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Confronting Religious Extremism in the New Silk Web
Abstract
The rise in religious extremism is highly documented, but not well understood. The most frequently cited explanations are economic and sociological. However, the specific role of religion has received far less attention and is often glossed within social-scientific analysis. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the rise of religious ideology in pre-modern Indian Muslim thought and to draw attention to the importance of religious narratives in causing and possibly resolving violent religious extremism in Southwest Asia. This historic setting, more than any other, informs the trajectory of competing religious expressions of Islam. Two positions are considered because of their polar responses to similar phenomenon. These proceed from the same school of thought, and overlap considerably in the use of interpretative methodologies, yet they articulate radically different visions for fidelity to Islam. One has been used to legitimize and mobilize extremist violence in order to establish a righteous society, the other to advocate for a pluralistic participation with the secular state. Their shared roots allow for a juxtaposition that allows for a cursory description of the challenges faced within the Muslim community to retain fidelity to some most cherished values. It is argued that within the Muslim religious intellectual tradition there are ample resources to support a dynamic and pluralistic society. The identification and promotion of these values is essential to halting the spread of violent extremism. Interventions need to promote proponents of this narrative and avoid practices that further alienate and limit the natural outworking of this dialogue within Muslim communities.
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This volume collects the published essays of the late Professor Hourani on Islamic ethics in the earlier classical and formative periods of Islamic civilization. Ethics was from the start at the core of Islam, and the construction of philosophical theories to support normative ethics made those centuries among the most profound and intensely active in the history of ethical thought. The book opens with two general and contextual pieces and thereafter it is organized by schools of thought in a broadly chronological order. The essays centre around two related debates in Islamic philosophy: over the ontological status of value, and over the sources of our knowledge of value. The answers developed follow similar lines to the rational theology and philosophy of the West, and Professor Hourani brings out the frequent parallels. As a whole, the volume will introduce and establish the importance of the Islamic tradition of thought about ethics.
Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents-the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it-are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization. These forces have increasingly tested Islam and Islamic civilization for validity, adaptability, and the ability to hold on to the loyalty of Muslims, says Ali A. Allawi in his provocative new book. While the faith has proved resilient in the face of these challenges, other aspects of Islamic civilization have atrophied or died, Allawi contends, and Islamic civilization is now undergoing its last crisis. The book explores how Islamic civilization began to unravel under colonial rule, as its institutions, laws, and economies were often replaced by inadequate modern equivalents. Allawi also examines the backlash expressed through the increasing religiosity of Muslim societies and the spectacular rise of political Islam and its terrorist offshoots. Assessing the status of each of the building blocks of Islamic civilization, the author concludes that Islamic civilization cannot survive without the vital spirituality that underpinned it in the past. He identifies a key set of principles for moving forward, principles that will surprise some and anger others, yet clearly must be considered.
Sometime towards the end of the sixth/twelfth century, a prominent preacher in Baghdād wrote the following: Say, 'O you unbelievers, (1) I do not worship what you worship (2) and you do not worship what I worship. (3) I am not a worshipper of what you worship (4) and you are not worshippers of what I worship. (5) Your religion is for you and mine is for me.'(6) There are two views about this verse: (1) Ibn Mas'ūd, al-Hasan and the majority say that it is Meccan. (2) It was reported on the authority of Qatāda to be Medinan. There are three different opinions about the occasion of its revelation: (1) a group of Quraysh, including al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra, al-'ds b. Wā'il and al-Aswad b. 'Abd Yaghūth; met al-'Abbās b. 'Abd al-Muttalib and said, 'O Abū l-Fadl, if your nephew had submitted himself to one of our gods then we would have believed in what he says and we would certainly have believed in his god.' So al-'Abbās came and told him [Muhammad] this and at that this sūra was revealed. Abū Sālih reported this on the authority of Ibn 'Abbās. (2) 'Utba b. Rabī'a and Umayya b. Khalaf met God's messenger and said, 'O Muhammad, we shall not leave you alone until you follow our religion and we follow yours. If ours is the right course, you will take your share of it. If yours is the right course, we will take our share of it.' At that this sūra was revealed. 'Ubayd b. 'Umayr said so. (3) The Quraysh said to the Prophet, 'If it please you we will follow your religion for a year and you will return to our religion for a year.' At that this sūra was revealed. Wahb reported it. Muqātil reported others to have said: 'This sūra was revealed about Abū Jahl and about “the mockers”. Of those about whom it was revealed, not one ever became a believer.' © Cambridge University Press 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2007.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States declared war on terrorism. More than ten years later, the results are decidedly mixed. Here world-renowned author, diplomat, and scholar Akbar Ahmed reveals an important yet largely ignored result of this war: in many nations it has exacerbated the already broken relationship between central governments and the largely rural Muslim tribal societies on the peripheries of both Muslim and non-Muslim nations. The center and the periphery are engaged in a mutually destructive civil war across the globe, a conflict that has been intensified by the war on terror.
The flowering of the 'Abbasid caliphate between 750 and 1258 CE is often considered the classical age of Islamic civilization. In the preceding 120 years, the Arabs - inspired by their powerful new version of Abrahamic monotheism, Islam - had conquered much of the known world of antiquity and established a vast empire stretching from Spain to China. But was this empire really so very different, as has sometimes been claimed, from what it superseded? The Great Caliphs explores the immense achievements of the 'Abbasid age through the lens of Mediterranean history." "When the Umayyad caliphs were replaced by the 'Abbasids in 750, and the Arab capital moved to the purpose-built city of Baghdad, Iraq quickly became the centre not only of an imperium but also of a culture built on the foundations of the great civilizations of antiquity: Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Persia. Debunking popular misconceptions about the Arab conquests, Amira Bennison shows that, far from seeing themselves as -- purging the 'occidental' culture of the ancient world with a 'pure' and 'oriental' Islamic doctrine, the 'Abbasids perceived themselves to be as much within the tradition of Mediterranean and Near Eastern empire as any of their predecessors. Like other outsiders who inherited the Roman Empire, the Arabs had as much interest in preserving as in destroying, even while they were challenged by the paganism of the past. Indebted to that past while building creatively on its foundations, the 'Abbasids and their rulers inculcated and nurtured precisely the 'civilized' values which western civilization so often purports to represent, sometimes in apparent opposition to Islam. The Great Caliphs shows what a huge debt Europe in fact owes to these remarkable Muslim rulers.
From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world.While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere.This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.
"In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions.
In this paper I will argue that the religious nationalisms that gave rise to Pakistan and Israel, took shape in an international arena and cannot be studied as part of regional histories alone. It is not simply a coincidence, therefore, that the Jewish State and Islamic Republic share so much in the way of ideology and even politics, despite the narratives of exceptionality within which they have hitherto been mired. Indeed most of these accounts, which take a nineteenth century model of the nation state as their conceptual framework, are belied by the words and deeds of the Zionists and Muslim nationalists who created these twentieth century states. For Israel and Pakistan were both founded in the wake of a world war that destroyed the kind of nationality whose claims to autochthony were couched in the language of Romanticism. And so the task I have set myself is to describe the religious state not only as a modern political form, whose international dispersal prevents it from becoming a regional exception, but also as one that poses a challenge to nationalism itself, if only by questioning its attachment to the territory that makes a common history and culture possible. Both established in the name of minorities and as a result of vast migrations, these religious states have had to reject the principle of territorially based community that gives meaning to majority nations. Pakistan and Israel, I will argue, have opened up new ways of structuring political communities whose consequences go far beyond the highly publicized travails of either one.
Scholarship on Islamic education in India has largely focussed on the colonial period which has contributed to a relative paucity of works on ways in which madaris have organised themselves and contributed to the production of knowledge in the contemporary period. It is only recently that scholars, activists and policy makers have turned their attention towards the madrasa [pl.: madāris] system in India. However, the very agenda of this scrutiny of madaris has meant that the 'object' of study has been within set parameters, which in this case has been Islamic education and its linkages with terrorism. The present paper seeks to understand the workings of a local Deobandi madrasa in North India and to participate in the Indian debate on madrasa education, although not on the agenda set by the post 9/11 academic world.
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