{"title":"Beyond Maṣlaḥah","authors":"Sami Al Daghistani","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2988","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on maṣlaḥah (benefit or well-being) and adab (righteous behavior or character) as ethically intertwined concepts that are discussed by classical Muslim scholars in relation to the acquisition of wealth (kasb) and overall economic engagement. Particularly in certain works of al-Shaybāni (d. 805), al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857), Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 894), al-Māwardī (d. 1058), and al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), personal piety is closely related to righteous economic behavior under the banner of adab’s moral stipulations. In light of al-Ghazālī’s understanding of economic provision as part of his overall theory of eternal happiness (saʿādah), the concept of maṣlaḥah can be analyzed in the context of adab as an extension of Sharīʿa law. While maṣlaḥah is from a legal standpoint crucial for safeguarding economic activities and preserving wealth, concomitantly, in this paper I treat maṣlaḥah as a derivative of adab and its holistic vision of human nature. In particular, I address what constitutes economic provision as an ethical endeavor in selected classical texts; and how the concept of adab preserves and enhances economic behavior as conceived by classical Muslim scholars.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42685223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment","authors":"B. Sadriu","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3146","url":null,"abstract":"In 2019 Professor Ahmet Kuru published his acclaimed Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. I say ‘acclaimed’ not as an endorsement but merely to point to accolades it received, such as the jointly awarded and prestigious 2020 American Political Science Association’s Jervis-Schroeder Book Award. Moreover, it was keenly promoted by Kuru and publishers via a global book tour including Harvard, on top of receiving reviews in Foreign Affairs and numerous political science and history journals. More recently, its arguments featured in a widely reported op-ed penned by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in the wake of the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, where he characteristically decries ‘Islamism’ as “a first-order security threat to the west”.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44884598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi","authors":"M. Dugan","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3154","url":null,"abstract":"In this topically and theoretically eclectic project, Sophia Rose Arjana analyzes the way that religious consumption perpetuates Orientalism. Arjana focuses on the consumption habits of Nones and New Agers, two amorphous groups linked by their avowed disregard for the strictures of religious traditions. She contends that their clothing, travel, and self-care practices commodify “the Orient” for Western consumers. Arjana terms this field of consumption the “mystical marketplace,” a network of symbols, figures, and objects that circulate non-Christian religious traditions to those desperate for enchantment. Within the mystical marketplace, tourism to Bali or Rumi translations stripped of their Islamic content (220-21) are not, as they might appear, means for learning from other religious traditions. Rather, the mystical marketplace in Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi dislocates religious symbols and entrenches Orientalism. Arjana’s postscript explicates her intention to expose the hegemonies—of whiteness, of coloniality, of Protestant normativity—which structure these forms of consumption. Her engaging concepts and case studies do just that, all in a broadly accessible register.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47318797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rivals in the Gulf","authors":"M. Amasha","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3132","url":null,"abstract":"David H. Warren enriches the rising literature on ʿulamaʾ and the “Arab Spring” with his first book, which provides an overview of the history of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Abdullah Bin Bayyah’s relations with Qatar and the UAE, respectively; both ʿulamaʾ and states’ engagement with the “Arab Spring”; and the political thought of both ʿulamaʾ and its connection to both states’ foreign policy. After describing the book’s structure here, I discuss the book’s methods and core arguments. I then engage methodologically with some of its arguments and conclude with why this book is a good model for scholarship on the ʿulamaʾ.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44764867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Competing Authorities","authors":"Yousef Aly Wahb","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2993","url":null,"abstract":"North American Muslims seeking to resolve their private disputes confront multifaceted access to justice issues. Since Islamic marriage and divorce laws do not always align with North American family legislative schemes, Muslims are burdened with trying to simultaneously meet their obligations toward both legal systems. Unlike secular law, Islamic divorce proceedings require either the husband’s eventual consent or the availability of a Muslim judge. They also prescribe substantive obligations and rights for divorcees that are comparable to corollary relief provided by family law statutes. The absence of religious quasi-judicial dispute resolutions poses barriers to Muslims obtaining a religious divorce or annulment, and to acquiring subsequent relief, such as financial settlements and custody, in accordance with their religious beliefs. To respond to these overlapping barriers, this paper analyzes forms of Islamic legal authority to grant religious divorce or annulment, and to mediate or arbitrate corollary relief using religious law. The paper concludes with recommendations for a holistic framework to settle family disputes in compliance with Islamic law and in a legally enforceable manner.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135534230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Muslim Intellectual History","authors":"Saulat Pervez","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.2332","url":null,"abstract":"This article strives to chart the intellectual history of Muslims and the trans-civilizational, discursive tradition of Islam spanning fourteen centuries. It chronicles the scholarly projects shaping Islamic thought as they developed in the wake of the Prophet’s (s) death and intensified in the ensuing centuries despite the numerous changes and tumultuous times the Muslim ummah encountered. Together with an accompanying map and visual timeline, it endeavors to empower students of Islam in general and Islamic Studies programs in particular with an appreciation of the breadth and depth of Muslim intellectual history. The article begins by tracing the foundation of early regional centers, the side-by-side formation of disciplines, the development of the various legal schools as well as the many strains of Islamic thought, and how they not only influenced one another but also became absorbed into mainstream Islam, ending with an overview of the impact of modernity on Islamic thought. Through this effort, I hope that students will be able to cultivate a rudimentary understanding of Islamic scholarship in its historical context, make interdisciplinary connections, critically engage with the individual disciplines in their focused study, and gain an overall nuanced reverence for the collective Muslim intellectual legacy across 1400 years along with the diversified scholarly struggles to diligently honor and observe the message received from the Prophet Muhammad (s).\u0000The map and timeline accompanying the present survey of Muslim intellectual history are available here.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46789667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How about a Green Caliphate?","authors":"Wardah Alkatiri","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3100","url":null,"abstract":"Over fifty years into global environmental negotiations since the first UN Conference in 1972 on the Human Environment in Stockholm, to the Climate Change Conference COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh in 2022, the major environmental concerns of our time are no closer to being resolved. Negotiations continued to fall by the wayside. Given the commitment to economic development and sovereignty of the nation states, the deadlocks are understandable. Against this background, this article proposes a “Green Caliphate” as a faith-motivated global environmental governance for a network of Sharia-based countries and devout local Muslim communities around the world. The article offers a set of rationales for considering the Green Caliphate in the light of climate emergency from multiple perspectives: social justice, knowledge sharing, and cultural transformation. Drawing on Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and Ovamir Anjum’s “Who Wants the Caliphate”, this article broaches the concept of a socially and environmentally-responsible caliphate governance which might be in congruent with the Schumacherian pursuit of the “Fourth World” where government and economics are under genuine human control because the size of such units are small, sensible, and human scale, and where the pace of development is in accordance with the religious cosmology of their members to adapt. The Green Caliphate is envisioned on a decolonial horizon of pluriversality towards a multipolar world order.\u0000 In the cycle of nature there is no such things as victory or defeat; there is only movement.\u0000 Within that cycle there are neither winners nor losers, there are only stages that must be gone through. Both will pass. One will succeed the other, and the cycle will continue until we liberate ourselves from the flesh and find the Divine Energy.\u0000 —Paulo Coelho, “Manuscript Found in Accra”","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49056055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Qur’an in South Asia","authors":"K. Khan","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3068","url":null,"abstract":"Kamran Bashir’s The Qur’an in South Asia addresses the question of how Sunni Muslims in India dealt with their intellectual heritage and identified with their past tradition in the wake of European colonialism and missionary activism. He focuses mainly on the Muslim scholars Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (d. 1898), Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī (d. 1943) and Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī (d. 1930), who wrote extensively on approaches to understanding the Qur’an after the mutiny/uprising that occurred in 1857 and the partition of India in 1947.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46838413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenges with Studying Islamist Groups in American Political Science","authors":"T. Khan","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3085","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I will explain why the lack of debate between political theory and comparative politics has led to an inadequate understanding of the politics of traditional Islamic scholars and Islamists in American political science. In the first section, I analyze the impact of the text-based approach of political theory; in the second, of the liberal frameworks of comparative politics; and in the third, a promising new development: the interdisciplinary field of Islamic legal studies, which has the potential to bridge the division between political science, law, and area studies approaches to the study of Muslim societies. I argue that the reliance of political theorists on seminal Islamist texts, rather than on the interpretations of texts during legal and political processes, limits their ability to represent the evolution of pragmatic Islamist theory in countries such as Pakistan. Moreover, whereas political theorists, such as Lucas Swaine, have demonstrated the futility of applying liberal assumptions to theocrats, comparativists continue to predominantly rely on liberal categories and frameworks, which produces a distorted view of Islamists. The division of labor between political theory and comparative politics, and the lack of conversation that results from it, makes it difficult—if not impossible—to fairly represent or analyze contemporary Islamist groups in American political science.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43745703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial Note","authors":"Ovamir Anjum","doi":"10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3194","url":null,"abstract":"In this issue, you will find three peer-reviewed articles and two forum essays. Adrien A. P. Chauvet’s “Cosmographical readings of the Qurʾan” is a trained physicist’s probing, multidisciplinary inquiry about a topic of great interest to the recent generations of Muslims about the compatibility of Islam and science, and about the obvious exuberance Muslims feel when some modern discoveries point to the Qurʾanic truth. As a trained physicist, he wonders whether and how we can be sure that the scientific paradigms endorsed today will endure, and therefore, more pertinently, “how can the text stay scientifically relevant across the ages, while science itself is evolving?” It thus advances the scholarship on the scriptures’ relevance to past and present scientific paradigms, reviewing multiple ancient cosmographical paradigms (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebraic, Greek, Christian, Zoroastrian and Manichean) as well as modern ones, while being grounded in Islamic theology and philosophy of science. It manages to advance a novel thesis in the growing field of Islam and science, advocating for a multiplicity of correspondences between both past and modern scientific paradigms, even if these paradigms conflict\u0000with one another.","PeriodicalId":34866,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Islam and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69903272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}