Abstract
Unlike its nineteenth- and twentieth-century fate in the West, religion for the dar al-Islam has not been secularized. It has not been relegated and confined to the private sphere. For the majority of Muslims, religion, like politics, is inherently public; it permeates all facets of life: moral, political, social, economic, and cultural. On an individual and collective level, religion and politics are inseparable—and, in many cases, so are Mosque and State. As Bernard Lewis has stated, historically, Islam was both God and Caesar. The history of Islam illustrates how, prior to its initial encounters with secularism in the eighteenth century, the entire Muslim world embraced the idea that “the state was God’s state, the army God’s army, … the enemy was God’s enemy,” and “the law was God’s law.”1 Religion was inextricably linked with the state.
Infuse your heart with mercy, love and kindness for your subjects. Be not in the face of them a voracious animal, counting them as easy prey, for they are of two kinds: either they are your brothers in religion or your equals in creation.
—Ali ibn Abi Talib
In order for the idea of the dialogue of cultures to become meaningful and to prevent it from becoming a mere slogan we have to begin intra-cultural dialogue in the world of Islam itself
—Abdolkarim Soroush
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Notes
Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 181.
John L. Esposito, “Practice and Theory,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, ed. Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 95–96.
Michael Novak, The Hunger for Universal Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations is not Inevitable (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 209.
Mashhood Rizvi, “Intolerable Injustices,” in The Place of Tolerance in Islam, ed. Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 70–71.
Martin Kramer, “Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?” in The Middle East Quarterly X (Spring 2003); available at http://www.meforum.org/ article/541/.
See Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 41–50.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization (San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 2003), 179–80.
Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17, 18.
John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 74.
Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.
Maududi, quoted in Beverly Milton-Edwards, Islam and Politics in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 53.
See also John Esposito, Islam and Politics (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 147.
Abul Ala Maududi, “Political Theory of Islam,” The Islamic Law and Constitutions, 6th ed., ed. Khurshid Ahmad (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1977), 160; also in Esposito, Islam and Politics, 147.
Milton-Edwards, 54–55. See also Esposito, Islam and Politics, 148–49; and Youssef M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1990), 110–11.
Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2001), 320.
zz Maududi, Rights of Non-Muslims in the Islamic State (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1982), 22–23. See also Choueiri, 110–12; Noah Feldman, 22; and Black, 343–44.
zz Maududi, First Principles of the Islamic State (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1983), 67. See Choueiri, 111.
In Milestones, Qutb states that “the chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam … If not, then we shall say to them what God commanded His Messenger—peace be upon him—to say: “For you your way, for me mine. 109:6)” Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Dar Al-Ilm, Damascus, Syria, 1964), 140.
Feldman, 43. See also Black, 321; and Yvonne Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85–87. According to Youssef Choueiri, jahiliyya was reframed as a fundamentalist concept by Muslim Indian politicians and thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s to refer to the Hindus’ non-Islamic doctrines and ideologies. Choueiri, 94–95.
Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, trans. William E. Shepard (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 303–4, 308.
Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 245, referenced in Black, 341.
Ahmad Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992), 162–63; quoted in Black, 341.
Dale F. Eickelman, “The Coming Transformation in the Muslim World,” in Current History (January 2000), 16. Dale Eickelman is a professor of anthropology and human relations at Dartmouth College. One of his more recent works is New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. Friedmann acknowledges the same required admission for Christians. Furthermore, he points out that Muslims can find solace in the commonly held belief that the living standards of non-Muslims under medieval Muslim rulers, for instance, “were significantly better than those imposed on Jews and other minorities by their Christian counterparts.” Bernard Lewis supports this view: “There is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the massacres and expulsions, the inquisitions and persecutions that Christians habitually inflicted on non-Christians and still more on each other. In the lands of Islam, persecution was the exception; in Christendom, sadly, it was the norm.”
Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 129. See also, Abou El Fadl, The Place of Tolerance in Islam, 23.
W. Cole Durham, Jr. “Perspective on Religious Liberty: A Comparative Framework,” in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Legal Perspectives, ed. Johan D. van der Vyver and John Witte, Jr. (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 13.
Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Freedom, Equality, and Justice (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2002), 47.
Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, Pakistan: An Islamic Democracy (Lahore: n.p., n.d., [1951]), 5;
quoted in Sharif Al Mujahid. Ideology of Pakistan (Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1974), 4; found in Essays on Pakistan Affairs, vol. 2 (Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1975), series no. 21.
This suggestion is made by Roger M. Savory, “Relations between the Safavid State and its Non-Muslim Minorities,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 14, no. 4 (2003): 435.
William H. Brackney, ed. Human Rights and the World’s Major Religions, vol. 3, The Islamic Tradition, by Muddathir ‘Abd al-Rahim (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 46. Qur’an 2:190. ‘Abd al-Rahim is a professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. He is also a charter member and Secretary General of the Sudanese National Committee for Human Rights, founded in 1967.
Ibn ’Abd Rabbih, al-’Iqd al-Farid, vol. 4 (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-’Arabi, 1983), 247; quoted in ’Abd al Rahim, 47–48.
Abū Zahrah, al-Mujtamaa’ al-Insani fi Zill al Islam, 2nd ed. (Jeddah: Dar al Su’udiyyah, 1981), 57–58;
quoted in Mohammad Hashim Kamali, The Dignity of Man: An Islamic Perspective (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2002), 69.
These sayings were composed in the sixteenth century by Ala ’al-Din ibn Mutaqqi, “The Treasury of Workmen in Traditions and Sayings and Deeds” (Kanz al-’Ummal fi Sunan al-Aqwal wa’l-Af’al) and were published on the margins of the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal (Cairo edition); quoted in Dwight M. Donaldson, Studies in Muslim Ethics (London: S.P.C.K., 1953), 79. The Sunni canon of hadith was completed five hundred years after Muhammad’s death and consists of six authentic collections of traditions: al-Bukhari (d. 870), Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875), Ibn Maja (d. 886), Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Tirmidhi (d. 892), al-Nisai (d. 915). Ahmed ibn Hanbal (mid-eighth century) is often included as a recognized source of traditions. The sayings above were published in the margins of Ibn Hanbal’s Musnad. Abu Zahrah, quoted in Kamali, The Dignity of Man, 69.
Paul Kurtz, “Free Inquiry and Islamic Philosophy: The Significance of George Hourani,” in Averroës and the Enlightenment, ed. Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), 234.
See also George F. Hourani, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9–14.
Black, 59–60; George Hourani, On the Harmony between Religion and Philosophy (London: Luzak & Co., 1967).
Abdolkarim Souroush, Treatise on Tolerance trans. Nilou Mobasser, (Praemium Erasmian Foundation, 2004), 1.
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© 2008 Aaron Tyler
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Tyler, A. (2008). Discovering Islam. In: Islam, the West, and Tolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612044_5
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