political parties existed at the sufferance of rulers, whose legitimacy, like their security, rested on a loyal military and secret police. Many were propped up by and dependent on foreign governments and multinational corporations.
Economically, both Western capitalism and Marxist socialism were judged incapable of effectively stemming the growing tide of poverty and illiteracy. Charges of corruption, concentration of and maldistribution of wealth found ready recipients as one looked at individual countries and the region. The disparity between rich and poor was striking in urban areas where the neighborhoods and new suburbs of the wealthy few stood in stark contrast to the deteriorating dwellings and sprawling shantytowns of the many. Socioculturally and psychologically, modernization was seen as a legacy of European colonialism perpetuated by Western-oriented elites who imposed and fostered the twin processes of westernization and secularization. As dependence on Western models of development was seen as the cause of political and military failures, so too, some Muslims charged, blind imitation of the West, an uncritical westernization of Muslim societies that some called the disease of “Westoxification,” led to a cultural dependence that threatened the loss of Muslim identity. Secular, “valueless,” social change was identified as the cause of sociomoral decline, a major contributor to the breakdown of the Muslim family, more permissive, promiscuous societies, and spiritual malaise. The psychological impact of modernity and, with it, rapid sociocultural change cannot be forgotten. Urban areas had undergone physical and institutional changes so that both the skylines and the infrastructure of cities were judged modern by their Western profile and facade. To be modern was to be Western in dress, language, ideas, education, behavior (from table manners to greetings), architecture, furnishings. Urban areas became the primary locations for work and living. Modern governments and companies as well as foreign advisers and investors focused their attentions and projects on urban areas so that the results of modernization only trickled down to rural areas.
Rapid urbanization led to the migration of many from outlying villages and towns. Their hopes and dreams for a better life were often replaced by the harsh realities of poverty in urban slums and shantytowns. Psychological as well as physical displacement occurred. Loss of village, town, and extended family ties and traditional values were accompanied by the shock and contrast of modern urban life and its westernized culture and mores. Many, swept along in a sea of alienation and marginalization, found an anchor or secure and safe ground for their lives in their religion. Islam offered a sense of identity, fraternity, and cultural values that offset the psychological dislocation and cultural threat of their new environment. Both the poor in their urban neighborhoods, which approximated traditional ghettos in the midst of modern cities, and those in the lower middle class, who were able to take advantage of the new educational and job opportunities of the city and thus experienced culture shock more profoundly and regularly, found a welcome sense of meaning and security in their religious faith and identity. Islamic organizations, their workers and message offered a more familiar alternative and answer which resonated with their experience, identified their problems, and offered a time honored solution.
Ideological Worldview. Contemporary revivalism is rooted in Islam’s time-honored tradition of renewal (tajdid) and reform (islah) embodied in Muhammad’s leadership of the first Islamic movement, seventeenthand eighteenth-century revivalism, and Islamic modernist movements. At the heart of the revivalist worldview is the belief that the Muslim world is in a state of decline owing to Muslims’ departure from the straight path of Islam. The cure is a return to Islam in personal and public life that will ensure the restoration of Islamic identity, values, and power. For Islamic political activists Islam is a total or comprehensive way of life, stipulated in the Qur’an, God’s revelation, mirrored in the example of Muhammad and the nature of the first Muslim community-state, and embodied in the comprehensive nature of shari `ah, God’s revealed law. Islamic activists or Islamists believe that the renewal and revitalization of Muslim governments and societies require the restoration or reimplementation of Islamic law, the blueprint for an Islamically guided and socially just state and society. [See Islah; Revival and Renewal.]
Although the westernization and secularization of society are condemned, modernization as such is not. Science and technology are accepted, but the pace, direction, and extent of change are to be subordinated to Islamic belief and values in order to guard against excessive dependence on Western culture and values.
Radical movements go beyond these principles and often operate on the following assumptions:
1. Islam and the West are locked in an ongoing battle that began during the expansion of Islam, is heavily influenced by the legacy of the Crusades and European colonialism, and is the product today of a JudeoChristian conspiracy. Radical extremists regard the Cold War’s superpower rivalry and neocolonialism and the power of Zionism as the foreign sources of Muslim impotence and Western hegemony. The West (Britain, France, and especially the United States) is blamed for its support of un-Islamic or unjust regimes (Egypt, Iran; Lebanon) and biased support for Israel in the face of Palestinian displacement. Violence against these governments and their representatives as well as Western multinationals is regarded as a legitimate form of selfdefense.
2. Islam is not simply an ideological alternative for Muslim societies but a theological and political imperative. Since it is God’s command, implementation must be immediate, not gradual, and the obligation to do so is incumbent on all true Muslims. Therefore, those who hesitate, are apolitical, or resist-individuals and governments-are no longer to be regarded as Muslims. They are declared atheists or unbelievers, enemies of God, against whom all true Muslims must wage jihad.
From the Periphery to the Center: Mainstream Revivalism. While the exploitation of Islam by governments and by extremist organizations has reinforced the secular orientations of many Muslims and the cynicism of many in the West, a less well-known and yet potentially far-reaching social transformation has also occurred in the Muslim world. In the 19gos Islamic revivalism has ceased to be restricted to small, marginal organizations on the periphery of society but instead has become part of mainstream Muslim society, producing a new class of modern, educated, but Islamically oriented elites who work alongside, and at times in coalitions with, their secular counterparts. Revivalism continues to grow as a broadbased religio-social movement, functioning today in virtually every Muslim country and transnationally. It is a vibrant, multifaceted movement that will embody the major impact of Islamic revivalism for the foreseeable future. Its goal is the transformation of society through the Islamic formation of individuals at the grassroots level. Islamic organizations work in social services (hospitals, clinics, legal aid societies), in economic projects (Islamic banks, investment houses, insurance companies), in education (schools, child-care centers, youth camps), and in religious publishing and broadcasting. Their common programs are aimed at young and old alike.
Islamic ideology and movements are not solely a marginal phenomenon limited to small radical groups or organizations. They have become part and parcel of mainstream religion and society. The presence and appeal of a more pronounced Islamic orientation is to be found among the middle and lower classes, educated and uneducated, professionals and workers, young and old, men, women, and children. A new generation of modern, educated, but Islamically (rather than secularly) oriented leaders can be found in Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Jordan, Iran, Malaysia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Islamic activists have become part and parcel of the political process. They have participated in national and local elections; scored impressive victories in Algeria’s municipal and parliamentary elections; emerged as the chief opposition parties or groups in Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan; served in cabinet level positions in Sudan, Jordan, Pakistan, Iran, and Malaysia.
Both the implementation of Islam by governments and the track record of Islamic movements have raised many questions about the use or manipulation of religion for political purposes as well as the nature and direction of Islamic reform. Two critical questions are: “Whose Islam?” and “What Islam?” While the `ulamd’ still assert their role as the primary interpreters of Islam, the guardians of Islamic law, both Muslim rulers and an educated lay Islamic leadership have threatened their domain. Libya’s Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi has ignored and even denounced the `ulamd’. The Saudi monarchy, while usually careful to cultivate strong ties with Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment, has in the 19gos increasingly encountered opposition from more independent Wamd’. Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq, despite a sensitivity to Wamd’ concerns, ultimately was the final arbiter of Pakistan’s Islamic experiment. Only Sh!’! Iran has seen the Wamd’ in power. Moreover, many Muslims increasingly call for greater political participation and democratization, more consensual (parliamentary or assembly) forms of government. The formation of Islamic governments or more Islamically oriented societies raises questions about the nature of the state and society and of its leadership. Who is to determine who shall define the Islamic character of the state and societyrulers (kings, military men, ex-military, the Wamd’, or the people through elected parliaments?
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the proliferation and growth of Islamic movements has witnessed the emergence of a lay Islamic elite leadership-modern, educated, Islamically oriented professionals who have been the founders and key leaders of Islamic movements and organizations. Their role as Islamic actors and their professional expertise have challenged the traditional monopoly of the `ulamd’ (the learned) as religious leaders and interpreters of Islam. Islam in theory knows no clergy and the right of personal interpretation (ijtihdd) technically belongs to all qualified Muslims, but historically the `ulamd’ did constitute themselves as a professional class. The complex nature and the multiple disciplines necessary to address many modern political, economic, and social issues that are beyond the traditional areas of competence of most `ulamd’, have led some to question of the need to broaden the definition of what constitutes a qualified scholar. Is there now a new Wamd’, a new class of `ulamd’? Or should the `ulamd’ retain their authority as religious scholars based on their training in religion (knowledge of the Qur’an, sunnah, shad’ah) but now in complex decision making advise or be advised by “modern experts”?
“What Islam?” Does the reassertion of Islam in Muslim public life mean a process of restoration or reformation? Does the creation of more Islamically oriented societies require the wholesale reintroduction of classical Islamic law, developed in the early centuries of Islam, or will it require a substantial reformulation of Islam? At the heart of contemporary Islamic revivalism are a series of key issues that concern the nature and development of Islam. Whether it be issues of marriage and divorce, the nature of the state and political participation, or the status and role of women and minorities in society, the issue of change in Islam and the role of traditional concepts such as personal interpretation, community consensus, and consultation (shurd) have become pivotal.
Some believe that the Islamic paradigm is fixed in classical Islamic law, but others distinguish between shad`ah and fiqh, human understanding, interpretation, and application of shad `ah. The latter would argue that Muslims must distinguish between those elements of Islamic law which are immutable and those that are the product of human interpretation and thus are capable of change and reform in light of new historical circumstances and social conditions. Similarly, although community consensus traditionally was reduced to the opinion or consensus of the `ulamd’ and consultation referred to the ruler’s consultation with political and religious elites, today many, though certainly not all Muslims, transform or reconceptualize these concepts to support parliamentary systems of government and decision making.
However, the status of non-Muslims and the implications of political pluralism remain significant contemporary Islamic questions. The record of Islamic experiments in Pakistan, Iran, and Sudan raises serious questions about the rights of women and minorities under Islamically oriented governments. The extent to which the growth of Islamic revivalism has been accompanied in some countries by attempts to restrict women’s rights, to separate women and men in public, to enforce veiling, and to restrict women’s public roles in society strikes fear in some segments of Muslim society and challenges the credibility of those who call for islamization of state and society. The record of discrimination against the Baha’Y in Iran and the Ahmadi in Pakistan as “deviant” groups (heretical offshoots of Islam), against Christians in Sudan, and Arab Jews in Syria, as well as increased communal sectarian conflict between Muslims and Christians in Egypt and Nigeria, pose similar questions of religious pluralism and tolerance. Without a reinterpretation of classical Islamic law to safeguard the rights of non-Muslim minorities as “protected people,” Islamic states today would have a weak pluralistic profile which would restrict the participation of minorities and limit their rights and opportunities.
Substantive religious/intellectual reform has lagged behind and thus not informed much of Islamic political and social activism. Islamic movements continue to be challenged to move beyond slogans and vague promises to concrete socioeconomic programs, to bridge the gap between traditional Islamic belief/institutions and the sociopolitical realities of the contemporary world. They are increasingly challenged to demonstrate their ability to be effective problem solvers, not just social critics, who can transform ideological commitment and slogans into concrete policies and programs that respond to national and local concerns in diverse sociopolitical contexts. They must do this in a manner that is pluralistic enough in scope to enjoy the support of a broad and diverse constituency, fellow activists, secularists, religious/ethnic minorities, and that broad-based majority of Muslims who, while wishing to be good Muslims, do not want to see the stability of their societies and their lives disrupted.
The history of the Islamic community has spanned more than fourteen centuries. As in the past Islam continues to be a vibrant and dynamic religious tradition, providing guidance for almost one-fifth of the world’s population, continuing to grow and expand geographically, facing new problems and issues. There are often as many differences as similarities in Muslim interpretations of the nature of the state, Islamic law, the status of women and minorities as there are sharp differences regarding implementation of an Islamic order or system of government. For many Muslims, Islamic revivalism is a social rather than a political movement whose goal is a more Islamically minded and oriented society but not necessarily the creation of an Islamic state. For others, the establishment of an Islamic order requires the creation of an Islamic state. Thus, there is today, as in the past, a rich diversity of interpretations and applications of Islam. As with other religions and religious communities, Muslims continue to grapple with the role and relevance of Islam, and, in the process, demonstrate both the unity and diversity of Islam.
[See also Allah; Muhammad; Qur’an; Shi i Islam; and Sunny Islam. In addition, see entries on the figures and organizations mentioned as well as entries on specific countries.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayubi, Nazih. Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World. London and New York, i991.
Esposito, John L., ed. Islam in Asia: Religion, Politics, and Society. New York and Oxford, 1987.
Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path. Exp. ed. New York and Oxford, 1991.
Esposito, John L. Islam and Politics. 3d ed. Syracuse, N.Y., 1991. Esposito, John L. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? New York and Oxford, 1992.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, et al., eds. The Contemporary Islamic Revival: A Critical Survey and Bibliography. New York, 1991. Piscatori, J. P., ed. Islam in the Political Process. Cambridge, 1983. Voll, John Obert. “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islah.” In Voices of Resurgent Islam, edited by John L. Esposito, pp. 32-47. New York and Oxford, 1983.
Voll, John Obert. Islam, Continuity, and Change in the Modern World. 2d ed. Syracuse, N.Y., 1994
JOHN L. EsposITO

Ms. Jewellee

Batoota — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 17:07:10 +0000

I am a new Muslim. I am writing to tell you ‘why’ I converted to Islam, but it’s going to be more like ‘how.’
Last year, at the age of 23, I was trying to open an import/export company to sell children’s books overseas. Much thought went into my decision to work with Saudi Arabia above any other country. After contacting the Saudi Arabia Commercial Office at the Royal Embassy in Washington DC, I learned that all contracts with my sponsor must be in Arabic to be binding. That prompted me to study Arabic so I would know what I was signing. I went to a local language school where I took classes with a private tutor named Suad. She was one of the nicest people I ever met as well as one of the most religious. All the books, tapes, and videos that I studied from centered on Islam (Ifta Ya Sim Sim, etc.), so without realizing it I was learning about Islam all along! I was not brought up with any Stories of New Muslims religious indoctrination. I knew the basics, but I had never gone to church.
The same time this was going on, I was having the hardest time in my life. I was on the east coast and my family was on the west coast, the friends I had were not acting like the ‘quality’ kind of people I knew I needed to hang around with, and I had really difficult money problems (who doesn’t). I was crying almost every day. I never felt more alone in my life. It was affecting my job and my Arabic classes. Suad noticed, and she was always there to listen. She gave the best advice (Islamic), and she was always right. She told me that if I just submitted myself to God completely, he would take away all the pain and loneliness I was feeling. That was on a Thursday. That night, I asked God to help me, when I woke up the next day I felt completely relieved of all my pain. I could say “God will take care of it” out loud and mean it. I spent that weekend talking to Suad about Islam and I learned that I knew more about Islam than I thought! On Sunday I did my Shahada at an Islamic Women’s Group meeting. The next Friday, January 20, 1995, after the noon prayer, I did my open Shahada at the Masjid Dal Hijrah in Falls Church, Virginia. Ramadhan started shortly after that, and I went to Mecca for Umrah at the end of Ramadhan (last 10 days). It has been the best thing I ever did in my life and I never looked back.
My experiences with Islam have shown me that if you follow God’s direction (awkward to call it law because it’s much more than that) you will have everything you need and often what you want, enshallah. Faith in Allah is the best advantage anyone could ever give themselves!

“My Path to Islam”

Batoota — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:01:39 +0000

By C. Huda Dodge
Salaam alaykum wa rahmatullah.
Since I have started reading and posting on this newsgroup a few months ago, I have noticed a great interest in converts (reverts) to Islam: how are people introduced to it, what attracts people to this faith, how their life changes when they embrace Islam, etc. I have received a lot of e-mail from people asking me these questions. In this post, I hope insha’Allah to address how, when and why an American like myself came to embrace Islam. It’s long, and I’m sorry for that, but I don’t think you can fully understand this process from a few paragraphs. I tried not to ramble on or get off on tangents. At times the story is detailed, because I think it helps to truly understand how my path to Islam developed. Of course, there’s a lot I left out (I’m not trying to tell you my whole life story – just the pertinent stuff).
It’s interesting for me to look back on my life and see how it all fits together – how Allah planned this for me all along. When I think about it, I can’t help saying `Subhannallah,’ and thank Allah for bringing me to where I am today. At other times, I feel sad that I was not born into Islam and [thereby] been a Muslim all my life. While I admire those who were, I at times pity them because sometimes they don’t really appreciate this blessing. Insha’Allah, reading this can help you understand how I, at least, came to be a Muslim. Whether it gives you ideas for da’wah, or just gives you some inspiration in your own faith, I hope it is worth your time to read it, insha’Allah. It is my story, but I think a lot of others might see themselves in it. I was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in a Bay Area suburb. My small town (San Anselmo, pop. about 14,000 last I checked) was a mostly white, upper-middle-class, Christian community. It is a beautiful area – just north of San Francisco (across the Golden Gate Bridge), nestled in a valley near the hillsides (Mount Tamalpais) and the Pacific Ocean. I knew all of my neighbors, played baseball in the street, caught frogs in the creeks, rode horses in the hills, and climbed trees in my front yard. My father is Presbyterian, and my mother is Catholic. My father was never really active in any church, but my mother tried to raise us as Catholics. She took us to church sometimes, but we didn’t know what was going on. People stand up, sit down, kneel, sit again, stand up, and recite things after the priest. Each pew had a booklet – a kind of `direction book’ –and we had to follow along in order to know what to do next (if we didn’t fall asleep first). I was baptized in this church, and received my First Communion at about the age of 8 (I have pictures, but I don’t remember it much). After that, we only went about once a year.
I lived on a dead-end street of about 15 houses. My grammar school was at the end of the street (4 houses down), next to a small Presbyterian church. When I was about 10, the people of this church invited me to participate in their children’s Christmas play. Every Sunday morning from then on, I walked down to church alone (no one else in my family was interested in coming). The whole congregation was only about 30 older people (past their 50’s), but they were nice and never made me feel out of place. There were about 3 younger couples with children younger than me. I became a very active member of this church down the street. When I was in 6th grade, I started babysitting the younger kids during the service. By 9th grade, I was helping the minister’s wife teach Sunday school. In high school, I started a church youth group by recruiting 4 of my friends to join me. It was a small group: me, my friends, and a young couple with kids, but we liked it that way. The big Presbyterian Church in town had about 100 kids in their youth group and took trips to Mexico, etc. But our group was content to get together to study the bible, talk about God, and raise money for charities.
These friends and I would sit together and talk about spiritual issues. We debated about questions in our minds: what happens to the people who lived before Jesus came (go to heaven or hell); why do some very righteous people automatically go to hell just because they don’t believe in Jesus (we thought about Gandhi); on the other hand, why do some pretty horrible people (like my friend’s abusive father) get rewarded with heaven just because they’re Christian; why does a loving and merciful God require a blood sacrifice (Jesus) to forgive people’s sins; why are we guilty of Adam’s original sin; why does the Word of God (Bible) disagree with scientific facts; how can Jesus be God; how can One God be 3 different things; etc. We debated about these things, but never came up with good answers. The church couldn’t give us good answers either; they only told us to “have faith.” The people at church told me about a Presbyterian summer camp in Northern California. I went for the first time when I was 10.
For the next 7 years, I went every summer. While I was happy with the little church I went to, this is where I really felt in touch with God, without confusion. It was here that I developed my very deep faith in God. We spent much of our time outdoors, playing games, doing crafts, swimming, etc. It was fun, but every day we would also take time out to pray, study the bible, sing spiritual songs, and have `quiet time.’ It is this quiet time that really meant a lot to me, and of which I have the best memories. The rule was that you had to sit alone – anywhere on the camp’s 200 beautiful acres. I would often go to a meadow, or sit on a bridge overlooking the creek, and just THINK. I looked around me, at the creek, the trees, the clouds, the bugs listened to the water, the birds’ songs, the crickets’ chirps. This place really let me feel at peace, and I admired and thanked God for His beautiful creation. At the end of each summer, when I returned back home, this feeling stayed with me. I loved to spend time outdoors, alone, to just think about God, life, and my place in it.
I developed my personal understanding of Jesus’ role as a teacher and example, and left all the confusing church teachings behind. I believed (and still do) in the teaching “Love your neighbor as yourself,” fully giving to others without expecting anything in return, treating others as you would like to be treated. I strived to help everyone I could. When I was fourteen, I got my first job, at an ice cream store. When I got my paycheck each month (it wasn’t much), I sent the first $25 to a program called `Foster Parents Plan’ (they’ve changed the name now). This was a charity that hooked up needy children overseas with American sponsors. During my 4 years of high school, I was a sponsor for a young Egyptian boy named Sherif. I sent him part of my paycheck each month, and we exchanged letters. (His letters were in Arabic, and looking at them now, it appears that he believed he was writing to an adult man, not a girl 5 years older than him.) He was 9 years old, his father was dead, and his mother was ill and couldn’t work. He had 2 younger brothers and a sister my age. I remember getting a letter from him when I was 16 – he was excited because his sister had gotten engaged. I thought, “She’s the same age as me, and she’s getting engaged!!!” It seemed so foreign to me. These were the first Muslims I had contact with. Aside from this, I was also involved with other activities in high school. I tutored Central American students at my school in English. In a group called “Students for Social Responsibility,” I helped charities for Nicaraguan school children and Kenyan villagers. We campaigned against nuclear arms (the biggest fear we all had at that time was of a nuclear war). I invited exchange students from France into my home, and I had pen pals from all over the world (France, Germany, Sweden, etc.). My junior year of high school, we hosted a group called ‘Children of War’ – a group of young people from South Africa, Gaza Strip, Guatemala, and other war-torn lands, who toured the country telling their stories and their wishes for peace. Two of them stayed at my house – the group’s chaperone from Nicaragua, and a young black South African man.
The summer after my junior year of high school, I took a volunteer job in San Francisco (the Tenderloin district), teaching English to refugee women. In my class were Fatimah and Maysoon, 2 Chinese Muslim widows from Vietnam. These were the next Muslims I met, although we couldn’t talk much (their English was too minimal). All they did was laugh. All of these experiences put me in touch with the outside world, and led me to value people of all kinds. Throughout my youth and high school, I had developed two very deep interests: faith in God, and interacting with people from other countries. When I left home to attend college in Portland, Oregon, I brought these interests with me. At Lewis & Clark College, I started out as a Foreign Language (French & Spanish) major, with a thought to one day work with refugee populations, or teach English as a Second Language. When I arrived at school, I moved into a dorm room with two others – a girl from California (who grew up only 10 minutes from where I did), and a 29-year-old Japanese woman (exchange student). I was 17. I didn’t know anyone else at school, so I tried to get involved in activities to meet people. In line with my interests, I chose to get involved with 2 groups: Campus Crusade for Christ (obviously, a Christian group), and Conversation Groups (where they match Americans up with a group of international students to practice English).
I met with the Campus Crusade students during my first term of school. A few of the people that I met were very nice, pure-hearted people, but the majority was very ostentatious. We got together every week to listen to “personal testimonies,” sing songs, etc. Every week we visited a different church in the Portland area. Most of the churches were unlike anything I’d ever been exposed to before. One final visit to a church in the Southeast area freaked me out so much that I quit going to the Crusade meetings. At this church, there was a rock band with electric guitars, and people were waving their hands in the air (above their heads, with their eyes closed) and singing “hallelujah.” I had never seen anything like it! I see things like this now on TV, but coming from a very small Presbyterian church, I was disturbed. Others in Campus Crusade loved this church, and they continue to go. The atmosphere seemed so far removed from the worship of God, and I didn’t feel comfortable returning.
I always felt closest to God when I was in a quiet setting and/or outdoors. I started taking walks around campus (Lewis & Clark College has a beautiful campus!), sitting on benches, looking at the view of Mount Hood, watching the trees change colors. One day I wandered into the campus chapel – a small, round building nestled in the trees. It was beautifully simple. The pews formed a circle around the center of the room, and a huge pipe organ hung from the ceiling in the middle. No altar, no crosses, no statues – nothing. Just some simple wood benches and a pipe organ. During the rest of the year, I spent a lot of time in this building, listening to the organist practice, or just sitting alone in the quiet to think. I felt more comfortable and close to God there than at any church I had ever been to. During this time, I was also meeting with a group of international students as part of the Conversation Group program. We had 5 people in our group: me, a Japanese man and woman, an Italian man and a Palestinian man. We met twice a week over lunch, to practice English conversation skills. We talked about our families, our studies, our childhoods, cultural differences, etc. As I listened to the Palestinian man (Faris) talk about his life, his family, his faith, etc., it struck a nerve in me. I remembered Sherif, Fatima and Maysoon, the only other Muslims I had ever known. Previously, I had seen their beliefs and way of life as foreign, something that was alien to my culture. I never bothered to learn about their faith because of this cultural barrier. But the more I learned about Islam, the more I became interested in it as a possibility for my own life.
During my second term of school, the conversation group disbanded and the international students transferred to other schools.The discussions we had, however, stayed at the front of my thoughts. The following term, I registered for a class in the religious studies department: Introduction to Islam. This class brought back all of the concerns that I had about Christianity. As I learned about Islam, all of my questions were answered. All of us are not punished for Adam’s original sin. Adam asked God for forgiveness and our Merciful and Loving God forgave him. God doesn’t require a blood sacrifice in payment for sin. We must sincerely ask for forgiveness and amend our ways. Jesus wasn’t God, he was a prophet, like all of the other prophets, who all taught the same message: Believe in the One true God; worship and submit to Him alone; and live a righteous life according to the guidance He has sent. This answered all of my questions about the trinity and the nature of Jesus (all God, all human, or a combination). God is a Perfect and Fair Judge, who will reward or punish us based on our faith and righteousness.
I found a teaching that put everything in its proper perspective, and appealed to my heart and my intellect. It seemed natural. It wasn’t confusing. I had been searching, and I had found a place to rest my faith. That summer, I returned home to the Bay Area and continued my studies of Islam. I checked books out of the library and talked with my friends. They were as deeply spiritual as I was, and had also been searching (most of them were looking into eastern religions, Buddhism in particular). They understood my search, and were happy I could find something to believe in. They raised questions, though, about how Islam would affect my life: as a woman, as a liberal Californian , with my family, etc. I continued to study, pray and soul-search to see how comfortable I really was with it. I sought out Islamic centers in my area, but the closest one was in San Francisco, and I never got there to visit (no car, and bus schedules didn’t fit with my work schedule). So I continued to search on my own. When it came up in conversation, I talked to my family about it. I remember one time in particular, when we were all watching a public television program about the Eskimos. They said that the Eskimos have over 200 words for `snow,’ because snow is such a big part of their life. Later that night, we were talking about how different languages have many words for things that are important to them. My father commented about all the different words Americans use for `money’ (money, dough, bread, etc.). I commented, “You know, the Muslims have 99 names for God – I guess that’s what is important to them.”
At the end of the summer, I returned to Lewis & Clark. The first thing I did was contact the mosque in southwest Portland. I asked for the name of a woman I could talk to, and they gave me the number of a Muslim American sister. That week, I visited her at home. After talking for a while, she realized that I was already a believer. I told her I was just looking for some women who could help guide me in the practicalities of what it meant to be a Muslim. For example, how to pray. I had read it in books, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it just from books. I made attempts, and prayed in English, but I knew I wasn’t doing it right. The sister invited me that night to an aqiqa (dinner after the birth of a new baby). She picked me up that night and we went. I felt so comfortable with the Muslim sisters there, and they were very friendly to me that night. I said my shahaada, witnessed by a few sisters. They taught me how to pray. They talked to me about their own faith (many of them were also American). I left that night feeling like I had just started a new life.
I was still living in a campus dorm, and was pretty isolated from the Muslim community. I had to take 2 buses to get to the area where the mosque was (and where most of the women lived). I quickly lost touch with the women I met, and was left to pursue my faith on my own at school. I made a few attempts to go to the mosque, but was confused by the meeting times. Sometimes I’d show up to borrow some books from the library, and the whole building would be full of men. Another time I decided to go to my first Jumah prayer, and I couldn’t go in for the same reason. Later, I was told that women only meet at a certain time (Saturday afternoon), and that I couldn’t go at other times. I was discouraged and confused, but I continued to have faith and learn on my own.
Six months after my shahaada, I observed my first Ramadan. I had been contemplating the issue of Hijab, but was too scared to take that step before. I had already begun to dress more modestly, and usually wore a scarf over my shoulders (when I visited the sister, she told me “all you have to do is move that scarf from your shoulders to your head, and you’ll be Islamically dressed.”). At first I didn’t feel ready to wear Hijab, because I didn’t feel strong enough in my faith. I understood the reason for it, agreed with it, and admired the women who did wear it. They looked so pious and noble. But I knew that if I wore it, people would ask me a lot of questions, and I didn’t feel ready or strong enough to deal with that. This changed as Ramadan approached, and on the first day of Ramadan, I woke up and went to class in Hijab. Alhamdillah, I haven’t taken it off since.
Something about Ramadan helped me to feel strong, and proud to be a Muslim. I felt ready to answer anybody’s questions. However, I also felt isolated and lonely during that first Ramadan. No one from the Muslim community even called me. I was on a meal plan at school, so I had to arrange to get special meals (the dining hall wasn’t open during the hours I could eat). The school agreed to give me my meals in bag lunches. So every night as sundown approached, I’d walk across the street to the kitchen, go in the back to the huge refrigerators, and take my 2 bag lunches (one for fitoor, one for suhoor). I’d bring the bags back to my dorm room and eat alone. They always had the same thing: yoghurt, a piece of fruit, cookies, and either a tuna or egg salad sandwich. The same thing, for both meals, for the whole month. I was lonely, but at the same time I had never felt more at peace with myself.
When I embraced Islam, I told my family. They were not surprised. They kind of saw it coming, from my actions and what I said when I was home that summer. They accepted my decision, and knew that I was sincere. Even before, my family always accepted my activities and my deep faith, even if they didn’t share it. They were not as open-minded, however, when I started to wear Hijab. They worried that I was cutting myself off from society that I would be discriminated against, that it would discourage me from reaching my goals, and they were embarrassed to be seen with me. They thought it was too radical. They didn’t mind if I had a different faith, but they didn’t like it to affect my life in an outward way. They were more upset when I decided to get married. During this time, I had gotten back in touch with Faris, the Muslim Palestinian brother of my conversation group, the one who first prompted my interest in Islam. He was still in the Portland area, attending the community college. We started meeting again, over lunch, in the library, at his brother’s house, etc. We were married the following summer (after my sophomore year, a year after my shahaada). My family freaked out.
They weren’t quite yet over my Hijab, and they felt like I had thrown something else at them. They argued that I was too young, and worried that I would abandon my goals, drop out of school, become a young mother, and destroy my life. They liked my husband, but didn’t trust him at first (they were thinking `green card scam’). My family and I fought over this for several months, and I feared that our relationship would never be repaired.
That was 3 years ago, and a lot has changed. Faris and I moved to Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State University. We live in a very strong and close-knit Muslim community. I graduated magna cum laude last year, with a degree in child development. I have had several jobs, from secretary to preschool teacher, with no problems about my Hijab. I’m active in the community, and still do volunteer work. My husband, insha’Allah, will finish his Electrical Engineering degree this year. We visit my family a couple of times a year. I met Faris’ parents for the first time this summer, and we get along great.
I’m slowly but surely adding Arabic to the list of languages I speak. My family has seen all of this, and has recognized that I didn’t destroy my life. They see that Islam has brought me happiness, not pain and sorrow. They are proud of my accomplishments, and can see that I am truly happy and at peace. Our relationship is back to normal, and they are looking forward to our visit next month, insha’Allah. Looking back on all of this, I feel truly grateful that Allah has guided me to where I am today. I truly feel blessed. It seems that all of the pieces of my life fit together in a pattern – a path to Islam.
Alhamdillillahi rabi al’amin.
Your sister in faith,
C. Huda Dodge
“.Say: Allah’s guidance is the only guidance, and we have been directed to submit ourselves to the Lord of the Worlds..” Qur’an
(6:71)

Anis Ahmad

Batoota — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Dr. Anis Ahmad is a social scientist; he specializes in Islamic Studies and is Meritorious Professor of Comparative Religion. He is Vice Chancellor of Riphah International University, Islamabad. He is also Editor-in-Chief of West and Islam, an Academic journal Published from Islamabad.He has held numerous academic leadership positions both nationally and internationally. He is former Vice President of International Islamic University, Islamabad and former Dean, Faculty of Human Sciences, International Islamic University, Malaysia. He writes on contemporary social, political and cultural issues faced by the Muslim Ummah.Education:He carries a Ph.D. from the Temple University, Pennsylvania, USA.Academic Responsibilities Held in Past:

Dean, Faculty of Islamic Revealed Knowledge & Human Sciences, International Islamic University, Malaysia.
Vice President, International Islamic University, Islamabad.

Founder Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, International Islamic University, Islamabad.

Founder Dean, Faculty of Usul-al-Din, International Islamic University, Islamabad.

Founder Director General of the Da’wah Academy of International Islamic University, Islamabad.

Vice Chairman, Institute of Policy Studies Islamabad.

President, Association of Muslim Social Scientists, U.S.A

Teacing Experience:

The Appalachian State University, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Lanzho University, China
The Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
International Islamic University, Malaysia.

International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
The Karachi University, Karachi, Pakistan.
National Defense Universities, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Foreign Service Academy, Islamabad, Pakistan.

Federal Judicial Academy, Islamabad.
National Institutes of Public Administration, Pakistan.

Staff Colleges and War Colleges.
Shari’ah Academy of the IIU, Islamabad and other academic institutions.

Special awards:
University Fellow (1969–1971), Temple University, Philadelphia
Publications

Secularism: A pseudo – Religion in Islam and the Secular Mind, Karachi 2008.
Fundamentalism, Extremism and Islam in Criticism, Islamabad, 2007.
Family in Pakistan: Challenges and prospects” in Dr Umar caha, Ed..Gunumuzde Aile Istanbul, 2007.
Theoretical Foundations of Islamic Bio-Medical Ethics, in Journal of Islamic International Medical College, Islamabad, Vol.No.1 2006.
’Iran and Future of Peace in the Region’’ The West and Islam vol xi, no 1-2 Islamabad, July 2007.
Women and Social Justice: An Islamic Paradigm, Islamabad (Pakistan), Institute Of Policy Studies.
Kaden Ve Sosyal Adalet, Beyan Yayinlari, Istanbul (Turkey).
Al-nisa al-Muslim at wa al-ta’lim al-ali, Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States, (Arabic).
Muslim Women and Higher Education, Islamabad (Pakistan), Institute of Policy studies,
Islamic Da’wah Programmes and Prospect, Monograph, Islamabad (Pakistan), International Islamic University.
Islah-i-Mu’ashrah: Some Ideas For Islamic Social Reform, Monograph, Islamabad (Pakistan), International Islamic University.
Mashahir-I-Islam, Karachi, Jamiat al-Falah, Tr. Ed.(Urdu).
“Ramadan”, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World New York, 1995, Vol. 3.
“Sayyed Abul A’la Mawdudi: Life and works”, Encyclopedia of Islam, Istanbul, Turkey.
“Shibli Nu’mani: life and Works,”Encyclopedia of Islam ,Istanbul, Turkey.
“Family in Pakistan”, Worldwide State of Family, ed. Gordon L. Anderson, St. Paul. Minnesota, PWPA, 1995.
“Cultural Clash in a New Context”, West and Islam (Quarterly Urdu), Institute of Policy studies (IPS), Islamabad, NO.19, Vol.5, issue 4, October–December 2001.
“Islam and Muslims from an American Perspective”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad No. 18, Vol. 5, Issue 3, July–September 2001.
“Muslims Countries, Democratic Traditions and Islam”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad No. 17. Vol., Issue 2, April–June 2001.
“A Clash of Civilizations or a Dialogue”, West and Islam IPS, Islamabad No. 16, Vol. 5, Issue 1, January–March 2001.
“A Century of Islamic Revivalist Movements”, West and Islam IPS, Islamabad No. 13, Vol. 4, Issue 2, April–June 2001.
“West and Islam: The changing Perspectives”, West and Islam IPS, Vol. 3, Issue 4, October–December 1999.
“Secularism, Fundamentalism and Development”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad, Vol. 3, Issue 3, July September 1999.
“Modern Movements for Revival and Ijtehad”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 9, Vol. 3, Issue 2, April–June 1999.
“Modernism, Reform and Revival II’, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 8, January–March 1999.
“Modernism, Reform and Revival II’, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 7, October–December 1998.
“The Muslim Minorities Problems and Prospects”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 6, July–September 1998.
“Intellectual and Cultural Colonialism”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 5, April–June 1998.
“Islam and Liberation of Women”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 4, January–March 1998.
“West and its Political Apprehensions”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 3, October–December 1997.
“Fundamentalism: An Analysis”, West and Islam, IPS, Islamabad. No. 2, July–September 1997.
“Political Economy: An Islamic Paradigm”, proceedings in 2nd International Business Forum, Istanbul (Turkey). Nov 96, P1-25.
“Islamic Philosophy of Education”, proceedings in COMMECS, Karachi (Pakistan) May 1996.
“Islamic Movements as Agents of Social change: Framework for Analysis”, proceedings in International Conference on Islam & Change, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). 1996, P 1-27.
“Islamization of Laws and Economy: Case Studies on Pakistan”, introduction at Seminar at institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad (Pakistan). 1996, P11-31.
“Use of Technology for Training of Da’wah”, proceedings in International Conference on Role of University in Da’wah, Al-Azhar University Cairo (Egypt). April 1987.
“Towards a Long-Term Strategy for Islamic Education”, proceedings in Regional Islamic Education Seminar, PERKIM, Kuala Lumpur. Nov 1986.
“Pakistan”, Political Handbook of the World, ed. Arthur S. Banks, New York (McGraw-Hill Book Co.).1979.
“Opinion Formation in Islam”, proceedings in The Association of Muslim Social Scientists, Gray, Indiana. May 1974.
“Islam and the Oppressed Sex”, al-lttihad (Quarterly journal of Islamic Studies), Plainfield, Indiana. Vol.15, No. 1.
“The Miracle called Qur’an at the Mercy of Charlatans“, al-lttihad, Plainfield, Indiana. Vol. 15, No. 1.
“Introducing the Qur’an”, The Voice of Islam, Karachi (Pakistan). June 1968.
“Personal Liberty In Islam”, paper read at the Fourth All-Pakistan Political Science Conference and published in Proceedings of All-Pakistan Political Science Society. Reproduced by the Al-Muarif (Journal of the Institute of Islamic Culture), Lahore. June 1968.
“The Concept of Man in the Qur’an”, paper read at the All-Pakistan Philosophical Congress in May, 1966. Published in Fikro-Nazar (Journal of the Central Institute of Islamic Research), Rawalpindi (Pakistan). September 1966.
“Educational Thought of Ibn-e-Khaldun”, paper read at the Sixteenth All-Pakistan History Conference at Karachi in 1958, published in the Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, Karachi (Pakistan). Vol. XVI, Parts II & III, 1958.

Articles

Encyclopedia of Islam, Istanbul, Turkey.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Muslim World, N.Y., USA
The Muslim World Book Review, Leicester, UK.
The Policy Perspective, Islamabad.Pk.

Participation in International Conferences

Keynote addresses and talks delivered in International conferences, Seminars and Workshops in: Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Guyana, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nepal, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sri Lanks, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the USA among others.