Abstract
In the post-9/11 context, any reference to a “war of ideas” conjures up a civili-zational showdown primarily between the world of Islam and the West. This is a scenario made popular by the Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington in his provocative “clash of civilizations” thesis. Although Huntington recognized several civilizational blocs at odds with the West, Islam has received disproportionate attention. The atrocities of 9/11 were believed by a considerable number of people, many of them influential policymakers under the previous Bush administration, to have vindicated this thesis. Such a belief has spawned a dangerously Manichaean worldview pitting an assumed monolithic Islamic world against a monolithic West, the disastrous results of which were only too evident in the last eight years in particular.
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Notes
For an excellent, comprehensive introduction to the development of Islamic modernism, see Fazlur Rahman, Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 47.
The standard Islamist work on this is Mawdudi’s al-Islam wa al-Jahiliyya (“Islam and the Age of Ignorance”) (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-risala, 1975). For a discussion of Sayyid Qutb’s understanding of Jahiliyya, see the article by William Shepard, “Sayyed Qutb’s Doctrine of Jahiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (2003): pp. 521–545.
S. Abul ATa Mawdudi, Jihad in Islam (Salimiah, Kuwait: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, 1977), p. 5.
For a broad range of views on this topic among Islamists in Jordan, e.g., see Quintan Wiktorowicz, “The Salafi Movement in Jordan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 222–226.
See further the article “Takfir” in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. John L. Esposito (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4: 178–179.
See further my article, “Competing Perspectives on Jihad and Martyrdom in Early Islamic Sources,” in Witnesses for the Faith: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Martyrdom, ed. Brian Wicker (London: Aldershot, 2006), pp. 15–31.
This hadith, which appears to have emanated from Sufi circles, is recorded by al-Ghazali, “The book of invocation,” Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din, translated by Kojiro Nakamura as Ghazali on Prayer (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 1975), p. 167 For further attestations of this hadith, see John Renard, “Aljihad al-Akbar: Notes on a Theme in Islamic Spirituality,” Muslim World 78 (1988): pp. 225–242.
For an account of general tension between Sufis and Islamists as well as traditionalists, see Julian Johansen, Sufism and Islamic Preform in Egypt: The Battle for Islamic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 211–214.
For example, Mohammad Talaat al-Ghunaimi, The Muslim Conception of International Law and the Western Approach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1968), p. 104.
Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), pp. 257–261.
See Kate Zebiri, Mahmud Shaltut and Islamic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 68.
Al-Suyuti, al-Itqan fi ‘ulum al-Q_ur’an (Damascus: Dar Ibn Kathir, 1993), 2: 714
See Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 220–249
See the articles “The Myth of a Militant Islam,” by David Dakake and “Recollecting the Spirit of jihad,” by Keza Shah-Kazemi, in Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars, ed. Joseph E.B. Lumbard (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004), pp. 3–38
For names of more reformist and modernist Muslims, see Charles Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
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© 2009 Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher
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Afsaruddin, A. (2009). Debating Absolutism and Pluralism in Contemporary Islam. In: Patterson, E.D., Gallagher, J. (eds) Debating the War of Ideas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101982_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101982_9
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