Arguing Islam after the Revival of Arab Politics by Brown Nathan J.;

Author:Brown, Nathan J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1.I do not mean to suggest that Islam should be viewed only or primarily through the shari‘a. For a powerful critique of such a view, see Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). I do mean to suggest, however, that in the Arab world the revival of politics encounters religion chiefly through the Islamic shari‘a.

2.In this section I draw on and develop a guide I developed for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Egypt and the Islamic Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed,” http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/05/15/egypt-and-islamic-sharia-guide-for-perplexed, posted May 15, 2012; accessed March 20, 2015.

3.Most general overviews of the Islamic legal tradition show very clearly its breadth and its focus on method. Two more recent and particularly helpful guides are Wael B. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Bernard Weiss, The Spirit of Islamic Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). Abbas Amanat and Frank Griffel, eds., Shari‘a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009) provides a more current analysis on the meaning of the Islamic shari‘a.

4.Perhaps the most in-depth coverage and analysis of public opinion on this subject among others is available from the Arab Barometer Project, www.arabbarometer.org, accessed March 20, 2015.

5.See Andrew F. March, “Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology,” Social Research 80, 1 (2013): 293–320.

6.Predominant Shi`i approaches are somewhat different, though the result is not always dissimilar. For the majority of Shi`i in the Arab world, the task of an individual believer is to follow one of a limited number of leading authorities in matters of interpretation. In that sense, the authority of such scholars is determinative rather than advisory.

7.The evolving nature of Islamic legal approaches even within the dominant schools of law is not always appreciated by nonspecialists. A useful and influential set of detailed accounts of this subject illustrating this point can be found in Baber Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

8.Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

9.I am presenting an updated and condensed version of the argument I earlier made in “Shari‘a and State in the Modern Muslim Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, 3 (1997): 359–376.

10.I do not mean to suggest a linear story in which `ulama were independent and then lost their voice when religious institutions were taken over by the state. Such a story is frequently told by critics of either current regimes or of official religious establishment in the Arab world. And that story might bear some historical weight. But focused historical studies tell, at a minimum, a more nuanced and varied picture. See, for instance Meir Hatina, ‘Ulama’, Politics, and the Public Sphere: An Egyptian Perspective (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010).

11.For a very sophisticated treatment of the role of religious scholars in the modern era, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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