Islam

An Introduction

Catharina Raudvere

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848850835
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Many existing introductions to Islam focus predominantly on the Middle East and on historical background at the expense of Islam as a lived faith. Assessing Islam as a truly global phenomenon, Catharina Raudvere engages thoroughly with history, (explaining the significance of the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad and the origins of the different Sunni and Shi'a groups within Islam), while also giving full and comprehensive coverage to Muslim ritual life and Islamic ethics. She discusses moral debates and modern lifestyle issues such as halal consumption, interfaith dialogue and controversy over the wearing of the veil. Diaspora communities are considered with a view to showing how norms and doctrines are understood - and sometimes contradicted - in social and ritual practice. In addition, the author focuses on the meaning and continuing application to modern life of the Quran and hadith as sources for Islamic theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh).The book gives much attention to questions of universal values, Islam and democracy, gender issues, women's rights and pluralism, contrasting the thinking of Jihadists and radical Islamism with liberal reformist voices within Islam.
Islam: An Introduction offers undergraduate students of religion and general readers a balanced, sensitive and well informed overview of the world's most intensively discussed religious and cultural tradition.

Chapter I

The Muslim World: Past and Present

This introduction to Islam is mainly intended to be a guide to the study of contemporary Muslim life in its many (and sometimes contradictory) forms, although the relevant historical background will be provided when necessary. Diversity and transformation will therefore be recurring themes throughout the volume, and several diverging answers to the question ‘What is Islam?’ will be presented. Examples from canonical literature such as the Qur’an and the narratives referring to the time of Muhammad (sing. hadith) will be quoted to give a sense of the character of the Islamic scriptures and to indicate how many possible interpretations the individual texts open up.

Today, there are approximately 1.5 billion Muslims across the world. Nevertheless, the conventional stereotype of a Muslim is an Arab, despite the fact that only 20 per cent of the world’s Muslims live in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Middle East and North Africa. This fact should also be a reminder that all parts of the Middle East are not Arabic-speaking; Iran and Turkey, with Muslim majority populations, represent other cultural traditions and historical developments in the region. Of the 1.5 billion Muslims is it impossible to know how many practise Islam, to how many Islam is an issue of ethnic identity or family and community belonging, rather than personal faith, or how many regard themselves as secularized with a Muslim cultural background with or without personal piety. The problems of producing statistics on religious belonging are many. The methodology cuts through the private and the public spaces an individual dwells in, and does not grasp the identity shifts of individuals in various contexts or over time in different phases of life. Only 20 per cent of the world’s Muslims live in one of the 30 countries where Islam is the denomination of the majority, which means that encounters with non-Muslims are part of everyday life (and not necessarily without conflict) for the vast majority and not a particularity exclusive to Muslims in Europe. The Muslim world is therefore hard to define, and has been so for a long time.

1.5 billion Muslims in the world

There are significant differences between countries where Muslims constitute a dominant portion of the population (in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa over 95 per cent) and countries that have the largest numbers of Muslims but are nevertheless multi-religious (such as Indonesia, India and Nigeria) in terms of how local life is lived. The four countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world (all of them outside the Middle East) are:

•Indonesia: 210 million

•India: 170 million (12–15 per cent of the population)

•Pakistan: 160 million

•Bangladesh: 130 million
followed by

•Egypt 82 million

•Turkey 74 million

•Iran 74 million

•Nigeria 40 million (50 per cent of the population).

These figures are drawn from Pew Forum’s Mapping the Global Muslim Population, 2009. The institute is known to give conservative figures rather than over-estimations. Larger numbers for the statistics of the world’s Muslim population are therefore to be found in other sources.¹

In various ways, the countries all represent cultural and religious amalgamations that have taken place over the centuries. Furthermore, they have extensive diaspora populations all over the world with transnational links at all levels of societal life, which adds to the picture of a majority of Muslims in regular contact with people of other faiths or living in countries with anti-religious traditions. Muslims in China are estimated to constitute 1.6 per cent of the population, which means 22 million people; and Muslims in countries of the former Soviet Union number approximately 76 million, 16 million of them living in Russia today.

Both ‘the Muslim world’ and ‘the West’ are highly ideological concepts – disputed not only in the wake of the Orientalism debate, but also from the perspective of contemporary identity politics and diaspora culture. They are not the names of any distinct geographical places. Instead, the two terms carry an implicit dichotomy between ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ and ignore the fact that many Muslims throughout history, as well as today, live in close contact with people of other denominations; neither do ‘Muslims’ constitute a homogeneous category, considering how theology and rituals have developed over time – not to mention differences of gender, generation and social status within communities. Not only are the diaspora groups in countries with traditionally few Muslims increasing in numbers, but new living conditions are also having a steadily growing global impact, bringing about all kinds of identity alternatives and producing cultural blends that may, or may not, be regarded as a provocative alteration of Islam’s original message. These milieus are the breeding ground for pronounced reactions against traditionalism as well as for the construction of identities that integrate the local and the global, while retaining a link to Muslim history and the canonical texts. Although references to diaspora will be made frequently in this book, there are good reasons to question the underlining of diaspora when analysing Muslims in Europe and North America. There is segregation, prejudice and conflict, but there are also many examples of well integrated everyday religious life; perhaps most importantly, the Muslim presence in these regions now has a long-term history covering several generations and the members of the communities are in many cases not looking back to any homeland, but are citizens in their own right, no longer meriting a ‘diaspora’ label.

The mosque is traditionally a prime location for Muslim community life as the local site for canonical worship. It has by tradition also been an important locus for the execution of local religious authority (in most cases performed by the imam) and it has long served as a meeting place for its regular visitors and constituted a nexus for local (male) networks. The question is whether the mosque and its premises will remain the most important place of Muslim community and, if so, on what conditions. The mosque is still an important site for Muslim religious practice – for prayer, education, social networking and political mobilization – in what is conventionally recognized as the Muslim world as well as in the Muslim diaspora. But the mosque has started to lose some of its local dominance in many Muslim contexts, especially since there are so many new forums in which take part in teaching, debates and socio-religious activities. The absence of women in traditional mosques must also be noted as something that is changing – in some places rapidly. This does not mean that the spatial separation between men and women is being eroded, but that alternative interpretive spaces are emerging. Today, Islam is practised, discussed and interpreted by agents and in settings that do not fit with the conventional image of ‘Muslims’.

Diaspora

The term diaspora refers to the dispersion or migration of a specific group and was originally used to describe the Jewish exile. The term further implies not only a geographical spread, but also a notion of homeland and/or a shared origin that keeps the dispersed from being absorbed in other environments. Fellowship in a diaspora group can be based on the recognition of a common denominator, an identity, which is founded on a conception of a shared geographical origin, a spatial belonging. When it comes to the relationship between identity and belonging, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) was influential in its discussion of how fellowships are based on narratives that construct collective memory. The book’s focus on nationalism could easily be applied to religious narratives too.

Orientalism

After the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, a long critical debate took place about what power structures academic writing reproduce in their representations of Islam and Muslims and how many images of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures were rooted in European colonialism. Following Foucault, Said’s work paved the way for a greater emphasis in Islamic studies on local expressions and individual voices that articulate contradictions rather than confirming the image of ‘Islam’. The ideological side of Said’s study soon became part not only of academic analyses but also of political discourse and merged with post-colonial perspectives and cultural studies.

Orientalism is nowadays mostly a pejorative term pointing at the uses of stereotypes and dichotomies in the production of knowledge – often formulated from a post-colonial perspective or a self-reflective criticism of Eurocentrism in analytical concepts. The contrasting term occidentalism, ‘the Eastern’ view of ‘the West’, is not so much the label of a counter discourse to orientalism but has rather come to connote ‘anti-Westernism’ in a broad, but not necessarily academic, sense.

Robert Irwin’s For the Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), like many other criticisms of Said, pointed to his lack of understanding of the academic contributions made over the centuries despite colonial power relations between Western scholarship and its objects of investigation.

As pointed out by Said, and others before him, Islam cannot be referred to as an idealized, homogeneous system,² a standpoint that has far-reaching consequences for the study of religion in general and certainly not only religions from the Orient. Leif Manger in Muslim Diversity (1999) stresses that differences and what appear to be inconsistencies can be useful tools for identifying variation in terms of historical and regional background and social and ecological structures. Local and regional traditions (ada) are determinants for ethics, rituals and social practice.

The world in which Islam emerged

Islam grew out of a specific context on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, which had various distant cultural influences, and the presence of Jewish and Christian communities is apparent in the canonical texts. Even though most Christians and Jews left after World War II, the Middle East has for a very long time been multi-religious. The current situation in Iraq and Syria, and the encounter with the refugees from the area have made the general public in the receiving countries aware of the long history of many different Christian churches in the Middle East. Muslims in other regions have for centuries lived close to communities of other faiths. The devotional traditions of Muslims in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent are clearly a consequence of long-term interaction with Hindu communities. Sharing pilgrim sites and visiting saints’ graves are not uncommon practices in this region – though attacked by radical elements – as was the case in the Balkans before the war in the 1990s, after which such encounters became impossible.

The Muslim majority and the status of the Arabic language

Arabic has a special status among Muslims as a sacred language. The Qur’an refers to itself as a book in Arabic and the language of the daily prayers is Arabic. The beginning of the 12th section or chapter (sura) states:

Those are the signs of the Manifest Book.

We have sent it down as an Arabic Koran;

haply you will understand.

Even if only 20 per cent of the Muslims of the world are Arabs, the ideals of proper behaviour and a just society are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Chapter I: The Muslim World: Past and Present
• Chapter II: The Early History of Islam and Muhammad as a Historical Person
• Chapter III: The Canonical Texts of Islam: Historical Documents and Personal Piety
• Chapter IV: Sharia: The Law of Allah and Human Free Will
• Chapter V: The Festivals of the Muslim Year and Lifecycle Rituals: Community and Celebration
• Chapter VI: Between Canonical Obligations and Devotional Practices: Everyday Religiosity
• Chapter VII: Shi‘i Islam: Religious Authority and Remembered Martyrdom
• Chapter VIII: Muslim Ethics: Ideals, Responsibilities and the Challenges of Modern Life
• Chapter IX: Political Islam: Visions and Nightmares
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Sources and References