Contemporary Islam Research Articles

The Question of Becoming: Islamic Reform Movements in Contemporary Ethiopia

AbstractFacilitated by a new (since 1991) political climate, enhancing Muslim opportunities for religious expression, several Islamic reform movements have surfaced in Ethiopia. Under consideration here are the Salafi movement, the Tabligh movement and an Intellectualist revivalist movement, each of which was crucial for the reconfiguration of religious affiliation, and served as a channel in the search for belonging and coherent meaning. Discussing the movements' socio-cultural composition and their particular features, this paper pays attention to how issues of locality interact with translocal ideological currents and affect one another. Of particular interest in the Ethiopian case is the explicit avoidance of any political agenda, a distinct intermarriage with a discourse on ethnicity, where the latter has contributed to complex processes of constructing and demarcating religious- and ethnic-based boundaries. The paper thus seeks to demonstrate the complex interrelationship between global currents and local factors, all contributing to the heterogenisation of contemporary Islam.

Mit der Waffe des Islams gegen Zionisten und Anthropomorphisten. Die politische Relevanz mittelalterlicher Theologie im ibāditischen Islam der Gegenwart

AbstractStarting from the polemics of the Ibādī mufti of Oman, Ahmad al-Khalīlī, with Ibn Bāz and other Wahhābī 'ulamā' this paper addresses how representatives of contemporary Islam try to overcome sectarian differences and how they make sense of medieval theological precepts in a radically changed intellectual and political environment. The paper stresses the role of (invented traditions of) resistance against external and internal foes (imperialism and—to a lesser degree—Sufism) as ideological basis for modernist Islamic ecumenism. Remaining sectarian differences are explained by pretending that rival sects are in reality agents of external enemies of Islam. An example of this argumentation is Ahmad al-Khalīlī's effort to remove the Wahhābīs from the fold of Islam by making Wahhābism a Jewish sect with Islamic trappings. For this purpose Ahmad al-Khalīlī recycles premodern Ibādī polemic against the Sunnis at large. Medieval theologoumena are thereby given a present-day political meaning. Without openly attacking the Sultan, the mufti al-Khalīlī's arguments against the Wahhābīs can at the same time be read as a document of opposition against the Omani regime's policies, in a situation where the Sultanate is confronted by a resurgence of political Ibādism.

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought – Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu‐Rabi'

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought – Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu‐Rabi'

Muslim transnationalism in Indo-Guyana

Contemporary cultural processes, comprising tendencies toward transformation and reproduction, are inevitably affected by the (re)formative force of globalization. Increased mobility and intensified interconnectedness have expanded our ability to recreate culture, enforce a redefinition of social realities, and transform power structures. Globalization has thus also had an effect on religious realms. Religious concepts, practices, and organizations everywhere are increasingly subject to transnational forces. This article looks at the intersection of these forces and the local powers that determine religious developments by analyzing contemporary Indo-Guyanese Islam as a manifestation of this connection. Rather than stressing globalization's universalizing propensities, it investigates how local conditions determine the relationship between growing interconnectedness and the development of Muslim faith, practice, and collectivity. It is argued that globalization stirs opposing processes of deculturalization and reculturalization in Guyana because of the economic, social, religious, political, and historical context in which local Muslims consume the fruits of transnationalization.

Liberalism, civilisation and the (non-)oxymoronic limits of tolerance

In a 2002 interview exploring the darker side of modern Western secularism, Talal Asad suggested that instead of trying to fit contemporary Islam within the liberal secular paradigm we might want to ask, ‘What exactly does the liberal mean by tolerance?’ (Shaikh, 2002). Despite the overwhelming abundance of literature conceptualising liberal tolerance, Wendy Brown’s latest book shows that Asad’s question is far from commonplace or rhetorical.Regulating Aversiondissects the anatomy of contemporary liberal discourse of tolerance, challenging the truism that tolerance is an unconditional transcendental virtue, something that has for so long been taken for granted.

Review of R. Michael Feener, Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives

Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by R. Michael Feener, walks a careful line between a generalized study of world Islam and specific analysis of Islam in unique geopolitical settings. This is both its shortcoming and its success, and raises the thorny philosophical problem of how to conduct comparative religion, a question addressed by the editor in the introductory essay but largely ignored in subsequent chapters except to remark that Islam manifests itself differently from country to country. The challenges for such a text are twofold. First, how to account for the vast diversity of Islam as a faith tradition in the contemporary world; and second, if contemporary Islam is best understood through a comparative intrareligious analysis, what does this say about any effort to engage in interreligious comparison? The first challenge – of providing an adequate account of the complexities of world Islam – is gallantly if unevenly attempted. The chapters of the text are divided into geographical areas and written by various scholars expert in each region. The diversity of voices also contributes to a diversity of quality: the Central Asia chapter evocatively accounts for both the history and lived reality of Islam in the former Soviet states, while the chapter on South Asia blandly offers a list of important figures in Asian Muslim history while confining the ethnographic details of Muslim life to an account of political turmoil in Pakistan. More problematic is the selection of regions. The scope of the text is truly global, but its omissions are glaring: no account of Islam in Western or Eastern Europe; the SOPHIA (2007) 46:317–319 DOI 10.1007/s11841-007-0040-5

"Do Prophets Come with a Sword?" Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early Islamic World

IN THE NINTH CENTURY OF THE COMMON ERA, a Christian apologist living and writing under Muslim rule in Iraq repeated a very old critique of Islam. Amma r al-Bas ri wrote that Islam, like the religion of the Banu Isra i l (roughly “the Sons of Israel”), had been spread by the sword, whereas Christianity forbade the use of the sword as a means of promulgating the faith.1 However much we may doubt the assertion that late ancient and early medieval Christians scrupulously abstained from the use of the sword in spreading their religion, the Christian apologist clearly meant to suggest that Islam’s history of faith-driven conquest had made moot any claims that Muslims may have advanced concerning the status of their religion as the one true religion of God upon the Earth.2 In tandem with its theological implications, this Christian author’s critique of Islam’s use of the sword also seems to have taken aim at the early Muslim community or umma’s organizing historical narratives about the origins of the Islamic community itself. For Muslims of the era, the events of the conquest period were recalled as a series of monumental episodes that located contemporary Islam and its adherents within an overarching narrative of prophecy, revelation, and salvation.3 Although Amma r al-Bas ri was a Christian intellectual, he was intimately acquainted

Introduction Special Edition: Australian Muslims and Secularism

Ten years ago, Samuel Huntington (1996) solidified his contentious diagnosis that the world was entering a new phase of geopolitical dynamics, characterized by a clash of primordial civilizations. Academically, his thesis drew scathing criticisms, not least because of his essentialist and ahistorical reification of civilizational blocks (Berman 2003, Said 2001). At a more popular level, however, the image he drew of a globe divided along clear civilizational lines, with Islam and the European/North American/ Australian West representing two of the major opponents, has attained a mythic quality. Indeed, the niceties of academic critique aside, the putative fault line between 'the Islamic world' and 'the West' now serves as a rhetorical justification for what is undoubtedly one of the driving political and social forces of our time, the 'war against terror'. It is equally forcefully used by some Muslim militants to justify engaging in terrorist activities. In an increasingly integrated world, reading and constructing social space in terms of hermetically sealed civilizational blocks has a significant effect on everyone. The most direct impact, however, is on those who find themselves situated at the fault line, Muslim Australians amongst them. Certainly, latent tensions between 'Muslim' and Australian' identifies have long been present in Australian nationalist discourses; but since September 2001, the two parts of the designation Muslim Australian have seemed to pull in diametrically opposed directions. For the people who bear that designation, this means having to negotiate their identity against a novel and often hostile social map. There are no doubt highly convincing reasons for this shift in the way Western countries like Australia have forged an ideational link between Islam and political violence and threat, specifically the appeal to Islam that those responsible for the September 11, Madrid, Bali and London bombings invoked. In truth, however, the link between faith commitments and terrorist activity, is as remote for most Muslim Australians as it is for most Christian, atheist or agnostic Australians. Nevertheless, Muslim Australians are now living in an environment where the significance of their ascribed religion is being reshaped through media discourses, public policy and, at a conceptual level, the newfound salience of the apparent incompatibility of Islam and modern secular political forms and societies. In turn, these shifts in the putative significance of Islam are made manifest both in public institutions (including laws) and the lived experience of Muslims. Muslim Australians, however, just like any other citizens, are not passive recipients of changes in public discourses about their identifies. They are actively responding to the situation by reshaping the public significance of their religious ascription themselves. For some, this has meant vigorously asserting the compatibility of their faith commitments with full and active Australian citizenship. For others, as this volume disturbingly documents, it has meant turning to sources of information and discourses that place Islam at the centre, not at the margins, taking refuge in a more closed and separate sense of identity, and in some cases, imposing these more closed inflexible interpretations of Islamic identity on others, principally women. This special issue of the AJSI originally grew out of a symposium on Islam and Secularism held at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam at Melbourne University at the end of 2005. Some of the papers in this volume were originally presented at that symposium, others, consistent with the concerns of the volume were written subsequently. While the current collection of papers takes a broader focus than the issue of secularism itself, the question of both the compatibility between Islam and secularism and popular perceptions of this compatibility remains a strong theme throughout. …

Trends in Contemporary Islam: A Preliminary Attempt at a Classification

The A. attempts to identify the various trends among Muslims today in terms of their orientations towards law, theological purity, violence, politics, separation of religion and state, practice, modernity and ijtihād. While the study is couched at a general level, it certainly applies to the case of Muslims across Asia.

The Shari'ah Conundrum in Nigeria and the Zamfara Model: The Role of Nigerian Muslim Youth in the Historical Context

One of the outstanding issues in contemporary Islamist revivalism in sub-Saharan Africa is constitutional reform which will ensure the re-enactment of the shari'ah as a main, if not the main, legal system in countries with Muslim majority or where Muslims constitute a sizeable minority. Although shari'ah had always had a restricted sphere of operation, especially in Islamic societies where colonialism had often deprived it of jurisdiction on areas other than family law and religious endowments,1 agitations for its full entrenchment have, like flickering flames poked from dying embers in a grate, always surfaced under new political dispensations. Admittedly, ethnic divisions have always undermined the unity and sovereignty of Nigeria,2 but such divisions and suspicions are often suppressed by stronger factors such as religion. Until 1999, the penal aspect of the shari'ah was all but suspended in Nigeria. But on 21 January 2000, the governor of Zamfara State (North Eastern Nigeria) reintroduced this aspect, and since then, most of the northern Nigerian states, and to a certain extent, some areas in Yorubaland (south-west Nigeria), have equally tried their hands at it. This paper will examine the history of the Islamic legal system in Nigeria and the efforts of the Nigerian youth in promoting or opposing its application and sustenance as a veritable tool for solving contemporary political, social, and economic problems bedeviling the nation.

The Myth of the Neutral State: The relationship between state and religion in the face of new challenges

On a global level, we are witnessing a revitalisation of religion, which also includes a re-politisation of religion, particularly within contemporary Islam. Religion has become, once again, a political topos. The secularised western world is thus facing a new challenge, for which it appears to be inadequately prepared. The idea of freedom of religion, guaranteed as a fundamental right, obliges western democratic states to respect the religious activities of their citizens and to secure their free development. Therefore, the state is principally neither allowed to favour nor to discriminate against certain professions of faith. This concept of equidistance is known as the principle of state neutrality: it commits the state to generally withdraw from religious issues, especially the political act of defining what can legitimately be classified as religion and religious behaviour. The leeway given to the self-conception of religious groups by the German Federal Constitutional Court and its wide understanding of what kind of behaviour has a direct relationship to faith and therefore deserves protection by the freedom of religion, is to be understood against the context of this general principle. However, with regard to the new challenges mentioned above, the neutrality principle increasingly serves yet another purpose. The courts use it as an exit-option in order to avoid addressing problems which appear to be too complex for the law relegating religion to sociological study. In this context, state neutrality merely functions as a chiffre for indifference. But this strategy of avoidance, though understandable in the light of the complexity of religious pluralism, undermines the law's function of conflict resolution. Furthermore, it neither corresponds to the historical development nor to the functional aspects of the idea of religious freedom.

Towards a psycho-anthropological view of religious violence

Understanding the phenomenon of religious violence requires a theoretical approach to the task. Ideally, the theoretical framework must integrate (1) the insights of neurobiology and ethnology elucidating the roots of aggression in the organism and its manifestations in animal behaviour, (2) the expression of these in human violence, which requires careful attention to linguistic and other expressions in culture, (3) the special role of religious representations in this connection, and (4) the mechanisms, in time and place, whereby the role of religion in the maintenance of cultural order is reversed, and becomes an ally of violence. Psychological theories, like the psychoanalytic school, have a contribution to make to this end. But they also exhibit limitations. The most compelling anthropological theory to date is René Girard's, which focuses on mimetic desire, violence, its resolution through scapegoating and subsequent enactment in ritual. The sacred is seen to lie at the origins of cultural order. But it also harbours a potential for a resurgence of the violence it conceals. Other researchers have shown how certain features of modernity unwittingly fuel violence through the promulgation of stereotypical, group identities. Contemporary Islamist violence (Jihadism) offers a case-study for these theoretical axioms. The example is not peculiar or sui generis. Rather it illustrates, more widely, the nature of the sacred and its relation to history. The Islamic tradition and modern Muslim history also provide a template for an analytic understanding of religious symbols, and their degradation into symbols of a typically modern demand for recognition of ego and group orientated identities. This psychosocial configuration necessarily escapes the attention of the actors, and because of the nominal persistence of old symbols, may also escape the attention of observers. To expose and explain these discrepancies is one of the central tasks of analysis in the proposed theoretical framework.

Wahiduddin Khan and Peace in Contemporary Islamic Thought

Despite a resurgence of the view that the religious sciences and Islam are antithetical to the secular sciences and to secularised thought respectively, a reading of contemporary Islamic literature on peace and war reveals a great deal of resonance with peace psychology. As in peace psychology, much of Islamic thought is concerned with the theory and praxis of peacemaking and peacebuilding, and with the prevention of collective and structural violence. In the interest of encouraging dialogue between the religious and secular sciences, this article introduces readers to contemporary Islamic scholarship focused on collective violence, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. Special attention is given to one contemporary Islamic scholar, Wahiduddin Khan, and his faith-based ideas on peace promotion. Wahiduddin Khan's works on peace, representative of a socio-normative approach to social justice, are examined alongside a reading of Islamic perspectives on knowledge and human nature. By way of conclusion, the parallels between Islamic and peace psychology perspectives are noted, and a brief call is made for a study of the influences of faith-based approaches in current peace initiatives across different regions of the world.

Islamism revisited

While contemporary Islamism is a response to the domestic political situation in many Muslim countries, as well as to US and western policies in the Muslim world, it is also about religious assertion and the forging of an alternative ideology, not only as a means of empowerment but also as a means of establishing a particular social order. The debate is as much an internal one as it is a global one and in many ways mirrors the struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for political and cultural independence.

The Ethics of war: shared problems in different traditions

Contents: Introduction, Richard Sorabji and David Rodin. Part I Traditions: Just war from ancient origins to the Conquistadors debate and its modern relevance, Richard Sorabji The just war of Eastern Christians and the holy war of the Crusaders, Angeliki Laiou Conceptions of justice in war: from Grotius to modern times, Karma Nabulsi Arguments concerning resistance in contemporary Islam, John Kelsay War and reason in Maimonides and Averroes, Noah Feldman The ethics of war: Judaism, Norman Solomon Just war in the Mahabharata, Nick Allen. Part II Contemporary Problems: The ethics of asymmetric war, David Rodin Preventive war and the killing of the innocent, Jeff McMahan War, humanitarian intervention and human rights, Richard Norman Culture, the enemy and the moral restraint of war, Anthony Coates Application of just war criteria in the period 1959-89, Richard Harries Britain's wars since 1945, Michael Quinlan Index.

The political thought of Sayyid Qutb: the theory of jahiliyyah

This new book takes a literary approach in its study of Sayyid Qutb, one of the most significant political thinkers for contemporary Islamists and who has greatly influenced the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Executed by the Egyptian state in 1966, his books continue to be read and his theory of jahiliyya ‘ignorance’ is still of prime importance for radical Islamic groups. Through an examination of his thoughts and theories, the book explores the main concepts that are used by today’s radical fundamentalist movements, tracing the intellectual origins, as well as the conceptual and methodological thinking of radical Islamist movements in the modern world. The book sheds light on Islamic radicalism and its origins by presenting new analysis on the intellectual legacy of one of the most important thinkers of the modern Islamic revival. This is an invaluable new book for our time.

The Problem of Mixing Islam and Islamic Thought in Contemporary Islamic Circles

هدف البحث إلى التنبيه إلى خطورة الخلط بين الإسلام والفكر الإسلامي في الأوساط الإسلامية المعاصرة من خلال الكشف عن ذلك الخلط ومظاهره. وقد اعتمد المنهج الوصفي والتحليلي. وجاء في ثلاثة مباحث؛ الأول: منهجي، الثاني: مصطلحات الدراسة، الثالث مظاهر الخلط. وخلص إلى جملة من النتائج أهمها: أن هناك مظهرين للخلط تمثل الأول في عرض الاجتهاد الفكري والفقهي لمجمل القضايا الظنية والمستجدات في الواقع المعاصر بصورة قطعية يوهم بأن ذلك حكم الإسلام المقطوع به. أما الثاني فتمثل في إدخال الإسلام بأصوله وقطعيات نصوصه وثوابت شريعته ضمن مصطلح الفكر الإسلامي وإخضاعه للنقد والتقويم بدعوى ممارسة الاجتهاد والتجديد، والمظهران يشيران إلى أزمة فكرية في الأوساط المعاصرة.

A Theory of Contemporary Islamic Finance Practiced by Financial Institutions : Understanding Murabahah Contract

A Theory of Contemporary Islamic Finance Practiced by Financial Institutions : Understanding Murabahah Contract

An Analytical Framework for Contemporary Islamic Financial Studies: Towards an Integration of Theory and Practice with Interdisciplinary Approaches

An Analytical Framework for Contemporary Islamic Financial Studies: Towards an Integration of Theory and Practice with Interdisciplinary Approaches

Mysticism in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush

Mysticism in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush