Religious Injunctions Research Articles

Kuwaiti Women at a Crossroads: Privileged Development and the Constraints of Ethnic Stratification

As elsewhere in the developing world, the Arabian peninsula has undergone sweeping changes since World War II, with the important difference that the process here has been blessed with unprecedented prosperity and not marred by economic difficulties. To say that the effects of modernization upon the local societies differ as a result from what can be observed in other countries would be to state the obvious. Yet, when it comes to understanding the position and status of contemporary women in the Arabian oil producing countries, prosperity and the particular circumstances around it are rarely considered as crucial variables. The women's situation often is evaluated, mainly if not exclusively, in light of the religious injunctions and traditional norms that govern the female condition in a Middle East that, by the same token, appears curiously monolithic and timeless. There seems to be an assumption that Arabian women are not part of the societies in which they live, and that, by virtue of some unique cultural principle, their condition remains unaffected by the vectors of change that have turned upside down all the other areas of life around them. Hence the general tendency to assess women's opportunities and constraints in terms of what the Qurʾan and Islamic tradition dictate, not in terms of secular and more immediate concerns they may share with the rest of the society. Aside from assuming a spurious dichotomy between the women and their societies, such an approach disregards the historical and material specificity of particular areas in the Muslim world. It also arbitrarily and a priori defines the character of the meeting between “Islamic tradition” and “modernity,” instead of leaving it open to empirical investigation.

Ganja to Crack: Caribbean Participation in the Underground Economy in Brooklyn, 1976-1986. Part 1. Establishment of the Marijuana Economy

The involvement of Caribbean youth in drug distribution (marijuana from the mid-1960s to 1981; cocaine hydrochloride powder and crack from 1981 to 1987, the time of writing) throughout the Circum-Caribbean area and in North America is described. Social, economic, and cultural outcomes of these engagements are highlighted, and the relationship between the underground economy of drugs and the corporate, capitalist economy is explored. Responding to high rates of unemployment and to other problems of migrant adaptation, young Caribbean African males established a multimillion dollar marijuana (ganja) trading network which linked cultivators on the islands with exporters/importers and street-level distributors in North American cities. By 1976, its participants had become Rastafarians, or followers of an ideology of self-reliance and indigenous development. Following its precepts, they reinvested marijuana revenues to revive cottage industry and agriculture. In Caribbean or minority neighborhoods, therefore, marijuana was a "positive vibration" and its distributors were lionized.

From Ganja to Crack: Caribbean Participation in the Underground Economy in Brooklyn, 1976–1986. Part 2. Establishment of the Cocaine (and Crack) Economy

Shortages in the supply of marijuana, which became acute around 1981, caused Rastafari marijuana distributors very reluctantly to disregard religious injunctions against the use of any psychoactive substance except marijuana, and to experiment with the use and distribution of cocaine hydrochloride powder for intranasal administration and, later, for smoking (freebase and crack). This experimentation proved ruinous, and many were retired ignominiously from drug distribution. In the crack era they have been succeeded by completely new social, cultural, and economic arrangements.

Mawdudi's concept of Islam

The religious and political thought of Mawlana Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi was, and is, one of the main ideological currents contending for supremacy in modern Pakistan. Not unlike his Egyptian counterpart and contemporary, Hasan al-Banna, Mawdudi went beyond the formulation of a new type of Muslim political theory: they both sought to put such theory into practice through political and social action, and established political movements for that very purpose. But while Banna's Muslim Brothers were crushed in their premature bids for power (Banna himself was assassinated in 1949, probably by Government agents; and many of the movement leaders perished under Nasir), Mawdudi and his party, Jamaat-i Islami (The Community of Islam) had survived several similar clashes with the Pakistani authorities and seem to have emerged-under Zia al-Haqq's military regime-as a dominant force. Even after the Bangladesh secession, Pakistan is a major centre of Sunni Islam (prior to 1972 it was the largest Muslim state, in terms of population); and it is hard to exaggerate the importance of its current drift towards Mawdudi's version of Islam. What is his version of Islam? Mawdudi has been a prolific writer. Jamaat-i Islami published, since 1941, several dozens of his books in Urdu, English, Arabic and major Indian languages; and he started his career as a journalist and essayist as far back as 1918. He has covered an extremely wide spectrum of subjects: from a critique of Hegel to the religious injunctions concerning meat. He has undertaken in his writings to outline a programme for the establishment of a truly Islamic state; and in doing so, he involved himself (and his party) in a number of controversies-ranging from the making of a Pakistani constitution to Mawdudi's defence of Purdah (the segregation of women). All these were of immediate political relevance; and they tended to draw attention away from the more fundamental differences between Mawdudi and his rivals-away from his own different answer to the question 'What is Islam?' This paper is aimed at elucidating Mawdudi's answer to this basic question-and tracing the challenges that brought about his response. This is, above all, a primary question-and within a rigorously logical system of ideas, such as Mawdudi's, the answer to it is the cornerstone of the whole construction. Moreover, much of Mawdudi's intellectual appeal (and hence much of his political power) derives from his ability to formulate a coherent answer to that very question. Here 'Fundamentalists' like Mawdudi or al-Banna succeed, while alternative Muslim interpretations fail. For the traditional Muslim scholars, the Madrasa-bred Ulama, the question was almost meaningless: in a world where no real challenges presented themselves, there was no need to re-define Islam. For the Westernized elite of Muslim India, on the other hand, the question did arise: but for them the answer, propagated by the centres of Westernized Islamic education (such as the 'Anglo-Oriental Mohammedan College', established

World War I and the Liberal Pacifist in the United States

THE meaning of the word pacifist changed under the pressure for patriotic conformity in I9I7-i8. Having had the benign connotation of one who advocated international cooperation for peace, it narrowed to mean one who would not support even a war to end war. Pacifists were linked with draft dodgers, socialists, and communists, portrayed in hues from yellow to red; a rude inscription in the lobby of 7o Fifth Avenue in New York, where some pacifist groups were housed, read, Treason's Twilight Zone.' The word was thenceforth plagued with double meaning, and more than one prowar peace advocate hastened to explain that who are now called 'pacifists' here do not include all or most of those who were called 'pacifists' before the war.2 Later, when it was respectable to be against the war, the word sometimes was used in its original, broader sense, but it would be used by pacifists themselves, as it is used here, to designate those who worked for peace and refused to sanction any given war-absolute and religious but also selective and political objectors.3 The narrowness of this definition masked a new dimension in the American peace movement. There had been pacifists in the strict sense before World War I, but for the most part they had been sectarians motivated by obedience to religious injunctions against killing and against complying with the military. Their churches supplied most of the conscientious objectors in the Civil War and both world wars, but these were nonresistants obedient to the claims of religious faith and not challenging governmental authority or social policy except in the specific cases of their military service.4