Criticism of Islamism
Encyclopedia
Criticism of Islamism concerns critique of those beliefs or notions ascribed to Islamism
or Islamist movements. Such criticisms focus on (among other issues) the role of Islam
in legislation, the relationship between Islamism and freedom of expression and the rights of women.
Among those authors and scholars who have criticized Islamism, or some element of it, are Olivier Roy, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Reza Aslan
, Abdelwahab Meddeb
, Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
, Gilles Kepel
, and Khaled Abu al-Fadl.
, a long-time observer of Middle Eastern politics and supporter of allowing Islamists to participate in politics: "One of the most egregious and damaging roles played by some Islamists ... has been in ... ruthlessly attack[ing] and institut[ing] legal proceedings against any writings on Islam they disagree with."
Some of the victims of Islamist enforement of orthodoxy include Ahmad Kasravi
, a former cleric and important intellectual figure of 1940s Iran who was assassinated in 1946 by the Fadayan-e Islam
, an Islamic militant group, on the charge of takfir
.
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
, "a 76-year-old practicing Muslim" and theologian was hanged in a public ceremony in Khartoum, January 18, 1985, "following a hasty, ill-prepared trial." Taha had preached that of the two kinds of verses in the Qur'an - those revealed in Mecca and those revealed in Medina - the Medina verses
were intended only for Muhammad's own instruction and were not eternally valid principles of Islam as those revealed earlier in Mecca
were.
Maybe the most famous alleged apostate attacked by Islamists has been Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz
. He has been harassed and almost killed by assailants, stabbed in the neck. Others include novelist Salahaddin Muhsin who
Egyptian author Farag Foda
was assassinated on June 8, 1992 by militants of the Gamaa Islamiya as an example to other anti-fundamentalist intellectuals.
While the perpetrators of the killing and physical intimidation have been Islamic extremists
, the Islamists working within the system are not innocent. Author Gilles Kepel
points out that in Egypt "Islamist moderates and the extremists [have] complemented one another's actions." The more establishmentarian "moderates" declare a modernists or secularist an apostate; the extremists then carry out the death sentence against the alleged apostate. In the case of Foda's killing, establishmentarian Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali
("one of the most revered sheiks in the Muslim world"), testified for the defense in the trial of Foda's killers. "He announced that anyone born Muslim who militated against the sharia
(as Foda had done) was guilty of the crime of apostasy, for which the punishment was death. In the absence of an Islamic state to carry out this sentence, those who assumed that responsibility were not blameworthy."
Other observers have remarked on the narrowness of Islamism, and its lack of interest in studying and making sense of the world in general. Habib Boulares
regrets that the movement in general has "devoted little energy to constructing consistent theories" and made `no contribution either to Islamic thought or spirituality`. Olivier Roy complains of its intellectual stagnation in that "since the founding writings of Abul Ala Maududi
, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb
... all before 1978 ... there are nothing but brochures, prayers, feeble glosses and citations of canonical authors."
Even systematic study of human society and behavior is dismissed as un-Islamic. According to Olivier Roy:
"[F]or the Islamists, Islamic society exists only through politics, but the political institutions function only a result of the virtue of those who run them, a virtue that can become widespread only if the society is Islamic beforehand." Thus there is "no Islamic state without virtuous Muslims, no virtuous Muslims without an Islamic state".
Disillusionment with what he calls the "faltering ideology" of Islamists in power (Iran, Erbakan in Turkey, Sudan) or having been elected and having fought a guerilla war (Algeria), is explored by scholar Gilles Kepel.
In Iran the failure is seen not just in lack of support for Islamist government, but in the decline of the Islamic revival. "Mosques are packed" where Islamists are out of power, but "they empty out when Islamism takes power." In "Islamist Iran ... one almost never sees a person praying in the street." Islamic jurists, which form a politically privileged class in Iran "were generally treated with elaborate courtesy" in the early years of the revolution. "Nowadays, clerics are sometimes insulted by schoolchildren and taxi drivers and they quite often put on normal clothes when venturing outside Qom
."
, have bemoaned the Islamist belief that true Islam was enforced for only a few decades of its 1400-year-long history, and this short period is what Muslims should imitate. Sayyid Qutb
preached that Islam was no longer in existence and that it was "necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form," and follow the example of the original "Companions of the Prophet." These companions not only cut themselves off from non-Islamic culture or learning—Greek, Roman, Persian, Christian or Jewish logic, art, poetry, etc - but "separating [them]selves completely from [their] past life," of family and friends.
Islamist belief on what constitutes original form varies. Abul Ala Maududi
indicates it was the era of the Prophet and the four rightly guided caliphs
. Qutb's brother Muhammad thought the only time "Islam was ... enforced in its true form" was during the reign the first two caliphs, plus three years from 717 to 720 A.D. For the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini, the five-year reign of Caliph Ali
was the truly Islamic era Muslims should imitate.
Meddeb protests that this excludes not only all non-Muslim culture, but most of Muslim history including the Golden Age of Islam
: "How can one benefit from the past and the present if one comes to the conclusion that the only Islam that conforms to the sovereignty of God is that of Medina the first four caliphs? ... Can one still ... love and respond to the beauties handed down by the many peoples of Islam through the variety of their historic contribution?" He (and others) have questioned the perfection of the early era where "three of the first four caliphs ... were assassinated," while "enmities" and "factional disputes concerning legitimacy" were played out, and points out the celebration of rightly guided originated a century later with Ibn Hanbal. In the same vein, another author (Tarek Osman) complained of Islamists "excessive historical subjectivity that censored history and consciously (or ignorantly) overlooked the almost continuous embarrassing episodes of blood-letting and internal struggles."
: `al-islam dinun was dawlatun` (Islam is a religion and a state). But, as one critic complains, the slogan "is neither a verse of the Qur'an
nor a quote from a hadith
but a 19th century political slogan popularised by the Salafi
movement that emerged in opposition to Western influence in Egypt" -- a 19th century political origin being no problem for many other ideologies, but a severe handicap for a belief system predicated on following the scripture revealed, and the ways of those who lived, twelve centuries earlier.
According to Reza Aslan
:
Christianity was based within the "massive and enduring" Roman Empire
. The Hebrews
had "ethnic bonds before becoming Jews
." But unlike these other Abrahamic religions, "the Muslims depended on their religion to provide them with an authority and an identity."
For these critics, religion and state can be separated without betrayal of the timeless essence of Islam.
law — must govern, comes, at least in part, from the Quranic phrase that `Hukm is God's alone,` according to one of the founders of Islamist thought, Abul Ala Maududi
. However, journalist and author Abdelwahab Meddeb
questions this idea on the grounds that the definition of the Arabic word hukm is broader then simply "to govern", and that the ayah
Maududi quoted is not about governing or government. Hukm is usually defined as to "exercise power as governing, to pronounce a sentence, to judge between two parties, to be knowledgeable (in medicine, in philosophy), to be wise, prudent, of a considered judgment". The full ayat where the phrase appears says:
Which suggests that the Quran is talking about God's superiority over pagan idol
s, rather than His role in government. According to Meddeb, Quranic "commentators never forget to remind us that this verse is devoted to the powerlessness of the companion deities (pardras) that idolaters raise up next to God…"
law - or orthodox sharia law - are varied and not always in agreement. They include: that Islamist leaders are often ignorant of Islamic law, the Islamist definition of Sharia is in error, its implementation is impractical, and that flexible solutions have been ignored, that its scriptural basis has been corrupted, and that its enforcement is un-Islamic.
Dale C. Eikmeier points out the "questionable religious credentials" of many Islamist theorists, or "Qutbists," which can be a "means to discredit them and their message":
Khomeini preaches:
The alleged hypocrites and apostates reply that the Quran itself seems to deny there is one sharia for everyone to obey:
According to these dissenters the definition of Sharia as being the body of Muslim jurisprudence, its various commentaries and interpretations, only came later in Islamic history. Many modernists argue this jurisprudence is "entirely man-made, written by Muslim scholars according to their various schools, based on their best understanding of how the Qur'an should be translated into codes of law."
One scholar, Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
a specialist in comparative and Islamic law at Cairo University, argues that the term Sharia, as used in the Qur'an, refers not to legal rules but rather to "the path of Islam consisting of three streams: 1) worship, 2) ethical code, and 3) social intercourse. Thus al-`Ashmawi and many other modernists insist that the Shari'a is very different than Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and that fiqh must be reinterpreted anew by scholars in every age in accordance with their understanding."
"In Turkey, the Islamist [or post-Islamist] AK party
has many members who speak of Sharia as a metaphor for a moral society."
Thus "there is no one Sharia but rather many different, even contesting ways to build a legal structure in accordance with God's vision for mankind."
One difference between this interpretation and the orthodox Sharia is in the penalty for apostasy from Islam. Non-Islamist Sudanese cleric Abdullah Ahmad an-Na'im states: ".... This aspect of sharia is fundamentally inconsistent with the numerous provisions of the Quran and Sunna which enjoin freedom of religion and expression."
have relegated the Sharia to a level of political slogan, instead of elevating it to the level of intellectual complexity at which our jurisprudential forefather discussed it, debated it, and wrote about it. .... Superficial political chants claiming that the Qur'an is our constitution or that the Shari'a is our guide," are heard but not discussion "of what a constitution is, which parts of the Qur'an are 'constitutional,' or how the Shari'a is to guide us on any particular matter of legal relevance."
Daniel Pipes says "the historical record shows that every effort in modern times to apply the Shari`a in its entirety - such as those made in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Libya, Iran, and Pakistan - ended up disappointing the fundamentalists, for realities eventually had to be accommodated. Every government devoted to full implementation finds this an impossible assignment."
Olivier Roy refers to the call to enforce Sharia
, as a periodic cycle of Islamic history "as old as Islam itself." But one that is "still new because it has never been fulfilled. It is a tendency that is forever setting the reformer, the censor, and tribunal against the corruption of the times and of sovereigns, against foreign influence, political opportunism, moral laxity, and the forgetting of sacred texts."
Leading Islamists, in contrast, maintain that in addition to being divine, Sharia (or again orthodox Sharia), is easy to implement. Qutb believed that Sharia would be no problem to implement because there is "no vagueness or looseness" in its provisions.
Khomeini contended
. This open-ended requirement clashes with Qutb's idea that there is "no vagueness or looseness" in Sharia.
Ibn Aqil
believed Islamic law could consider the welfare of those who broke Islamic law and go beyond what was "explicitly supported" by the Quran.
's extensive research on the development of the Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged hadith had their chain of transmission added conjecturally so as to make them appear more authentic. Hence Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.`" But as a non-Muslim Orientialist, the persuasive authority of Schacht and his works are limited.
Aside from these doubts of ahadith, orthodox and Islamist teachers ignore the history of the development of Islamic jurisprudence over centuries maintaining that "Islamic law has not come into being the way conventional law has." It did not begin "with a few rules that gradually multiplied or with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time." When in fact, according to Aslan, "that is exactly how the Shariah developed: `with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time.' This was a process influenced not only by local cultural practices but by both Talmudic and Roman law. ... the sources from which these [early schools of law] formed their traditions, especially ijma, allowed for the evolution of thought. For this reason, their opinions of the Ulama ... were constantly adapting to contemporary situations, and the law itself was continually reinterpreted and reapplied as necessary."
In the mean time at madrassas in the Muslim world, thousands of "young Muslims are indoctrinated in a revival of Traditionalist orthodoxy especially with regard to the static, literalist interpretation of the Quran and the divine, infallible nature of the Shariah."
, or covering of a woman's head and body, is arguably "the most distinctive emblem of Islam". Compulsory wearing of the hijab is also a hallmark of Islamist states such as Iran and famously the Taliban Afghanistan. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Prosecutor-General, Abolfazl Musavi-Tabrizi has been quoted as saying: "Any one who rejects the principle of hijab in Iran is an apostate and the punishment for an apostate under Islamic law is death" (August 15, 1991). The Taliban's Islamic Emirate required women to cover not only their head but their face as well, because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption" for men not related to them. The burqa
Afghan women were required to wear in public was the most drastic form of hijab with very limited vision. Both states claim(ed) they are (were) simply enforcing Sharia law.
True terror has reportedly been used to enforce hijab "in Pakistan
, Kashmir
, and Afghanistan
," according to a Rand Corporation commentary by Cheryl Benard. "[H]undreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed," for failure to wear hijab. An example being use of acid against women by Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
in the 1970s,
and a 2001 "acid attack on four young Muslim women in Srinagar
... by an unknown militant outfit, and the swift compliance by women of all ages on the issue of wearing the chadar
(head-dress) in public."
Islamist
s in other countries have been accused of attacking or threatening to attack the faces of women in an effort to intimidate them from wearing of makeup or allegedly immodest dress.
But according to some critics there is a real question as to the scriptural or historical basis of this basic issue of Muslim women's lives. Such critics claim that the veil predates the revelation of the Quran as it "was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syria and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status. After all, only a woman who need not work in the fields could afford to remain secluded and veiled. ... In the Muslim community "there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E."
Islamists in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, have had to "quietly put aside" traditional Islamic divorce and inheritance law and replace them with statutes addressing "contemporary Iranian social needs," according to Graham Fuller. Another critic, Asghar Schirazi, has followed the progress of changes in divorce law in Iran, starting with the western innovation of court divorce for women — a deviation from traditional Islamic Talaq
divorce introduced before the Islamic Revolution. Court divorce went from being denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1960s as the product of orders by "agents of foreign powers for the purpose of annihilating Islam," to the law of the land in the Islamic Republic by 1992. Other loosening of prohibitions on previously unIslamic activity in the Islamic Republic include allowing the broadcast of music, and family planning.
Islamists, "ignorant of this legacy, have set up church-like structures."
The most extreme form of this adoption of church-like behavior is found in the Islamic Republic of Iran were the state demand for obedience to the fatawa of supreme cleric Khomeini strongly resembled the doctrine of Papal infallibility
of the Roman Catholic Church, and where the demotion of a rival of Khomeini, Ayatollah Muhammad Kazim Shari`atmadari (d. 1986), resembled "defrocking" and "excommunicating," despite the fact that "no machinery for this has ever existed in Islam."
"Christian imperialists imposed Sunday as the weekly day of rest throughout their colonies, ... Recently, as the Sunday sabbath came to be seen as too Western, Muslim rulers asserted their Islamic identities by instituting Friday as the day off." This contradiction was recognized by some Islamists. Omar Bakri Muhammad, qadi of the so-called Shari'ah Court of the United Kingdom protested: "Unfortunately, some Muslims have become consumers of the western culture to the extent that many Muslims celebrate and wrongly take the day of Friday as a weekly holiday in contrast to Saturday of the Jews and Sunday of the Christians. Whereas the idea of a holiday does not exist in Islam and contradicts with the Islamic culture."
' (mellat), 'the rights of the nation' (hoquq-e mellat), 'the legislature' (qovveh-e moqannaneb), 'the judiciary' (qovveh-e qaza'iyeh), 'parliament
' (majles), 'republic
' (jomhuri), 'consultation of the people' (hameh-porsi), 'elections' (entekhabat).
and its replacement with communism
, but then adding yet another stage, the ultimate Islamic triumph. Islam would replace communism after humanity realized communism could not fulfill its spiritual needs, and Islam was "the only candidate for the leadership of humanity."
But in explaining Islam's or Islamism's superiority in its treatment of women, many Islamists take positions unknown to the early Muslims they seek to emulate. Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna believed "Muslim women have been free and independent for fifteen centuries. Why should we follow the example of Western women, so dependent on their husbands in material matters?" A president of the Islamic Republic of Iran boasted that "under the Islamic Republic, women have full rights to participate in social, cultural, and political activities;" as did Islamist Hasan at-Turabi, the former leader of Sudan: "Today in Sudan, women are in the army, in the police, in the ministries, everywhere, on the same footing as men." Turabi explains that "a woman who is not veiled is not the equal of men. She is not looked on as one would look on a man. She is looked at to see if she is beautiful, if she is desirable. When she is veiled, she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure, not an erotic image."
Rather than comparing their movement against other religions, Islamists are prone to say "We are not socialist, we are not capitalist, we are Islamic."
In his famous 1988 appeal to Gorbachev to replace Communism with Islam, Imam Khomeini talked about the need for a "real belief in God" and the danger of materialism, but said nothing about the five pillars
, did not mention the Prophet Muhammad or monotheism. What he did say was that "nowadays Marxism in his economic and social approaches, is facing the blind alley" and that "the Islamic Republic of Iran can easily supply the solution the believing vacuum of your country". Materialism is mentioned in the context of "materialistic ideology."
law was elaborated by independent jurist scholars, had precedence over state interests, and was applied to people rather than territories. "[T]he caliph, though otherwise the absolute chief of the community of Muslims, had not the right to legislate but only to make administrative regulations with the limits laid down by the sacred Law."
Islamists in Iran and Sudan extended the purview of Sharia but gave the state, not independent jurists, authority over it. The most extreme example of this was the Ayatollah Khomeini's declaration in 1988 that "the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and ... to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests." Which meant that, "for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca." Something not even Ataturk, the most committed Muslim secularist, dared to do.
Traditionally Sharia applied to people rather than territories - Muslims were to obey wherever they were, non-Muslims were exempt. The idea that law was based on jurisdictions - with towns, states, counties each having their own laws - was a European import. "Turabi declares that Islam `accepts territory as the basis of jurisdiction.` As a result, national differences have emerged. The Libyan government lashes all adulterers. Pakistan lashes unmarried offenders and stones married ones. The Sudan imprisons some and hangs others. Iran has even more punishments, including head shaving and a year's banishment. In the hands of fundamentalists, the Shari`a becomes just a variant of Western, territorial law."
Under the new Islamist interpretation, the "millennium-old exclusion" of non-Muslims "from the Sharia is over." Umar Abd ar-Rahman
, the blind sheikh, "is adamant on this subject: `it is very well known that no minority in any country has its own laws.` Abd al-`Aziz ibn Baz
, the Saudi religious leader, calls on non-Muslims to fast during Ramadan
. In Iran
, [non-Muslim] foreign women may not wear nail polish - on the grounds that this leaves them unclean for (Islamic) prayer. ... A fundamentalist party in Malaysia wants to regulate how much time unrelated [non-Muslim] Chinese
men and women may spend alone together."
" rather than problem solving
. Another source has dismissed it as "a hodgepodge of populist and socialist ideas," in theory and "nothing more than inefficient state control of the economy and some almost equally ineffective redistribution policies," in practice.
were Islamization, includes banning of interest on loans or riba
, got underway with military ruler General Zia al-Haq (1977-1988), a supporter of "Islamic resurgence" who pledged to eliminate `the curse of interest.` One critic of this attempt, Kemal A. Faruki, complained that (at least in their initial attempts) Islamizers wasted much effort on "learned discussions on riba" and ... doubtful distinctions between `interest` and `guaranteed profits,` etc." in Western-style banks, "while turning a blind eye" to a far more serious problem outside of the formal, Western-style banking system:
Olivier Roy explains Islamist attacks on Christians and other non-Muslims as a need for a scapegoat for failure.
Another points out ayat endorsing diversity:
... and ayat that seem to be at odds with offensive jihad
against non-Muslims Qutb and others promote:
As Abu al-Fadl says, "these discussions of peace would not make sense if Muslims were in a permanent state of war with nonbelievers, and if nonbelievers were a permanent enemy and always a legitimate target."
or model for all Muslims – after conquering Mecca were notably light on bloodletting. While everyone was required to take an oath of allegiance to him and never again wage war against him, he "declared a general amnesty for most of his enemies, including those he had fought in battle. Despite the fact that tribal law now made the Quraysh his slaves, Muhammad declared all of Mecca's inhabitants (including its slaves) to be free. Only six men and four women were put to death for various crimes, and not one was forced to convert to Islam, though everyone had to take an oath of allegiance never again to wage war against the Prophet."
One complaint of this approach by critics is that these "conspiracy theor[ies]" revolving around the "ready-to-wear devil" of the West are "currently paralyzing Muslim political thought. For to say that every failure is the devil's work is the same as asking God, or the devil himself (which is to say these days the Americans), to solve one's problems."
were an attack on Islam, or at least "a wanton and predatory aggression" against Muslim countries from which Muslims developed a rightful mistrust of Christians/Europeans/Westerners, has been called into question.
According to historian Bernard Lewis, the Crusades were indeed religious wars for Christians, but to
The Arab Muslim contemporaries of the Crusaders did not refer to them as "Crusaders or Christians but as Franks or Infidels". Rather than raging at their aggression, "with few exceptions, the Muslim historians show little interest in whence or why the Franks had come, and report their arrival and their departure with equal lack of curiosity." Crusaders and Muslims allied with each other against other alliances of Crusaders and Muslims. Rather than being event of such trauma that Muslims developed an old and deep fear of Christians/Europeans/Westerners from it, the crusaders' invasion was just one of many such by barbarians coming from "East and West alike" during this time of "Muslim weakness and division."
Lewis argues that any traumatization from the Crusades felt by Muslims surely would pale in comparison to what European Christendom felt from Islam. The Crusades started in 1096 and the Crusaders lost their last toe-hold when the city of Acre, was taken less than two hundred years later in 1291, whereas Europe felt under constant threat from Islam, "from the first Moorish landing in Spain [711] to the second Turkish siege of Vienna [1683]."
William Cantwell Smith observes that
, the largest Muslim state and home of the Caliph, into 20 or so "artificially created separate nations," when that empire fell in 1918. Western powers did partition the Arab world (which made up most of the Ottoman empire) after World War I
, while the general Arab Muslim sentiment in much of the 20th Century was for wahda (unity).
Was this a case of divide and rule policy by Western imperialists?
International relations scholar Fred Halliday
points out there were plenty of other explanations for the continued division: rivalries between different Arab rulers and the reluctance of distinct regional populations to share statehood or power with other Arabs, rivalries between Saudi Arabia
and Yemen
in the Peninsula or between Egypt
and Syria
. Anger in Syria over Egyptian dominance in the United Arab Republic that led to its division in 1961. The difficulty of unifying a large group of states even though they share much the desire, the same language, culture and religion is mirrored in the failure of Latin America
to merge in the first decades of the 19th century after the Spanish withdrawal, when "broad aspirations, inspired by Simon Bolivar
, for Latin American unity foundered on regional, elite and popular resistance, which ended up yielding, as in the Arab world, around twenty distinct states."
Among Islamist opinion makers, both Qutb and Khomeini talked about Jews as both early and innate enemies of Islam. Qutb believed that
And goes on to say, "the Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society."
Khomeini mentions the "Jews of Banu Qurayza
", who were eliminated by Muhammad, as an example of the sort of "troublesome group" that Islam and the Islamic state must "eliminate."
and explains that "from the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam has had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems."
Qutb's anti-Judaism has been criticized as obsessive and irrational by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon who quote him saying
mentioned by Khomeini, a tribe that collaborated with the Quraysh, the Muslims' powerful enemy, and whose men were executed and women and children sold into slavery in 627 AD as punishment.
That this event was the beginning of a Jewish-Muslim struggle is disputed by religious scholar Reza Aslan.
Aslan believes this theory is refuted by historical evidence:
"Finally and most importantly, ... Jewish clans in Medina -- themselves Arab converts -- were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously."
Enforcing an Islamist program around the world would be greatly facilitated by mass conversion and according to Olivier Roy, "today's Islamist activists are obsessed with conversion: rumors that Western celebrities or entire groups are converting are hailed enthusiastically by the core militants."
Critic Daniel Pipes has also noted Islamist contempt for, and ambitions to convert, other cultures and religions, criticizing specifically the contempt of Islamists in the United States
for the country they have immigrated to. He quotes, for example, the wish of one Islamist living in the U.S. that North America turn "away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]."
Aside from the complaint that pushing for mass conversion of non-Muslims to a different religion and culture is intolerant and aggressive, Olivier Roy argues it is simply unrealistic. "[T]he age of converting entire peoples is past," as we live in an era where religious belief is considered a personal matter. Likewise, a strategy to gradually convert non-Muslims "until the number of conversions shifts the balance of the society," is also problematic. Conversion to Islam "in a Christian environment ... generally indicates a marginalized person, a fanatic or a true mystic," in any case people with little desire or ability to join or build "a mass movement."
Pipes also argues many prominent conversions to Islam appears to be part of a "recurring" pattern, rather than a mass movement. As he puts it, "Islam - in both its normative and Nation
variants" has become established "as a leading solace for African-Americans in need", specifically after trouble with the criminal justice system, and includes a "well-established" oppositional "pattern of alienation, radicalism and violence."
Islamism
Islamism also , lit., "Political Islam" is set of ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system. Islamism is a controversial term, and definitions of it sometimes vary...
or Islamist movements. Such criticisms focus on (among other issues) the role of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
in legislation, the relationship between Islamism and freedom of expression and the rights of women.
Among those authors and scholars who have criticized Islamism, or some element of it, are Olivier Roy, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American activist, a nationally acclaimed writer of religions. He is on the faculty at the University of California, Riverside, and is a contributing editor for The Daily Beast...
, Abdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb is an award-winning French-language poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, Islamic scholar, cultural critic, political commentator, radio producer, public intellectual and professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.- Biography and career...
, Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi is a retired Egyptian Supreme Court justice and former head of the Court of State Security and a specialist in comparative and Islamic law at Cairo University...
, Gilles Kepel
Gilles Kepel
Gilles Kepel is a French political scientist, specialist of the Islam and contemporary Arab world. He is Professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and member of the Institut Universitaire de France....
, and Khaled Abu al-Fadl.
Limits on freedom of expression
According to Graham FullerGraham Fuller
Graham E. Fuller is an American author and political analyst, specializing in Islamic extremism. Formerly vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, he also served as Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA...
, a long-time observer of Middle Eastern politics and supporter of allowing Islamists to participate in politics: "One of the most egregious and damaging roles played by some Islamists ... has been in ... ruthlessly attack[ing] and institut[ing] legal proceedings against any writings on Islam they disagree with."
Some of the victims of Islamist enforement of orthodoxy include Ahmad Kasravi
Ahmad Kasravi
Ahmad Kasravi , was a notable Iranian linguist, historian, and reformer.Born in Hokmabad , Tabriz, Iran, Kasravi was an Iranian Azeri Initially, Kasravi enrolled in a seminary. Later, he joined the Iranian Constitutional Revolution...
, a former cleric and important intellectual figure of 1940s Iran who was assassinated in 1946 by the Fadayan-e Islam
Fadayan-e Islam
Fadā'iyān-e Islam , was an Iranian Islamic fundamentalist secret society founded in 1946, by a 21 year-old theology student named Navvab Safavi. Safavi sought to purify Islam in Iran by ridding it of `corrupting individuals` by means of carefully planned assassinations of certain leading...
, an Islamic militant group, on the charge of takfir
Takfir
In Islamic law, takfir or takfeer refers to the practice of one Muslim declaring another Muslim an unbeliever or kafir...
.
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, also known as Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was a Sudanese religious thinker, leader, and trained engineer. He was executed for apostasy at the age of 76 by regime of Gaafar Nimeiry....
, "a 76-year-old practicing Muslim" and theologian was hanged in a public ceremony in Khartoum, January 18, 1985, "following a hasty, ill-prepared trial." Taha had preached that of the two kinds of verses in the Qur'an - those revealed in Mecca and those revealed in Medina - the Medina verses
Madinan sura
The Medinan suras or Medinan chapters of the Qur'an are those later suras which, according to Islamic tradition, were revealed at Medina, after Muhammad's hijra from Mecca. These suras appeared when the Muslims were in larger numbers, rather than being an oppressed minority as in Mecca.They are...
were intended only for Muhammad's own instruction and were not eternally valid principles of Islam as those revealed earlier in Mecca
Meccan sura
The Meccan suras are the chronologically earlier suras of the Qur'an that were, according to Islamic tradition, revealed anytime before the Hijrah . The other type of sura is the Madinan sura....
were.
Maybe the most famous alleged apostate attacked by Islamists has been Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie...
. He has been harassed and almost killed by assailants, stabbed in the neck. Others include novelist Salahaddin Muhsin who
... was sentenced to three years hard labor for writings that `offended Islam`; feminist novelist Nawal al-Sa'dawi has been repeatedly tried in court for anti-Islamic writing and her husband ordered to divorce her as a Muslim apostate, although the charges were ultimately struck down; Islamist lawyers also charged Islamic and Arabic literature professor Nasr Abu Zayd with apostasy for his writings on the background of the Qur'an, and his wife was ordered to divorce him. ..."
Egyptian author Farag Foda
Farag Foda
Farag Foda , also Faraj Fawda, was an important Egyptian thinker, human rights activist, writer, and columnist.Based in Cairo, he was noted for his critical articles and sharp satires about Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt. In many newspaper articles, he demonstrated weak points in Islamic ideology...
was assassinated on June 8, 1992 by militants of the Gamaa Islamiya as an example to other anti-fundamentalist intellectuals.
While the perpetrators of the killing and physical intimidation have been Islamic extremists
Islamic extremism
Islamic extremism refers to two related and partially overlapping but also distinct aspects of extremist interpretations and pursuits of Islamic ideology:...
, the Islamists working within the system are not innocent. Author Gilles Kepel
Gilles Kepel
Gilles Kepel is a French political scientist, specialist of the Islam and contemporary Arab world. He is Professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and member of the Institut Universitaire de France....
points out that in Egypt "Islamist moderates and the extremists [have] complemented one another's actions." The more establishmentarian "moderates" declare a modernists or secularist an apostate; the extremists then carry out the death sentence against the alleged apostate. In the case of Foda's killing, establishmentarian Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali
Mohammed al-Ghazali
Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali al-Saqqa , was an Islamic cleric and scholar whose writings "have influenced generations of Egyptians". The author of 94 books, Sheikh Ghazali attracted a broad following with works that sought to interpret Islam and its holy book, the Qur'an, in a modern light...
("one of the most revered sheiks in the Muslim world"), testified for the defense in the trial of Foda's killers. "He announced that anyone born Muslim who militated against the sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
(as Foda had done) was guilty of the crime of apostasy, for which the punishment was death. In the absence of an Islamic state to carry out this sentence, those who assumed that responsibility were not blameworthy."
Neglect of other issues
Although Islamism is a movement devoted to the preeminence of Islam in all fields rather than shifting its focus from belief to politics, some have suggested this is what has happened, and that "organizers, enthusiasts, and politicians," rather than those focusing on spiritually or religion, have "had the most impact" in the movement.Other observers have remarked on the narrowness of Islamism, and its lack of interest in studying and making sense of the world in general. Habib Boulares
Habib Boularès
Habib Boularès is a Tunisian diplomat and politician, currently serving as secretary-general of the Arab-Maghreb Union. He first entered the cabinet in 1970 as minister of culture and information, serving in that post until 1971...
regrets that the movement in general has "devoted little energy to constructing consistent theories" and made `no contribution either to Islamic thought or spirituality`. Olivier Roy complains of its intellectual stagnation in that "since the founding writings of Abul Ala Maududi
Abul Ala Maududi
Syed Abul A'ala Maududi , also known as Molana or Shaikh Syed Abul A'ala Mawdudi, was a Sunni Pakistani journalist, theologian, Muslim revivalist leader and political philosopher, and a major 20th century Islamist thinker. He was also a prominent political figure in Pakistan and was the first...
, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb
Sayyid Qutb
Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s....
... all before 1978 ... there are nothing but brochures, prayers, feeble glosses and citations of canonical authors."
Even systematic study of human society and behavior is dismissed as un-Islamic. According to Olivier Roy:
There is neither historyHistoryHistory is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, since nothing new has happened except a return to the jahiliyya of pre-Islamic times, nor anthropologyAnthropologyAnthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, since man is simply the exercise of virtue (there is no depth psychologyPsychologyPsychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
in Islam: sin is not an introduction to the other within), nor sociologySociologySociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, since segmentation is fitna, splitting of the community, and thus an attack on the divine oneness the community reflects. Anything, in fact, that differentiates is seen as a menace to the unity of the community...
Dependence on virtue
Roy also argues that the basic strategy of Islamism suffers from "a vicious circle":"[F]or the Islamists, Islamic society exists only through politics, but the political institutions function only a result of the virtue of those who run them, a virtue that can become widespread only if the society is Islamic beforehand." Thus there is "no Islamic state without virtuous Muslims, no virtuous Muslims without an Islamic state".
Failure of Islamists in power
The problem of dependence on personal virtue and disinterest in "building institutions" capable of handling the corruption of power and human frailty is manifest, Roy believes, in the aftermath of the victories of Islamist or Islamic movements in Islamic Republic of Iran and mujahideen Afghanistan. In both cases the heroic Islamic self-sacrifice that brought Islamic insurgents to power was followed by notably un-virtuous governance of the victorious warriors "demanding their due" in spoils and corruption. Islamism did not prove immune to the foibles of "other ideologies", where the virtuous `pure` are corrupted or abandon politics to "climbers, careerists, and unscrupulous businessmen."Disillusionment with what he calls the "faltering ideology" of Islamists in power (Iran, Erbakan in Turkey, Sudan) or having been elected and having fought a guerilla war (Algeria), is explored by scholar Gilles Kepel.
In Iran the failure is seen not just in lack of support for Islamist government, but in the decline of the Islamic revival. "Mosques are packed" where Islamists are out of power, but "they empty out when Islamism takes power." In "Islamist Iran ... one almost never sees a person praying in the street." Islamic jurists, which form a politically privileged class in Iran "were generally treated with elaborate courtesy" in the early years of the revolution. "Nowadays, clerics are sometimes insulted by schoolchildren and taxi drivers and they quite often put on normal clothes when venturing outside Qom
Qom
Qom is a city in Iran. It lies by road southwest of Tehran and is the capital of Qom Province. At the 2006 census, its population was 957,496, in 241,827 families. It is situated on the banks of the Qom River....
."
Vagueness
Author Tarek Osman has criticized Islamism as unsustainably flexible, offering "everything to everyone": an alternative social provider to the poor masses; an angry platform for the disillusioned young; a loud trumpet-call announcing `a return to the pure religion` to those seeking an identity; a "progressive, moderate religious platform` for the affluent and liberal; ... and at the extremes, a violent vehicle for rejectionists and radicals."Emphasis on early Islam
Some critics, such as Tunisian-born scholar Abdelwahab MeddebAbdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb is an award-winning French-language poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, Islamic scholar, cultural critic, political commentator, radio producer, public intellectual and professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.- Biography and career...
, have bemoaned the Islamist belief that true Islam was enforced for only a few decades of its 1400-year-long history, and this short period is what Muslims should imitate. Sayyid Qutb
Sayyid Qutb
Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s....
preached that Islam was no longer in existence and that it was "necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form," and follow the example of the original "Companions of the Prophet." These companions not only cut themselves off from non-Islamic culture or learning—Greek, Roman, Persian, Christian or Jewish logic, art, poetry, etc - but "separating [them]selves completely from [their] past life," of family and friends.
Islamist belief on what constitutes original form varies. Abul Ala Maududi
Abul Ala Maududi
Syed Abul A'ala Maududi , also known as Molana or Shaikh Syed Abul A'ala Mawdudi, was a Sunni Pakistani journalist, theologian, Muslim revivalist leader and political philosopher, and a major 20th century Islamist thinker. He was also a prominent political figure in Pakistan and was the first...
indicates it was the era of the Prophet and the four rightly guided caliphs
Rashidun
The Rightly Guided Caliphs or The Righteous Caliphs is a term used in Sunni Islam to refer to the first four Caliphs who established the Rashidun Caliphate. The concept of "Rightly Guided Caliphs" originated with the Abbasid Dynasty...
. Qutb's brother Muhammad thought the only time "Islam was ... enforced in its true form" was during the reign the first two caliphs, plus three years from 717 to 720 A.D. For the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini, the five-year reign of Caliph Ali
Ali
' |Ramaḍān]], 40 AH; approximately October 23, 598 or 600 or March 17, 599 – January 27, 661).His father's name was Abu Talib. Ali was also the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and ruled over the Islamic Caliphate from 656 to 661, and was the first male convert to Islam...
was the truly Islamic era Muslims should imitate.
Meddeb protests that this excludes not only all non-Muslim culture, but most of Muslim history including the Golden Age of Islam
Islamic Golden Age
During the Islamic Golden Age philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations...
: "How can one benefit from the past and the present if one comes to the conclusion that the only Islam that conforms to the sovereignty of God is that of Medina the first four caliphs? ... Can one still ... love and respond to the beauties handed down by the many peoples of Islam through the variety of their historic contribution?" He (and others) have questioned the perfection of the early era where "three of the first four caliphs ... were assassinated," while "enmities" and "factional disputes concerning legitimacy" were played out, and points out the celebration of rightly guided originated a century later with Ibn Hanbal. In the same vein, another author (Tarek Osman) complained of Islamists "excessive historical subjectivity that censored history and consciously (or ignorantly) overlooked the almost continuous embarrassing episodes of blood-letting and internal struggles."
Unification of religion and state
One of the most commonly quoted slogans in the movement is that of the Muslim BrotherhoodMuslim Brotherhood
The Society of the Muslim Brothers is the world's oldest and one of the largest Islamist parties, and is the largest political opposition organization in many Arab states. It was founded in 1928 in Egypt by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna and by the late 1940s had an...
: `al-islam dinun was dawlatun` (Islam is a religion and a state). But, as one critic complains, the slogan "is neither a verse of the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
nor a quote from a hadith
Hadith
The term Hadīth is used to denote a saying or an act or tacit approval or criticism ascribed either validly or invalidly to the Islamic prophet Muhammad....
but a 19th century political slogan popularised by the Salafi
Salafi
A Salafi come from Sunni Islam is a follower of an Islamic movement, Salafiyyah, that is supposed to take the Salaf who lived during the patristic period of early Islam as model examples...
movement that emerged in opposition to Western influence in Egypt" -- a 19th century political origin being no problem for many other ideologies, but a severe handicap for a belief system predicated on following the scripture revealed, and the ways of those who lived, twelve centuries earlier.
Historical context
Critics contend the idea that religion and state should be unified is not unique to Islam but to the premodern era, or at least the era around the time of Muhammad.According to Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American activist, a nationally acclaimed writer of religions. He is on the faculty at the University of California, Riverside, and is a contributing editor for The Daily Beast...
:
This was also an era in which religion and the state were one unified entity. ... no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confessional experiences of individuals. ... Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity ... your religion was your citizenship.
The post-Julian Roman EmpireTheodosius ITheodosius I , also known as Theodosius the Great, was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395. Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire. During his reign, the Goths secured control of Illyricum after the Gothic War, establishing their homeland...
was Christian, with one "officially sanctioned and legally enforced version" of (Nicene) Christianity. The Sassanid EmpireSassanid EmpireThe Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
in Persia was Zoroastrian, again with one officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Zoroastrianism. On the Indian subcontinent, Vaisnava kingdoms (devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations) fought with Savia kingdoms (devotees of Shiva) for territorial control. In China, BuddhistBuddhismBuddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
rulers fought TaoistTaoismTaoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...
rulers for political ascendancy. "Thus every religion was a `religion of the sword.`"
Historical necessity
Aside from what other religions and empires were doing at the time, the location of Muslims in the stateless world of Arab society meant they needed a state to protect themselves.Christianity was based within the "massive and enduring" Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
. The Hebrews
Hebrews
Hebrews is an ethnonym used in the Hebrew Bible...
had "ethnic bonds before becoming Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
." But unlike these other Abrahamic religions, "the Muslims depended on their religion to provide them with an authority and an identity."
Mohammad founded a religious community ex nihiloEx nihiloEx nihilo is a Latin phrase meaning "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing"—chiefly in philosophical or theological contexts, but also occurs in other fields.In theology, the common phrase creatio ex...
. He lived in western Arabia, a stateless region where tribal affiliations dominated all of public life. A tribe protected its members (by threatening to take revenge for them), and it provided social bonds, economic opportunities, as well as political enfranchisement. An individual lacking tribal ties had no standing: he could be robbed, raped, and killed with impunity. If Muhammad was to attract tribesmen to join his movement, he had to provide them with an affiliation no less powerful than the tribe they had left behind".
For these critics, religion and state can be separated without betrayal of the timeless essence of Islam.
Scriptural basis
The scriptural basis of the Islamist principle that God — in the form of ShariaSharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
law — must govern, comes, at least in part, from the Quranic phrase that `Hukm is God's alone,` according to one of the founders of Islamist thought, Abul Ala Maududi
Abul Ala Maududi
Syed Abul A'ala Maududi , also known as Molana or Shaikh Syed Abul A'ala Mawdudi, was a Sunni Pakistani journalist, theologian, Muslim revivalist leader and political philosopher, and a major 20th century Islamist thinker. He was also a prominent political figure in Pakistan and was the first...
. However, journalist and author Abdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb
Abdelwahab Meddeb is an award-winning French-language poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, Islamic scholar, cultural critic, political commentator, radio producer, public intellectual and professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.- Biography and career...
questions this idea on the grounds that the definition of the Arabic word hukm is broader then simply "to govern", and that the ayah
Ayah
Ayah or Aayah is the Arabic word for sign or proof:"These are the Ayat of Allah, which We recite to you with truth...
Maududi quoted is not about governing or government. Hukm is usually defined as to "exercise power as governing, to pronounce a sentence, to judge between two parties, to be knowledgeable (in medicine, in philosophy), to be wise, prudent, of a considered judgment". The full ayat where the phrase appears says:
Those who you adore outside of Him are nothing but names that you and your fathers have given them. God has granted them no authority. Hukm is God's alone. He has commanded that you adore none but Him. Such is the right religion, but most people do not know.
Which suggests that the Quran is talking about God's superiority over pagan idol
Idolatry
Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...
s, rather than His role in government. According to Meddeb, Quranic "commentators never forget to remind us that this verse is devoted to the powerlessness of the companion deities (pardras) that idolaters raise up next to God…"
Islamist interpretation of Sharia
Criticisms of ShariaSharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
law - or orthodox sharia law - are varied and not always in agreement. They include: that Islamist leaders are often ignorant of Islamic law, the Islamist definition of Sharia is in error, its implementation is impractical, and that flexible solutions have been ignored, that its scriptural basis has been corrupted, and that its enforcement is un-Islamic.
Ignorance
Despite the great importance Islamists gave to strict adherence to Sharia, many were not trained jurists. Islamic scholar and moderate abou el Fadl complains that "neither Qutb nor Mawdudi were trained jurists, and their knowledge of the Islamic jurisprudential tradition was minimal. Nevertheless, like `Abd al-Wahhad, Mawdudi and Qutb imagined Islamic law to be a set of clear cut, inflexible and rigid positive commands that covered and regulated every aspect of life."Dale C. Eikmeier points out the "questionable religious credentials" of many Islamist theorists, or "Qutbists," which can be a "means to discredit them and their message":
With the exception of Abul Ala MaududiAbul Ala MaududiSyed Abul A'ala Maududi , also known as Molana or Shaikh Syed Abul A'ala Mawdudi, was a Sunni Pakistani journalist, theologian, Muslim revivalist leader and political philosopher, and a major 20th century Islamist thinker. He was also a prominent political figure in Pakistan and was the first...
and Abdullah Azzam, none of Qutbism’s main theoreticians trained at Islam’s recognized centers of learning. Although a devout Muslim, Hassan al Banna was a teacher and community activist. Sayyid QutbSayyid QutbSayyid Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s....
was a literary critic. Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj was an electrician. Ayman al-ZawahiriAyman al-ZawahiriAyman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian physician, Islamic theologian and current leader of al-Qaeda. He was previously the second and last "emir" of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, having succeeded Abbud al-Zumar in the latter role when Egyptian authorities sentenced al-Zumar to life...
is a physician. Osama bin LadenOsama bin LadenOsama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
trained to be a businessman.
Sharia as single universal set of laws to obey
Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini have argued that Islam cannot be Islam without the application of Sharia law. According to Qutb, "The Muslim community with these characteristics vanished at the moment the laws of God [i.e. Sharia] became suspended on earth."Khomeini preaches:
in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power. No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of the Divine Legislator.
The alleged hypocrites and apostates reply that the Quran itself seems to deny there is one sharia for everyone to obey:
`To each of you God has prescribed a Law [Sharia] and a Way. If God would have willed, He would have made you a single people. But God's purpose is to test you in what he has given each of you, so strive in the pursuit of virtue, and know that you will all return to God [in the Hereafter], and He will resolve all the matters in which you disagree.
According to these dissenters the definition of Sharia as being the body of Muslim jurisprudence, its various commentaries and interpretations, only came later in Islamic history. Many modernists argue this jurisprudence is "entirely man-made, written by Muslim scholars according to their various schools, based on their best understanding of how the Qur'an should be translated into codes of law."
One scholar, Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi
Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi is a retired Egyptian Supreme Court justice and former head of the Court of State Security and a specialist in comparative and Islamic law at Cairo University...
a specialist in comparative and Islamic law at Cairo University, argues that the term Sharia, as used in the Qur'an, refers not to legal rules but rather to "the path of Islam consisting of three streams: 1) worship, 2) ethical code, and 3) social intercourse. Thus al-`Ashmawi and many other modernists insist that the Shari'a is very different than Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and that fiqh must be reinterpreted anew by scholars in every age in accordance with their understanding."
"In Turkey, the Islamist [or post-Islamist] AK party
Justice and Development Party (Turkey)
The Justice and Development Party , abbreviated JDP in English and AK PARTİ or AKP in Turkish, is a centre-right political party in Turkey. The party is the largest in Turkey, with 327 members of parliament...
has many members who speak of Sharia as a metaphor for a moral society."
Thus "there is no one Sharia but rather many different, even contesting ways to build a legal structure in accordance with God's vision for mankind."
One difference between this interpretation and the orthodox Sharia is in the penalty for apostasy from Islam. Non-Islamist Sudanese cleric Abdullah Ahmad an-Na'im states: ".... This aspect of sharia is fundamentally inconsistent with the numerous provisions of the Quran and Sunna which enjoin freedom of religion and expression."
Overly simplistic
A related criticism is that Islamist "politics of identityIdentity politics
Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...
have relegated the Sharia to a level of political slogan, instead of elevating it to the level of intellectual complexity at which our jurisprudential forefather discussed it, debated it, and wrote about it. .... Superficial political chants claiming that the Qur'an is our constitution or that the Shari'a is our guide," are heard but not discussion "of what a constitution is, which parts of the Qur'an are 'constitutional,' or how the Shari'a is to guide us on any particular matter of legal relevance."
Historical record
Another (unrelated) complaint against a revival of Sharia law is that strict application of orthodox Sharia law has been tried repeatedly throughout Islamic history and always found to be impractical.Daniel Pipes says "the historical record shows that every effort in modern times to apply the Shari`a in its entirety - such as those made in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Libya, Iran, and Pakistan - ended up disappointing the fundamentalists, for realities eventually had to be accommodated. Every government devoted to full implementation finds this an impossible assignment."
Olivier Roy refers to the call to enforce Sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
, as a periodic cycle of Islamic history "as old as Islam itself." But one that is "still new because it has never been fulfilled. It is a tendency that is forever setting the reformer, the censor, and tribunal against the corruption of the times and of sovereigns, against foreign influence, political opportunism, moral laxity, and the forgetting of sacred texts."
Leading Islamists, in contrast, maintain that in addition to being divine, Sharia (or again orthodox Sharia), is easy to implement. Qutb believed that Sharia would be no problem to implement because there is "no vagueness or looseness" in its provisions.
Khomeini contended
Islam has made the necessary provision; and if laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need for you, after establishing a government, to sit down and draw up laws, or, like rulers who worship foreigners and are infatuated with the west, run after others to borrow their laws. Everything is ready and waiting.
Quran as Constitution
"The Quran is our Constitution" or "the Quran is our law," is "the slogan encountered from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the Afghan Islamists." But non-Islamist criticism replies that only 245 of the 6000 verses in the Quran concern legislation, and only 90 of those concern constitutional, civil, financial or economic matters. Scarcely enough to form a constitution.Ignoring Maslaha
A solution to this problem embraced by modernists and usually ignored by Islamists, is the inclusion of the principle that Islamic law must serve the general common good or maslahaMaslaha
Maslaha is a concept in traditional Islamic Law. It is invoked to prohibit or permit something on the basis of whether or not it serves the public's benefit or welfare. The concept is related to that of Istislah...
. This open-ended requirement clashes with Qutb's idea that there is "no vagueness or looseness" in Sharia.
"Many modernist use as the point of departure the well-established Islamic concept of maslaha (the public interest or common good.) For those schools that place priority on the role of maslaha in Islamic thinking, Islam by definition serves the common good; therefore, if a given policy or position demonstrably does not serve the public interest it simply is `not Islam`. This formulation is used by the huge Muhammadiya movement in Indonesia, among others. The pioneering Egyptian Islamic thinker Muhammad `Abdu spoke in similar terms when he criticized Muslim neglect of the concept of `common good` and rulers' emphasis on obedience above justice."
Ibn Aqil
Ibn Aqil
Abu al-Wafa Ali Ibn Aqil ibn Ahmad al-Baghdadi was an Islamic theologian from Baghdad, Iraq. He was trained in the tenets of the Hanbali school ., Among his works of jurisprudence that have survived are Wadih fi usul al-fiqh and Kitab al-funun.-Notes:...
believed Islamic law could consider the welfare of those who broke Islamic law and go beyond what was "explicitly supported" by the Quran.
Islam approves of all policy which creates good and eradicates evil even when it is not based on any revelation. That is how the Companions of the Prophet understood Islam. Abu Bakr, for example, appointed Umar to succeed him without precedent. Umar suspended the Quranically mandated punishment of hand amputation during a famine, he suspended it also when he discovered that two thieves, the employees of Hatib, were under-paid. And so on.
Compulsion in Sharia
Islamist governments such as Iran's have emphasized compulsion in personal behavior (such as the wearing of hijab) enforced with religious police. The question here is that since compelling people to obey Shariah law means they may be obeying out of fear of punishment by men rather than devotion to God's law, might this not negates the merit of the act in the eyes of God. Compulsion in religious observance deprives "the observant of the credit for following God's order through personal volition. Only free acts of piety and worship have merit in God's eyes."Ignoring problems with the development of orthodox Sharia
Finally there is the question of accuracy of the ahadith or sayings of the Prophet which forms that basis of most of the Sharia law. The sayings were not written down for some generations but transmitted orally. An elaborate method has been developed to verify and rate hadith according to levels of authenticity, including isnad or chains of the hadith's trasmision. Nonetheless these were often not essential elements "in the dissemination of a hadith ... before the 9th century, when the collections were completed. Joseph SchachtJoseph Schacht
Joseph Schacht, born in Ratibor, 15 March 1902, died in Englewood, 1 August 1969, was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar on Islamic law, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence is still considered a centrally...
's extensive research on the development of the Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged hadith had their chain of transmission added conjecturally so as to make them appear more authentic. Hence Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.`" But as a non-Muslim Orientialist, the persuasive authority of Schacht and his works are limited.
Aside from these doubts of ahadith, orthodox and Islamist teachers ignore the history of the development of Islamic jurisprudence over centuries maintaining that "Islamic law has not come into being the way conventional law has." It did not begin "with a few rules that gradually multiplied or with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time." When in fact, according to Aslan, "that is exactly how the Shariah developed: `with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time.' This was a process influenced not only by local cultural practices but by both Talmudic and Roman law. ... the sources from which these [early schools of law] formed their traditions, especially ijma, allowed for the evolution of thought. For this reason, their opinions of the Ulama ... were constantly adapting to contemporary situations, and the law itself was continually reinterpreted and reapplied as necessary."
In the mean time at madrassas in the Muslim world, thousands of "young Muslims are indoctrinated in a revival of Traditionalist orthodoxy especially with regard to the static, literalist interpretation of the Quran and the divine, infallible nature of the Shariah."
Case of hijab
HijabHijab
The word "hijab" or "'" refers to both the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women and modest Muslim styles of dress in general....
, or covering of a woman's head and body, is arguably "the most distinctive emblem of Islam". Compulsory wearing of the hijab is also a hallmark of Islamist states such as Iran and famously the Taliban Afghanistan. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Prosecutor-General, Abolfazl Musavi-Tabrizi has been quoted as saying: "Any one who rejects the principle of hijab in Iran is an apostate and the punishment for an apostate under Islamic law is death" (August 15, 1991). The Taliban's Islamic Emirate required women to cover not only their head but their face as well, because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption" for men not related to them. The burqa
Burqa
A burqa is an enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic religion to cover their bodies in public places. The burqa is usually understood to be the woman's loose body-covering , plus the head-covering , plus the face-veil .-Etymology:A speculative and unattested etymology...
Afghan women were required to wear in public was the most drastic form of hijab with very limited vision. Both states claim(ed) they are (were) simply enforcing Sharia law.
True terror has reportedly been used to enforce hijab "in Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, Kashmir
Kashmir
Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...
, and Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
," according to a Rand Corporation commentary by Cheryl Benard. "[H]undreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed," for failure to wear hijab. An example being use of acid against women by Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan Mujahideen leader who is the founder and leader of the Hezb-e Islami political party and paramilitary group. Hekmatyar was a rebel military commander during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan and was one of the key figures in the civil war that followed the...
in the 1970s,
and a 2001 "acid attack on four young Muslim women in Srinagar
Srinagar
Srinagar is the summer seasonal capital of Jammu and Kashmir. It is situated in Kashmir Valley and lies on the banks of the Jhelum River, a tributary of the Indus. It is one of the largest cities in India not to have a Hindu majority. The city is famous for its gardens, lakes and houseboats...
... by an unknown militant outfit, and the swift compliance by women of all ages on the issue of wearing the chadar
Chador
A chādor or chādar is an outer garment or open cloak worn by many Iranian women and female teenagers in public spaces. Wearing this garment is one possible way in which a Muslim woman can follow the Islamic dress code known as ḥijāb. A chador is a full-body-length semicircle of fabric that is...
(head-dress) in public."
Islamist
Islamism
Islamism also , lit., "Political Islam" is set of ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system. Islamism is a controversial term, and definitions of it sometimes vary...
s in other countries have been accused of attacking or threatening to attack the faces of women in an effort to intimidate them from wearing of makeup or allegedly immodest dress.
But according to some critics there is a real question as to the scriptural or historical basis of this basic issue of Muslim women's lives. Such critics claim that the veil predates the revelation of the Quran as it "was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syria and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status. After all, only a woman who need not work in the fields could afford to remain secluded and veiled. ... In the Muslim community "there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E."
Case of ridda
Traditionally ridda, or converting from Islam to another religion is a capital crime in Islam. While this has been a mainstream, not just Islamist belief, Islamists have been noted for their enthusiasm in enforcing the penalty. But like hijab however, there is question over the scriptural or historical basis of the proscribed sentence of death. According to reformist author Reza Aslan, belief in the death sentence for apostates originated with early Caliph Abu Bakr's "war against tribes that had annulled their oath of allegiance to the Prophet." The war was to "prevent Muhammad's community from dissolving back into the old tribal system," but was a political and not a religious war. "Still, the Riddah Wars did have the regrettable consequence of permanently associating apostasy (denying one's faith) with treason (denying the central authority of the Caliph)," which made apostasy "a capital crime in Islam."Innovations to Islam
Islamists and Islamic revivalists have striven to eliminate Western practices in their lives - the use of toothbrushes, mixing of the sexes, women walking about with uncovered heads, Saturday-Sunday weekend days off, applause of speakers - but according to Daniel Pipes, "even in rejecting the West, they accept it," and introduce Western-style innovations to Islam.Tendency towards modernism
Critics have noted that Islamists have claimed to uphold eternal religious/political principles but sometimes changing with the times, for example embracing "far more modern and egalitarian" interpretations of social justice - including socialist ideas - than the rightly guided caliphs would ever have conceived of.Islamists in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, have had to "quietly put aside" traditional Islamic divorce and inheritance law and replace them with statutes addressing "contemporary Iranian social needs," according to Graham Fuller. Another critic, Asghar Schirazi, has followed the progress of changes in divorce law in Iran, starting with the western innovation of court divorce for women — a deviation from traditional Islamic Talaq
Divorce (Islamic)
In Islam there are separate rules for divorce for men and women under the terms of Islamic law . When a man has initiated a divorce the procedure is called . When a woman has initiated a divorce it is called khula ....
divorce introduced before the Islamic Revolution. Court divorce went from being denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1960s as the product of orders by "agents of foreign powers for the purpose of annihilating Islam," to the law of the land in the Islamic Republic by 1992. Other loosening of prohibitions on previously unIslamic activity in the Islamic Republic include allowing the broadcast of music, and family planning.
Church-like structures
"Traditional Islam was characterized by informal organizations. Virtually every major decision - establishing a canonical text of the Qur'an, excluding philosophical inquiry, or choosing which religious scholars to heed - was reached in an unstructured and consensual way."Islamists, "ignorant of this legacy, have set up church-like structures."
A number of religious functionaries have come into being whose posts were previously unheard of, for example: the Secretary of the Muslim World League, the Secretary General of the Islamic Conference, the Rector of the Islamic University in Medina, and so [on] and so forth. For the first time in history the imam of the Ka'ba has been sent on tour of foreign countries as if he were an Apostolic Nuntius.
The most extreme form of this adoption of church-like behavior is found in the Islamic Republic of Iran were the state demand for obedience to the fatawa of supreme cleric Khomeini strongly resembled the doctrine of Papal infallibility
Papal infallibility
Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, by action of the Holy Spirit, the Pope is preserved from even the possibility of error when in his official capacity he solemnly declares or promulgates to the universal Church a dogmatic teaching on faith or morals...
of the Roman Catholic Church, and where the demotion of a rival of Khomeini, Ayatollah Muhammad Kazim Shari`atmadari (d. 1986), resembled "defrocking" and "excommunicating," despite the fact that "no machinery for this has ever existed in Islam."
Other trends, such as centralized control over budgets, appointments to the professoriate, curricula in the seminaries, the creation of religious militias, monopolizing the representation of interests, and mounting a Kulturkampf in the realm of the arts, the family, and other social issues tell of the growing tendency to create an "Islamic episcopacy" in Iran.
Friday as Sabbath
"Traditionally, Friday was a day of congregating for prayer, not a day of rest. Indeed, the whole idea of sabbath is alien to the vehemently monotheistic spirit of Islam, which deems the notion of God needing a day of rest falsely anthropomorphic. Instead, the Qur'an (62:9-10) instructs Muslims to `leave off business` only while praying; once finished, they should `disperse through the land and seek God's bounty` - in other words, engage in commerce."Christian imperialists imposed Sunday as the weekly day of rest throughout their colonies, ... Recently, as the Sunday sabbath came to be seen as too Western, Muslim rulers asserted their Islamic identities by instituting Friday as the day off." This contradiction was recognized by some Islamists. Omar Bakri Muhammad, qadi of the so-called Shari'ah Court of the United Kingdom protested: "Unfortunately, some Muslims have become consumers of the western culture to the extent that many Muslims celebrate and wrongly take the day of Friday as a weekly holiday in contrast to Saturday of the Jews and Sunday of the Christians. Whereas the idea of a holiday does not exist in Islam and contradicts with the Islamic culture."
Western political concepts
One critic has compiled a list of concepts borrowed from the West and alien to the Sharia used in the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran: 'sovereignty of the people` (hakemiyat-e melli), 'nationNation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
' (mellat), 'the rights of the nation' (hoquq-e mellat), 'the legislature' (qovveh-e moqannaneb), 'the judiciary' (qovveh-e qaza'iyeh), 'parliament
Parliament
A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French , the action of parler : a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which...
' (majles), 'republic
Republic
A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, have supreme control over the government and where offices of state are elected or chosen by elected people. In modern times, a common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of...
' (jomhuri), 'consultation of the people' (hameh-porsi), 'elections' (entekhabat).
Idea of historical progress
Sayyid Qutb adopted the "Marxist notion of stages of history", with the demise of capitalismCapitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and its replacement with communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, but then adding yet another stage, the ultimate Islamic triumph. Islam would replace communism after humanity realized communism could not fulfill its spiritual needs, and Islam was "the only candidate for the leadership of humanity."
Feminism
For Islamists women's condition under Islam is a major issue. Women regularly attend public mosque salah services and new mosques consequently allot far more space to women's sections.But in explaining Islam's or Islamism's superiority in its treatment of women, many Islamists take positions unknown to the early Muslims they seek to emulate. Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna believed "Muslim women have been free and independent for fifteen centuries. Why should we follow the example of Western women, so dependent on their husbands in material matters?" A president of the Islamic Republic of Iran boasted that "under the Islamic Republic, women have full rights to participate in social, cultural, and political activities;" as did Islamist Hasan at-Turabi, the former leader of Sudan: "Today in Sudan, women are in the army, in the police, in the ministries, everywhere, on the same footing as men." Turabi explains that "a woman who is not veiled is not the equal of men. She is not looked on as one would look on a man. She is looked at to see if she is beautiful, if she is desirable. When she is veiled, she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure, not an erotic image."
Ideology
Traditional Islam emphasized man's relation with God and living by Sharia, but not the state "which meant almost nothing to them but trouble ... taxes, conscription, corvée labor." Islamists and revivalists embrace the state, in statements like: Islam "is rich with instructions for ruling a state, running an economy, establishing social links and relationships among the people and instructions for running a family," and "Islam is not precepts or worship, but a system of government."Rather than comparing their movement against other religions, Islamists are prone to say "We are not socialist, we are not capitalist, we are Islamic."
In his famous 1988 appeal to Gorbachev to replace Communism with Islam, Imam Khomeini talked about the need for a "real belief in God" and the danger of materialism, but said nothing about the five pillars
Five Pillars of Islam
The Pillars of Islam are basic concepts and duties for accepting the religion for the Muslims.The Shi'i and Sunni both agree on the essential details for the performance of these acts, but the Shi'a do not refer to them by the same name .-Pillars of Shia:According to Shia Islam, the...
, did not mention the Prophet Muhammad or monotheism. What he did say was that "nowadays Marxism in his economic and social approaches, is facing the blind alley" and that "the Islamic Republic of Iran can easily supply the solution the believing vacuum of your country". Materialism is mentioned in the context of "materialistic ideology."
Innovation in Sharia
Traditionally ShariaSharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
law was elaborated by independent jurist scholars, had precedence over state interests, and was applied to people rather than territories. "[T]he caliph, though otherwise the absolute chief of the community of Muslims, had not the right to legislate but only to make administrative regulations with the limits laid down by the sacred Law."
Islamists in Iran and Sudan extended the purview of Sharia but gave the state, not independent jurists, authority over it. The most extreme example of this was the Ayatollah Khomeini's declaration in 1988 that "the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and ... to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests." Which meant that, "for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca." Something not even Ataturk, the most committed Muslim secularist, dared to do.
Traditionally Sharia applied to people rather than territories - Muslims were to obey wherever they were, non-Muslims were exempt. The idea that law was based on jurisdictions - with towns, states, counties each having their own laws - was a European import. "Turabi declares that Islam `accepts territory as the basis of jurisdiction.` As a result, national differences have emerged. The Libyan government lashes all adulterers. Pakistan lashes unmarried offenders and stones married ones. The Sudan imprisons some and hangs others. Iran has even more punishments, including head shaving and a year's banishment. In the hands of fundamentalists, the Shari`a becomes just a variant of Western, territorial law."
Under the new Islamist interpretation, the "millennium-old exclusion" of non-Muslims "from the Sharia is over." Umar Abd ar-Rahman
Omar Abdel-Rahman
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman , commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United...
, the blind sheikh, "is adamant on this subject: `it is very well known that no minority in any country has its own laws.` Abd al-`Aziz ibn Baz
Abd-al-Aziz ibn Abd-Allah ibn Baaz
Abdul Aziz ibn Abdullah ibn Baz , was a Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar, considered as one of the renowned Sunni Muslim scholars of the twentieth century...
, the Saudi religious leader, calls on non-Muslims to fast during Ramadan
Ramadan
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which lasts 29 or 30 days. It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight hours and is intended to teach Muslims about patience, spirituality, humility and...
. In Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, [non-Muslim] foreign women may not wear nail polish - on the grounds that this leaves them unclean for (Islamic) prayer. ... A fundamentalist party in Malaysia wants to regulate how much time unrelated [non-Muslim] Chinese
Chinese people
The term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....
men and women may spend alone together."
Islamic economics
Criticism of Islamist (or Islamic) economics have been particularly contemptuous, alleging that effort of "incoherence, incompleteness, impracticality, and irrelevance;" driven by "cultural identityCultural identity
Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
" rather than problem solving
Problem solving
Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...
. Another source has dismissed it as "a hodgepodge of populist and socialist ideas," in theory and "nothing more than inefficient state control of the economy and some almost equally ineffective redistribution policies," in practice.
In a political and regional context where Islamist and ulemaUlemaUlama , also spelt ulema, refers to the educated class of Muslim legal scholars engaged in the several fields of Islamic studies. They are best known as the arbiters of shari‘a law...
claim to have an opinion about everything, it is striking how little they have to say about this most central of human activities, beyond repetitious pieties about how their model is neither capitalist nor socialist.
Riba
One complaint comes from PakistanPakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
were Islamization, includes banning of interest on loans or riba
Riba
Riba means one of the senses of "usury" . Riba is forbidden in Islamic economic jurisprudence fiqh and considered as a major sin...
, got underway with military ruler General Zia al-Haq (1977-1988), a supporter of "Islamic resurgence" who pledged to eliminate `the curse of interest.` One critic of this attempt, Kemal A. Faruki, complained that (at least in their initial attempts) Islamizers wasted much effort on "learned discussions on riba" and ... doubtful distinctions between `interest` and `guaranteed profits,` etc." in Western-style banks, "while turning a blind eye" to a far more serious problem outside of the formal, Western-style banking system:
usury perpetrated on the illiterate and the poor by soodkhuris (lit. `devourers of usury`). These officially registered moneylenders under the Moneylenders Act are permitted to lend at not more than 1% below the State Bank rate. In fact they are Mafia-like individuals who charge interest as high as 60% per annum collected ruthlessly in monthly installments and refuse to accept repayment of the principal sum indefinitely. Their tactics include intimidation and force.
Social justice
On the same note, another critic has attacked Islamist organizations in that country for silence about "any kind of genuine social or economic revolution, except to urge, appropriately, that laws, including taxation, be universally applied." In the strongly Islamic country of Pakistan for example, this despite the fact that "social injustice is rampant, extreme poverty exists, and a feudal political and social order are deeply rooted from eras preceding the country's founding." This lack of interest is not unique to Pakistan. "The great questions of gross maldistribution of economic benefits, huge disparities in income, and feudal systems of landholding and human control remain largely outside the Islamist critique."Enmity towards the West
Major Islamist figures such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini emphasize antipathy towards non-Muslims and anything un-Islamic. Sayyid Qutb, for example, opposed co-existence with non-Muslims and believed the world divided into "truth and falsehood" - Islam being truth and everything else being falsehood. "Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half-Islam and half-Jahiliyyah ... The mixing and co-existence of the truth and falsehood is impossible," Western civilization itself was "evil and corrupt," a "rubbish heap."Olivier Roy explains Islamist attacks on Christians and other non-Muslims as a need for a scapegoat for failure.
Since Islam has an answer to everything, the troubles from which Muslim society is suffering are due to nonbelievers and to plots, whether Zionist or Christian. Attacks against Jews and Christians appear regularly in neofundamentalist articles. In Egypt, Copts are physically attacked. In Afghanistan, the presence of western humanitarians, who are associated with Christian missionaries [despite the fact that many if not most have secular often leftist backgrounds] is denounced.
Verses of the Quran and enmity
But whatever the explanation, the sentiments of Qutb and Khomeini seem to clash with Quranic calls for moderation and toleration according to critics:`all those who believe -- the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians -- anyone who believes in Allah and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret.`
`We believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you [i.e. Jews and Christians] Our God and Your God are the same; and it is to Him we submit.`
Another points out ayat endorsing diversity:
`If thy Lord had willed, He would have made humankind into a single nation, but they will not cease to be diverse ... And, for this God created them [humankind]`
`To each of you God has prescribed a Law and a Way. If God would have willed, He would have made you a single people. But God's purpose is to test you in what He has given each of you, so strive in the pursuit of virtue, and know that you will all return to God [in the Hereafter], and He will resolve all the matters in which you disagree.`
... and ayat that seem to be at odds with offensive jihad
Offensive jihad
Offensive Jihad is armed Jihad meant to expand the realm of Islam at the expense of the House of War . Although these world divisions was derived by jurists, they are not mentioned in the Qur'an and hadith....
against non-Muslims Qutb and others promote:
`If your enemy inclines towards peace, then you should seek peace and trust in God`
`... If God would have willed, He would have given the unbelievers power over you [Muslims], and they would have fought you [Muslims], Therefore, if they [the unbelievers] withdraw from you and refuse to fight you, and instead send you guarantees of peace, know that God has not given you a license [to fight them].`
As Abu al-Fadl says, "these discussions of peace would not make sense if Muslims were in a permanent state of war with nonbelievers, and if nonbelievers were a permanent enemy and always a legitimate target."
Sunna and enmity
The policies of the prophet – whose behavior during the 23 years of his ministry makes up SunnahSunnah
The word literally means a clear, well trodden, busy and plain surfaced road. In the discussion of the sources of religion, Sunnah denotes the practice of Prophet Muhammad that he taught and practically instituted as a teacher of the sharī‘ah and the best exemplar...
or model for all Muslims – after conquering Mecca were notably light on bloodletting. While everyone was required to take an oath of allegiance to him and never again wage war against him, he "declared a general amnesty for most of his enemies, including those he had fought in battle. Despite the fact that tribal law now made the Quraysh his slaves, Muhammad declared all of Mecca's inhabitants (including its slaves) to be free. Only six men and four women were put to death for various crimes, and not one was forced to convert to Islam, though everyone had to take an oath of allegiance never again to wage war against the Prophet."
Alleged conspiracies against Islam
Khomeini believed "imperialists" - British and then American - had 300-year-long "elaborate plans for assuming control of" the East, the purpose of which was "to keep us backward, to keep us in our present miserable state so they can exploit our riches, our underground wealth, our lands and our human resources. They want us to remain afflicted and wretched, and our poor to be trapped in their misery ... "One complaint of this approach by critics is that these "conspiracy theor[ies]" revolving around the "ready-to-wear devil" of the West are "currently paralyzing Muslim political thought. For to say that every failure is the devil's work is the same as asking God, or the devil himself (which is to say these days the Americans), to solve one's problems."
Christian Crusades
The belief of some, such as Sayyid Qutb, that the CrusadesCrusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
were an attack on Islam, or at least "a wanton and predatory aggression" against Muslim countries from which Muslims developed a rightful mistrust of Christians/Europeans/Westerners, has been called into question.
According to historian Bernard Lewis, the Crusades were indeed religious wars for Christians, but to
recover the lost lands of Christendom and in particular the holy land where Christ had lived, taught and died. In this connection, it may be recalled that when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant not much more than four centuries had passed since the Arab Muslim conquerors had wrested theses lands from Christendom - less than half the time from the Crusades to the present day - and that a substantial proportion of the population of these lands, perhaps even a majority, was still Christian."
The Arab Muslim contemporaries of the Crusaders did not refer to them as "Crusaders or Christians but as Franks or Infidels". Rather than raging at their aggression, "with few exceptions, the Muslim historians show little interest in whence or why the Franks had come, and report their arrival and their departure with equal lack of curiosity." Crusaders and Muslims allied with each other against other alliances of Crusaders and Muslims. Rather than being event of such trauma that Muslims developed an old and deep fear of Christians/Europeans/Westerners from it, the crusaders' invasion was just one of many such by barbarians coming from "East and West alike" during this time of "Muslim weakness and division."
Lewis argues that any traumatization from the Crusades felt by Muslims surely would pale in comparison to what European Christendom felt from Islam. The Crusades started in 1096 and the Crusaders lost their last toe-hold when the city of Acre, was taken less than two hundred years later in 1291, whereas Europe felt under constant threat from Islam, "from the first Moorish landing in Spain [711] to the second Turkish siege of Vienna [1683]."
All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christian rulers, and the vast majority of the first Muslims west of Iran and Arabia were converts from Christianity. North Africa, EgyptEgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, SyriaSyriaSyria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
, even Persian-ruled IraqIraqIraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe. In SpainSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and in SicilySicilySicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...
, Muslim faith and Arab culture exercised a powerful attraction, and even those who remained faithful to the Christian religion often adopted the Arabic languageArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
."
William Cantwell Smith observes that
until Karl MarxKarl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and the rise of communismCommunismCommunism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, the Prophet organized and launched the only serious challenge to Western civilization that it has faced in the whole course of its history ... Islam is the only positive force that has won converts away from Christianity - by the tens of millions ...
Division of Muslim world into many separate states
According to the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Islamists, one glaring example of an attempt by the West to weaken the Muslim world was the division of the Ottoman empireOttoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
, the largest Muslim state and home of the Caliph, into 20 or so "artificially created separate nations," when that empire fell in 1918. Western powers did partition the Arab world (which made up most of the Ottoman empire) after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, while the general Arab Muslim sentiment in much of the 20th Century was for wahda (unity).
Was this a case of divide and rule policy by Western imperialists?
International relations scholar Fred Halliday
Fred Halliday
Frederick Halliday, FBA was an Irish writer and academic specialising in International Relations and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Cold War, Iran, and the Arabian peninsula.-Biography:Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1946 to an English father, businessman Arthur Halliday, and an...
points out there were plenty of other explanations for the continued division: rivalries between different Arab rulers and the reluctance of distinct regional populations to share statehood or power with other Arabs, rivalries between Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...
and Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
in the Peninsula or between Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
. Anger in Syria over Egyptian dominance in the United Arab Republic that led to its division in 1961. The difficulty of unifying a large group of states even though they share much the desire, the same language, culture and religion is mirrored in the failure of Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
to merge in the first decades of the 19th century after the Spanish withdrawal, when "broad aspirations, inspired by Simon Bolivar
Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...
, for Latin American unity foundered on regional, elite and popular resistance, which ended up yielding, as in the Arab world, around twenty distinct states."
The more general claim that imperialism and colonialism divide in order to rule is, in broad terms, simplistic: the overall record of colonialism has been to merge and unite previously disparate entities, be this in 16th century Ireland, 19th-century India and Sudan or 20th century Libya and Southern Arabia. The British supported the formation of the League of Arab states in 1945 and tried, in the event unsuccessfully, to create united federations first in Southern Arabia (1962-7) and then in the Gulf states (1968-71). As Sami ZubaidaSami ZubaidaSami Zubaida is an Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and, as a Visiting Hauser Global Professor of Law in Spring 2006, taught Law and Politics in the Islamic World at New York University School of Law....
has pointed out in his talks, imperialism in fact tends to unite and rule. It is independent states such as India and Pakistan (later Pakistan and Bangladesh), as well as Ireland, Cyprus and indeed, the USSR and Yugoslavia, that promote fragmentation."
Alleged Jewish conspiracies against Islam
Islamists from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood on the moderate end ("Such are the Jews, my brother, Muslim lion cub, your enemies and the enemies of God"), to the bin Laden at the extreme ("Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery"), have issued powerful and categorical anti-Jewish statements.Among Islamist opinion makers, both Qutb and Khomeini talked about Jews as both early and innate enemies of Islam. Qutb believed that
At the beginning the enemies of the Muslim community did not fight openly with arms but tried to fight the community in its belief through intrigue, spreading ambiguities, creating suspicions.
And goes on to say, "the Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society."
Khomeini mentions the "Jews of Banu Qurayza
Banu Qurayza
The Banu Qurayza were a Jewish tribe which lived in northern Arabia, at the oasis of Yathrib , until the 7th century, when their conflict with Muhammad led to their demise, after the Invasion of Banu Qurayza, took place in the Dhul Qa‘dah, 5 A.H i.e. in February/March, 627 AD...
", who were eliminated by Muhammad, as an example of the sort of "troublesome group" that Islam and the Islamic state must "eliminate."
and explains that "from the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam has had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems."
Qutb's anti-Judaism has been criticized as obsessive and irrational by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon who quote him saying
that `anyone who leads this community away from its religion and its Quran can only be Jewish agent` - in other words, any source of division, anyone who undermines the relationship between Muslims and their faith is by definition a Jew. The Jews thus become the incarnation of all that is anti-Islamic, and such is their supposed animosity that they will never relent `because the Jews will be satisfied only with destruction of this religion [Islam].` The struggle with the Jews will be a war without rules, since `from such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evilness.`
Alleged Jewish conspiracy against the Prophet Muhammad
But specifically there is the issue of Jews conspired against the Prophet Muhammad, those Jews being the Banu QurayzaBanu Qurayza
The Banu Qurayza were a Jewish tribe which lived in northern Arabia, at the oasis of Yathrib , until the 7th century, when their conflict with Muhammad led to their demise, after the Invasion of Banu Qurayza, took place in the Dhul Qa‘dah, 5 A.H i.e. in February/March, 627 AD...
mentioned by Khomeini, a tribe that collaborated with the Quraysh, the Muslims' powerful enemy, and whose men were executed and women and children sold into slavery in 627 AD as punishment.
That this event was the beginning of a Jewish-Muslim struggle is disputed by religious scholar Reza Aslan.
The execution of the Banu Qurayza was not, as it has so often been presented, reflective of an intrinsic religious conflict between Muhammad and the Jews. This theory, which is sometimes presented as an incontestable doctrine... is founded on the belief that MuhammadMuhammadMuhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...
... came to MedinaMedinaMedina , or ; also transliterated as Madinah, or madinat al-nabi "the city of the prophet") is a city in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia, and serves as the capital of the Al Madinah Province. It is the second holiest city in Islam, and the burial place of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, and...
fully expecting the Jews to confirm his identity as a prophet ... To his surprise, however the Jews not only rejected him but strenuously argued against the authenticity of the Qur’an as divine revelation. Worried that the rejection of the Jews would somehow discredit his prophetic claims, Muhammad had not choice but to turn violently against them, separate his community from theirs,
Aslan believes this theory is refuted by historical evidence:
- The Banu Qurayza were not executed for being Jews. Non-Jews were also executed following the Battle of the TrenchBattle of the TrenchThe Battle of the Trench also known as Battle of Ahzab, Battle of the Confederates and Siege of Medina , was a fortnight-long siege of Yathrib by Arab and Jewish tribes. The strength of the confederate armies is estimated around 10,000 men with six hundred horses and some camels, while the...
. "As Michael Lecker has demonstrated, a significant number of the Banu Kilab -- Arab clients of the Qurayza who allied with them as an auxiliary force outside Medina -- were also executed for treason." Other Jews did not protest or side with the Banu Qurayza, and these Jews were left alone. - Most Jews were untouched. The 400 to 700 Banu Qurayza men killed were "no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina" who are estimated to have been between 24,000 and 28,000 These "remained in the oasis living amicably alongside their Muslim neighbors for many years" until they were expelled "under the leadership of Umar near the end of the seventh century C.E." along with all the other non-Muslims "as part of a larger Islamization process throughout the Arabian Peninsula."
- "Scholars almost unanimously agree, the execution of the Banu Qurayza did not in any way set a precedent for future treatment of Jews in Islamic territories. On the contrary, Jews throve under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and non-Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians `protected peoples` (dhimmi), neither required nor encouraged their conversion to Islam. ... In return for a special `protection tax` called jizyah, Muslim law allowed Jews and Christians both religious autonomy and the opportunity to share in the social and economic institutions ..."
"Finally and most importantly, ... Jewish clans in Medina -- themselves Arab converts -- were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously."
- They spoke a language called ratan, and "[t]here is no evidence that they either spoke or understood Hebrew. Indeed, their knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture was likely limited to just a few scrolls of law, some prayer books, and a handful of fragmentary Arabic translations of the Torah -- What S. W. Baron refers to as a `garbled, oral tradition.`"
- They "neither strictly observed Mosaic lawTorahTorah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five books of the bible—Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers and Deuteronomy Torah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five...
, nor seemed to have any real knowledge of the TalmudTalmudThe Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
," nor were Israelites, which, according to J.G. Reissener, precluded them from being considered Jews. A non-Israelites Jew being required to be `a follower of the Mosaic Law ... in accordance with the principles laid down in the Talmud,` according to the strong consensus of opinion among Diaspora Jewish communities. - In "their culture, ethnics, and even their religion, Medina's Jews ... were practically identical to Medina's pagan community, with whom they freely interacted and (against Mosaic law) frequently intermarried."
- Archeologists haven't found any "easily identifiable archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence" at Medina. The usual "indicators -- such as the remnants of stone vessels, the ruins of immersion pools (miqva'ot), and the interment of ossuaries -- must be present at a site in order to confirm the existence there of an established Jewish religious identity."
Hopes for world success and mass conversion
The anti-Islamist website islamistwatch.org quotes disapprovingly from a book of pioneer Islamist author Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi that Islam isa comprehensive system which envisages to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforces its own programme of reform which it deems best for the well-being of mankind.
Enforcing an Islamist program around the world would be greatly facilitated by mass conversion and according to Olivier Roy, "today's Islamist activists are obsessed with conversion: rumors that Western celebrities or entire groups are converting are hailed enthusiastically by the core militants."
Critic Daniel Pipes has also noted Islamist contempt for, and ambitions to convert, other cultures and religions, criticizing specifically the contempt of Islamists in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for the country they have immigrated to. He quotes, for example, the wish of one Islamist living in the U.S. that North America turn "away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]."
Aside from the complaint that pushing for mass conversion of non-Muslims to a different religion and culture is intolerant and aggressive, Olivier Roy argues it is simply unrealistic. "[T]he age of converting entire peoples is past," as we live in an era where religious belief is considered a personal matter. Likewise, a strategy to gradually convert non-Muslims "until the number of conversions shifts the balance of the society," is also problematic. Conversion to Islam "in a Christian environment ... generally indicates a marginalized person, a fanatic or a true mystic," in any case people with little desire or ability to join or build "a mass movement."
Pipes also argues many prominent conversions to Islam appears to be part of a "recurring" pattern, rather than a mass movement. As he puts it, "Islam - in both its normative and Nation
Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
variants" has become established "as a leading solace for African-Americans in need", specifically after trouble with the criminal justice system, and includes a "well-established" oppositional "pattern of alienation, radicalism and violence."
See also
- Liberal movements within IslamLiberal movements within IslamProgressive Muslims have produced a considerable body of liberal thought within Islam or "progressive Islam" ; but some consider progressive Islam and liberal Islam as two distinct movements)...
- Apostasy in IslamApostasy in IslamApostasy in Islam is commonly defined in Islam as the rejection in word or deed of one's former religion by a person who was previously a follower of Islam...
- TakfirTakfirIn Islamic law, takfir or takfeer refers to the practice of one Muslim declaring another Muslim an unbeliever or kafir...
- War against Islam
- Criticism of multiculturalismCriticism of multiculturalismCriticism of multiculturalism questions the multicultural ideal of the co-existence of distinct ethnic cultures within one nation-state. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that were once associated with a single, homogeneous, national cultural identity...
- Muslim BrotherhoodMuslim BrotherhoodThe Society of the Muslim Brothers is the world's oldest and one of the largest Islamist parties, and is the largest political opposition organization in many Arab states. It was founded in 1928 in Egypt by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna and by the late 1940s had an...
- Islamic terrorism
Books & organisations
- The IslamistThe IslamistThe Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, is a book about Ed Husain's five years as an Islamic fundamentalist. Husain became an Islamist at the age of sixteen, but rejected fundamentalist teaching and returned to normal life and his family...
- Undercover MosqueUndercover MosqueUndercover Mosque is a documentary programme produced by the independent television company hardcash productions for the Channel 4 series Dispatches which first aired on 15 January 2007 in the UK. The film caused a furore in Britain and the world press due to the content of the released footage...
- Stop the Islamification of EuropeStop the Islamification of EuropeStop Islamisation of Europe , also known as Stop the Islamification of Europe, is a group with the self-declared goal of "preventing Islam becoming a dominant political force in Europe". It is a political interest group which has been active in Denmark and has conducted anti-Islamic protests in the...
- Political group - MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianismMANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianismMANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism is a political statement made in response to the violence surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. The signatories said they issued the letter to demonstrate that there is a need to fight for secular values and personal freedom...
Further reading
- Abu al-Fadl, Khaled, Great Theft : wrestling Islam from the extremists, New York, NY : HarperSanFrancisco, c2005
- Abu al-Fadl, Khaled, The Place of Tolerance in Islam, Beacon Press, 2002
- Aslan, Reza, No God But God : The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Random House, 2005
- Boulares, Habib, Islam, The Fear And The Hope, Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Zed Books, 1990
- Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn ed., Against Islamic Extremism: The Writings of Muhammad Sa'id al-Ashmawy, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1998)
- Fuller, Graham E., The Future of Political Islam, Palgrave MacMillan, (2003)
- Halliday, Fred, 100 Myths about the Middle East, Saqi BooksSaqi BooksSaqi Books is an independent UK publisher co-founded in 1984 by author and feminist Mai Ghoussoub to "print quality academic and general interest books on the Middle East". It now claims to be "the UK's largest publisher of Middle Eastern and Arabic titles"...
, 2005, - Kepel, Gilles, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Khomeini, Ruhollah. Algar, Hamid (translator and editor). Islam and Revolution: Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981
- Lewis, Bernard, Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1993
- Maalouf, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1985)
- Mawdudi, S. Abul A'la, Islamic Law and Constitution, edited and translated into English by Khursid Ahmad, Jamaat-e-Islami Publications, 1955
- Meddeb, Abelwahab (2003). The Malady of Islam. Basic Books. ISBN 0465044352.
- Pipes, Daniel, In the Path of God : Islam and Political Power, by Daniel Pipes, New York : Basic Books, c1983.
- Schirazi, Asghar, The Constitution of Iran : politics and the state in the Islamic Republic / by Asghar Schirazi, London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 1997
- Taheri, Amir, Holy Terror, the Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism, Sphere Books, 1987
- Taheri, Amir, The Spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution by Amir Taheri, Adler and Adler c1985