Abstract
Religions do not lend themselves easily to rational, cool-headed debate. They arouse such passion that, for even the most liberal modern iconoclast, they often remain a last taboo. Such discussions as do take place are frequently characterized by platitudes and prejudice; with “positive prejudice” tending to be more insidious and harder to identify than its more virulent negative counterpart. Yet neither is based on a deductive analysis of the religion itself. Nowhere is this truer than in Western attitudes towards Islam.
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Notes
The travelogue of the fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battutah (1304–68/69), who visited almost every Muslim country during thirty years of traveling, reveals not only the cultural diversity of the Islamic world but also its many shared features. For example, Ibn Battutah’s training in Islamic jurisprudence enabled him to serve as a judge, each time under a different political authority, not only in his native Morocco but as far afield as Delhi and the Maldives. See Tim Mackintosh-Smith, ed., The Travels of Ibn Battutah (London: Picador, 2000).
They include Wahhabism, which is based on the puritanical teachings of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (c.1703–92) and is today the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia. For a detailed exposition of Wahhabi doctrine, see http://www.Islam-qa.com. For an unapologetically antagonistic critique, see Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (New York: Islamic Publications International, 2002).
The precise balance between predestination and freewill in Sunni Islam remains problematic. The very name of the religion—in as much that Islam means submission— would appear to necessitate at least a modicum of free will. The degree to which human free will is circumscribed by divinely predestined fate was one of the most divisive issues in early Islamic theology and has arguably yet to be fully resolved. See William Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 82–118.
Translation by N. J. Dawood, The Koran (London: Penguin, 1999). The identity of the Sabaeans (also sometimes spelled Sabeans or Sabians) has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. They appear to have been members of a now-extinct monotheistic faith with a scripture and prophets similar, though not identical, to the Jews and Christians.
A succinct description of this accommodation between Sufism and orthodox theology can be found in Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156–82.
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© 2008 Gareth Jenkins
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Jenkins, G. (2008). Introduction. In: Political Islam in Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612457_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612457_1
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