Members of the Abbasid family were installed as titular caliphs in Cairo by the Mamluks, the main Sunni Islamic power of the day. They were more ornaments to the Mamluk court than anything else, but merely by existing they preserved the ideal of a single leader behind whom all Muslims could unite. So the title was still there for the taking when a new Islamic empire arose. Early in the 16th Century it passed - in slightly murky circumstances - to the Ottoman sultans, who ruled a new Islamic world power for a further years.
The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.
But the institution he represented had by then existed for nearly years, and the impact of its abolition on Muslim intellectual life was profound. Salman Sayyid, who teaches at Leeds University and is the author of Recalling the Caliphate, compares it to Charles I's execution, which opened up so many profound questions about the roles of parliament and the crown.
In the same way, he says, Muslim thinkers in the s suddenly found they had to ask fundamental questions they had never confronted before: "Do Muslims need to live in an Islamic State? What should that state be like?
By the mid 20th Century leaders like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser had come up with an answer to those questions - the ideology known as pan-Arabism offered a kind of secular caliphate, and during the s Nasser even established something called the United Arab Republic, which joined Egypt and Syria.
But everything changed in the Middle East with the foundation of the State of Israel, and Pankhurst argues that Pan-Arabism was wrecked on the rock of Israeli military might. Pankhurst belongs to Hizb ut Tahrir, an organisation founded in the s to campaign for the restoration of the caliphate, and he argues that the revival of the idea has been driven by a general disenchantment with the political systems under which most Muslims have been living.
A language is a resource for making meaning, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice. So when we analyse a text, we show the functional organization of its structure; and we show what meaningful choices have been made, each one seen in the context of what might have been meant but was not.
On the interpersonal level I ask what relations they produce with their audience through their use of personal pronouns and Mood structures. Halliday Each of these in turn determines to a certain degree what kind of participants will appear together with them. Lastly, I note some more general characteristics of their styles that clearly says something about their attitudes to written Arabic and the rhetorical tradition in Arab Islam.
I then connect my findings to the Islamic field to see what they might mean in a religio-sociological sense. I chose these books because they all clearly show a concern with normative discourse aimed at creating an Islamic revival in different ways, but there are other books that would be interesting too.
I have also chosen to focus on some linguistic aspects among many. I agree with Henry G. Widdowson that such an analysis is necessarily a subjective interpretation to a large extent Widdowson 11 , but this fact does not mean that it cannot say anything substantial or interesting about a text — it just should not claim to be definite.
This is all the more true of my own analysis, since to the best of my knowledge similar studies do not exist on this subject and would be very welcome. This article is thus an introduction, not a conclusion. These objections have to be dealt with in some detail.
On the contrary, the publisher asserts that they sell quite well, especially during the annual book fair in Cairo and during religious holidays. They are also easily available in upmarket neighborhoods of Cairo, typically placed on a shelf near the exit of the popular Metro supermarkets. Thus, his books can be regarded as one among many means to disseminate his message. In fact, in our context they become particularly interesting, as they introduce a completely new, quasi-oral style into the Islamic book market.
Moreover, we should note that such an analysis would require several non-linguistic parameters to be considered. With this disclaimer and clarification in mind, let us start by looking at their pronominal references. I talk to his mind at times, and to his heart at others You [sing. Where does this love leave us!? Although most of these are in the singular masculine, there are some switches between the 2 nd person singular and plural. This can be seen in the third quote above, and the following example is even more salient:.
Do you [pl. In most written discourse, the use of the plural to address the readers is very rare. But what is its effect, here, in writing? A reasonable interpretation is that it is a good way of combining an appeal to individuals and a creation of group identity.
As a result, they belong to something that is bigger than themselves, a collective effort that is the result of individual awakening. Another point which also has got to do with group feeling is that the scattered references to a group of readers facilitate reading aloud to each other, for example in private religious study circles.
In his texts, the dominant pronominal references are to the third person singular and plural and the first person plural. Islam implants in the Muslim For the contemporary Muslim does not accept that the old [ways] remain as they are.
Such references normally denote the greatest distance between the writer and the ones he writes about, and is thus often accompanied by a negative evaluation Wilson 58, However, it was likely to shape how Muslims might imagine or idealize their relations to "others" in the international arena.
From that point on, Mawdudi tacitly accepted nationalism in the framework of his idealization of the Umma. He would seek to address and accommodate both, sometimes conceding the reality of the nation-state system and other times asserting the inevitable ascendance of the Umma.
In Swami Shradhanand , a renowned Shuddhi activist, was assassinated, causing much anti-Muslim bitterness in the Indian press and among the Hindus, and a feeling of desperation and apologetic resignation among Muslims. NASR, , p. After Shradhanand's murder, Mawdudi plunged into the communalist movement, making a choice which determined the direction of his lifelong struggle to preserve the place of Islam in Muslim life.
In he published his book Al-Jihad fi'l-Islam [ Jihad in Islam ], not only as a response to Hindu challenges to Islam following Shradhanand's death, but also as a prologue to a lifetime of religious and political effort. By the Muslim predicament had become the focus of Mawdudi's life, and he increasingly looked to Islam for solutions and gradually adopted a revivalist approach. The result was the movement that Mawdudi's followers regard as the heir to the tradition of Islamic tajdid [revival, renewal] and as its greatest manifestation in modern times.
Mawdudi articulated his views amid the lively and bitter debate between Jinnah and the Muslim supporters of the Congress Party. Some of Mawdudi's expositions on the relation between religion, society, and politics were recorded in books on Muslim politics of the time.
From to , Mawdudi published in Tarjuman al-Qur'an a series of essays dealing with the political matters of India's future independence and their implications for the Muslims. These essays were later printed in book form in the three volumes entitled Musulmanon awr Mawjudah Siyasi Kashmakash [ Muslims and the Current Political Crisis ], and in the volume Mas'alah-i qaumiyat [ Question of Nationalism ].
The particular source of Mawdudi's apprehension was the stance of the Indian National Congress, which affirmed that all Indians constituted a single nation and that a future government in India had to be both democratic and secular. Echoing the thought of Muhammad Iqbal, Mawdudi simply did not believe that the Muslims of the subcontinent constituted one nation along with all other Indians.
He insisted that the Muslims had an identity or nationality of their own which was Islam; they were bound together not by ties of race, geography, language, mutual interest, economics, or even culture, but by their commitment to follow the will of God in their lives. There were no claims which Muslims could raise against the British or anyone else on the basis of their common nationhood with other Indians; he stated quite unequivocally that Islam was the polar opposite of nationalism and all that nationalism stood for.
Within a united India, where all were Indians together, it would be construed as traitorous for Muslims to attempt to maintain their peculiar identity and sense of nationality. They would, in fact, be constrained to accept and manifest the identity of the Hindu majority. Although Mawdudi shared the desire of other Indians for freedom from British rule, independence from the British was not worthwhile in itself if the Indian Muslims were to exchange "servitude" to outsiders for "servitude" to the majority within their own country.
Hence, he urged the Muslims not to participate in the freedom struggle being led by the Indian National Congress and its nationalist Muslim supporters. In , the Jamia'at-i 'Ulama-i Hind , an organization founded in and led by Mawlana Husain Ahmad Madani , the renowned Indian Islamic leader, also head of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband , was split with a faction which was supportive of the Muslim League's demands, originating the Jamia'at-i 'Ulama-i Islam , led by Shabbir Ahmad Usmani In this book, Madani, who had spent some time in British jails between and , depicted a multicommunal Indian state that would be compatible with the teachings of Islam, and laid out in systematic form the positions that the author had taken in speeches and letters from the early s on the question of nationalism as well as other related issues of national importance.
Using various verses from the Qur'an , Madani, with his book, aimed at opposing the divisive policy of Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, dealing mainly with two aspects: the meaning of the term Qawm and how it was distinct from the term millat , and the crucial distinction between those two words and their true meanings in the Qur'an and the Hadiths.
By proposing "composite nationalism", this book strongly argued that despite cultural, linguistic and religious differences, the people of India were but one nation, and, according to the author, any effort to divide Indians on the basis of religion, caste, culture, ethnicity and language was a manoeuvre of the ruling power.
Mawdudi reacted strongly, attacking Madani in public speeches and in a number of tracts. Madani's book, along with the Congress Party's direct appeal to Muslims through such measures as the "mass contact movement," which was directed at taking the Congress Party's message to the Muslim masses and recruiting larger numbers of Muslims for the party, convinced Mawdudi that the first order of business was to close off the Muslim community to the Congress Party, articulating an Islamist ideology from that point on in order to preclude the possibility of a "composite nationalism.
In Mawdudi's writings the term employed to translate "secular" la dini in fact literally means "religionless". Theoretically, in a secular system, the government would adopt a neutral attitude towards all religious groups, treating them equally.
What would actually occur, according to Mawdudi, was that the government would be secularist only toward the minority religious groups, neither helping nor restraining them, but it would be necessarily partisan toward the religion of the majority.
Congress secularism, believed to be based on Gandhi's teachings about tolerance toward all other religions, was nothing but a drawing out of the implications of a specifically Hindu point of view. Congress policy would, therefore, result in the imposition of Gandhi's religious views on the whole of India.
Mawdudi's answer to the situation of the Muslims in India was that they should become better Muslims. As the result of that very process they would achieve organization, discipline, and social effectiveness, enabling them to transform the whole of India into Dar al-Islam. Islamism, for Mawdudi, was the assertion of the Muslim community's prerogative to determine the limits of individual moral behaviour and define the nature of a Muslim's relation to Islam.
But more importantly, and as a result, it was the means to create impregnable walls around the Muslim community. By interpreting Islam as an ideology for a vigilant community that emphasized puritanism, the external dimensions of the faith, and strict obedience to Islamic law, and by discouraging those customs and rituals that resembled Hindu practices or could serve as a bridge to Hinduism, Mawdudi moved to change the cultural milieu of Indian Islam, as well as the context in which Muslims were encountering the political choices before them.
As the balance of relations between Muslims and Hindus would change at the national level and in neighbourhoods, towns, and villages, "composite nationalism" would cease to be a viable option. In the process, the resurgence of Islamic sentiments, as interpreted by Mawdudi, would lay the foundations for organization building and political activism.
His conception of the revival tajdid and reform islah of Islam, therefore, was at its inception tantamount to radical communalism. In , in a lengthy article in Tarjumanu'l-Qur'an , Mawdudi wrote that Nehru's promises of scientific progress and nationalist democracy would be "tantamount to the extinction of Islam, and hence Muslims. In its place he offered two "two-nation" schemes of his own, proposing a state within a state riyasat dar riyasat which echoed Muhammad Iqbal's demand for a "Muslim India within India.
The first plan favoured dividing India into two "culturally autonomous" democratic entities, which would form the "international federation" of India with a constitution similar to those of "Switzerland, Australia, or the United States". Mawdudi's vision unfolded in the context of rapid polarization of the Muslim community. Following the Government of India Act of and the elections of , the Congress began to make serious overtures to Muslims.
Some were enticed into serving as junior partners to the Congress, thus acknowledging Hindu political ascendancy. Others in the Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, took the opposite course in the s and demanded a separate state for Muslims, a demand embodied in the Lahore Resolution of Mawdudi did not join either party, choosing instead to form his own organization, the Jama'at-e-Islami as the "counter-League", headed by Mawdudi for thirty-one years, between and ADAMS, , p.
He started with the premise that Muslims should return to a pure and unadulterated Islam to brace themselves for the struggle before them.
They should reject Hindu ascendancy and continue to lay claim to the whole of India. He was especially disturbed by those Muslims who were willing to accommodate Hindus, and saw their support of the Congress Party as acquiescing in the inevitability of a Hindu raj rule.
His most violent rhetoric was reserved for them. As the creation of Pakistan became more and more likely, Mawdudi's polemical attacks on the Muslim League also increased, and rivalry with the Muslim League escalated with each step India took toward partition.
As India moved closer to partition, Mawdudi's political thinking became increasingly clear regarding the polity which he envisioned.
He had to position himself to dominate the debate over Pakistan, and to do that he needed the Muslim League's power and prominence, for he distrusted Jinnah's intentions and even more the secularist inclinations of the League's program.
For Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, people in Pakistan would be free, free to go to temples, to mosques or to any other place of worship. The State would not have anything to do with the religion or caste or creed of the citizens, who would be equals of one State:. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.
The fate of Islam in Kemalist Turkey and Pahlavi Iran had no doubt served as a warning to Mawdudi and to those other Muslims whose rationale for a separate Muslim state was the promise that it would preserve Islam in the Subcontinent. Increasingly, Mawdudi reacted directly to the Muslim League's policies, and to its conception of what Pakistan was to be; these were the subject of his strongest attacks, denouncing nationalism and berating secular politics as disbelief kufr.
In , following partition, Mawdudi was escorted to safety after violence broke out in the Gurdaspur District of Punjab, where the Jama'at was based, and was taken to Lahore by units of the Pakistani army. Mawdudi now demanded an Islamic state where he had once dreamed of an Islamic empire.
His programme was no longer to save Islam in India but to have it conquer Pakistan. Ideology compelled action, which in Pakistan assumed the form of demanding an Islamic state. The Jama'at demanded a government inspired by and obedient to the writ of the Shari'a and which would promise a utopian order that gave direction to "Islamic" social action, which did not imply revolution as the term is understood in the West. Mawdudi believed in incremental change rather than in radical ruptures.
He did not subscribe to class war or disparaged violence as a political tool, and assumed that Islamic revolution would be heralded not by the masses but by the society's leaders. Revolution, in Mawdudi's view, did not erupt from the bottom up but flowed from the top of society down. The aim of Islamic revolution, therefore, was not to spearhead the struggle of the underclass but to convert society's leaders.
His notions of social action therefore had peculiar meanings and aims. Like Hassan al-Banna , founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mawdudi considered the Muslim societies as being dependent on the West, politically weak, and culturally adrift. Both in their early years had been anti-colonial nationalists who turned to religious revivalism to restore the Muslim community at home and universally. They drew on the example and concerns both of eighteenth-century Islamic revivalist movements like the Wahhabi and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic modernist predecessors for their critique of Muslim society.
They did not simply retreat to the past but instead provided Islamic responses, ideological and organizational, to modern society. They appropriated and reapplied the vision and logic of the revivalist tradition in Islam to the socio-historical conditions of twentieth-century Muslim society, reinterpreting Islamic sources and beliefs to address modern realities.
Yet they distinguished their method from that of Islamic modernism, which they equated with the "Westernization of Islam".
If Islamic modernists legitimated the adoption of Western ideas and institutions by maintaining their compatibility with Islam, al-Banna and Mawdudi sought to produce a new synthesis which began with Islamic sources and found either Islamic equivalents or Islamic sources for notions of government accountability, legal change, popular participation, and educational reform. Both shared a common anti-imperialist view of the West, which they believed was not only a political and economic but also a cultural threat to Muslim societies.
Westernization was a threat to the very identity, independence, and way of life of Muslims, and the religious-cultural penetration of the West education, law, customs, values were far more pernicious in the long run than political intervention, since it threatened the very identity and survival of the Muslim community.
For them, Islam was self-sufficient, an all-encompassing way of life, an ideological alternative to Western Capitalism and Marxism, and though hostile to Westernization, they were not against modernization. Both engaged in modern organization and institution building, provided educational and social welfare services, and used modern technology and mass communications to spread their message and to mobilize popular support.
Mawdudi wrote extensively and systematically, attempting to demonstrate the comprehensive relevance of Islam to all aspects of life. The range of his topics reflected his holistic vision: Islam and the state, economics, education, revolution, women. Their message, though rooted in Islamic revelation and sources, was clearly written for a twentieth-century audience, addressing the problems of modernity, analyzing the relationship of Islam to nationalism, democracy, Capitalism, Marxism, modern banking, education, law, women and work, Zionism, and international relations.
A collection of Mawdudi's speeches with this title, the most important of which are two addresses to the Law College in Lahore in early , was published originally in , in Karachi, by the Jama'at-e-Islami Publications, with a second edition in When India was partitioned in , the Jama'at-e-Islami was also divided into separate Pakistani and Indian and Kashmiri units, sharing Mawdudi's ideology but working through independent organizational structures defined in terms of the national polity in which they operated.
Mawdudi justified this move by arguing that each organization would face different political realities under separate national circumstances and could not be caught in the middle of conflicts between Pakistan and India.
By giving up his leadership of the Indian Jama'at-e-Islami and breaking the embryonic Umma along national lines, Mawdudi effectively surrendered the ideal of the Umma to the reality of the developing nation-state order in the region. The gap between what Muslims once were and where they now find themselves is at the center of the anger and humiliation that drive political violence in the Middle East.
But there is also a sense of loss and longing for an organic legal and political order that succeeded for centuries before its slow but decisive dismantling. Ever since, Muslims, and particularly Arab Muslims, have been struggling to define the contours of an appropriate post-caliphate political model. Neither would the pragmatic, mainstream Islamist movements that oppose ISIS and its idiosyncratic, totalitarian take on the Islamic polity.
While they have little in common with Islamist extremists, in both means and ends, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many descendants and affiliates do have a particular vision for society that puts Islam and Islamic law at the center of public life. The vast majority of Western Christians—including committed conservatives—cannot conceive of a comprehensive legal-social order anchored by religion.
However, the vast majority of, say, Egyptians and Jordanians can and do. After all, one can like sandwiches and want peace, or whatever else, while also supporting the death penalty for apostasy, as 88 percent of Egyptian Muslims and 83 percent of Jordanian Muslims did in a Pew poll.
In the same survey, 80 percent of Egyptian respondents said they favored stoning adulterers while 70 percent supported cutting off the hands of thieves. Polling in the Arab world is an inexact science. In this sense, the median Egyptian or Jordanian voter is to the right of the main Islamist parties in their respective countries. These are, in any case, only the most extreme examples, and it would be problematic to take the hudud as somehow emblematic of modern Islamism or, for that matter, pre-modern Islamic law.
The more relevant consideration is how Arabs view the relevance of Islamic law, including on issues like gender equality, minority rights, and the role of clerics in drafting national legislation. Why, for example, do only 24 percent of Egyptian women, according to an April YouGov poll , say they would support a female president? Islam is distinctive in how it relates to politics. It just is. Comparing it with other religions helps illuminate what makes it so. In part, this is because traditional Hindu kingship—with its fiercely inegalitarian vision of a caste-based social order—is simply less relevant to modern, mass politics and largely incompatible with democratic decision-making.
The Prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a head of state, a warrior, a preacher, and a merchant, all at once.
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