Miscellany
Announcement
Fifth Shah Waliullah Award for the Year 2003
The Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi has instituted the Shah Waliullah Award in commemoration of the outstanding contribution of the 18th century Muslim scholar and saint, Shah Waliullah of Delhi, to rejuvenate Islamic learning in India. The first award in the series, for the year 1999 was posthumously conferred on late Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi (R.A), popularly known as Maulana Ali Mian, for his contribution to “Islamic Disciplines” (Uloom-e-Islami)”. The second award was conferred on Qazi Mujahidul Islam Qasmi (R.A), the renowned Islamic Scholar and an authority on Islamic Fiqh. The third award was conferred on Prof. M. Nejatullah Siddiqui, an authority in the area of Islamic Economics and Islamic or interest-free banking. The fourth Award (for the year 2002) has been conferred posthumously on Maulana Mohammed Shihabuddin Nadvi (R.A) who made an outstanding contribution in the field of Quranic Uloom (sciences).
The next award would be for the year 2003 on the topic “Historiography in Islamic Perspective”. The focus may be on the contribution of the scholar to Islamic historiography and who has consistently endeavoured to advance the frontiers of historiography in an Islamic framework. The Urdu version of the topic stands as Tarikhnavesi Islami Tanazur Mein.
The last date for receipt of nominations is August 31, 2004.
Further, the Institute invites the young scholars and researchers (below 45 years of age) to submit the Essay on “Human Rights in Islamic Perspective”. The best Essay will be awarded Rs. 25,000/-. The Urdu version of the topic stands as: Insani Huqooq Islami Tanazur Mein.
The last date for submission of the essay on the above topic is September 15, 2004.
The universities, the Dar-ul-Ulooms and other educational and research institutions are requested to make suitable nominations for the award. Intellectuals outside these institutions may also send similar nominations if they so desire.
Forms for nominations and a brochure containing rules governing the award as well as Essay Writing Competition can be obtained from the office.
IOS Publication
The IOS has recently published two new books: (1) Empowerment of Muslims in India: Perspective, Context and Prerequisites by Prof. A.R. Momin and (2) Empowerment of Muslims through Education by Prof. M. Akhtar Siddiqui. The contents of the books are given below for the benefit of our readers.
Empowerment of Muslims in India: Perspective, Context and Prerequisites
Introduction to the Series
Foreword (Lord Bhikhu Parekh)
Introduction (Justice A.M. Ahmadi)
Preface
Chapter 1: Development, Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conceptual Framework
Chapter 2: Empowerment: Structural Constraints and Impediments
Chapter 3: Indian Muslims: Facing the Reality of Disempowerment
Chapter 4: Exogenous Sources of Disempowerment
Chapter 5: Endogenous Sources of Disempowerment
Chapter 6: Creating an Enabling Environment for Empowerment
Chapter 7: Empowerment through Community Restructuring
References
Bibliography
Index
Empowerment of Muslims through Education
Introduction to the Series
Foreword
Preface
1. Empowerment and Education
2. Literacy, Education and Employment Among Muslims
3. Women’s Education
4. Contribution of Madrasas
5. Urdu and Education of Muslims
6. Voluntary Action by the Community
7. State Policies and their Implementation
8. Future Course of Action
Index
Book Reviews
Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith, eds. New York and Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2002. 306 pages.
The Muslim diaspora, which has become established as a significant area of publishing in the past 2 to 3 decades, is being charted by a number of books and journals. This edited collection is a valuable addition to the literature, although specialists in the field will notice some degree of overlap with existing sources.
The book is divided into three sections exploring the Muslim experience in America (seven chapters), Europe (three chapters covering France, Germany, and Norway), and areas of European settlement (five chapters covering Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Caribbean). The best way to view this book is to consider it a series of case studies examining how Muslims in different contexts have moved from being temporary and peripheral individual sojourners to being, within their adopted societies, generally well-established communities that have largely overcome their internal differences and external structural barriers in order to be publicly recognized as a part of multicultural and multifaith communities and societies. Many of the contributors believe that Muslim minorities are growing, dynamic, confident, and demographically “young” in most of their new societies, and that wherever they have established themselves, they have sustained their presence and thrived, sometimes in the face of extreme hostility.
This case study character has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, this reviewer found it extremely valuable to learn more about the experience of some very specific minority groups, such a Sahelians in France, who are usually ignored and overshadowed in the literature by the overwhelming Algerian-Moroccan presence in France. Likewise, with relatively little academic material available on Muslims in New Zealand, for example, this book fills many of the academic gaps in the literature. The first-hand accounts from previously unpublished sources were similarly valuable, and the chapter on establishing the Islamic Party in North America constitutes an important documentary record. On the other hand, some chapters went over well-established ground, such as Turks in Germany. Specialists on Muslim minorities will find that some chapters repeat already well-known data and profiles of Islam in these contexts.
The book would have been much more informative if the countries or cases had been selected according to a clearer underpinning rationale. For example, why was the Muslim experience in Britain, given its size and significance, omitted while two chapters were devoted to Muslims in Australia: one on community building and one on Muslim women in Perth? The selection appeared to be somewhat random and without a guiding principle.
The theme of visibility and invisibility is the supposed theme linking the various chapters together, but the degree to which the contributors really give it any theoretical space varies considerably. They have been more or less skillful in drawing out the theme’s parameters and dynamics, and some chapters are factually heavy but rather light in terms of analysis. This being the case, the book warranted a strong theoretically informed conclusion to complement the editors’ introduction to the chapters and themes. The implication of the similarities and differences of the Muslim experience in the contexts considered needed to be addressed, and some indications of future directions would have been welcome.
Many of the analyzed contexts and cases suggest that Muslim minorities have become more visible by challenging the established frameworks of law and civil society, and gradually are becoming more accepted by the government, media local populations, and so on. Over time, their priorities have shifted gradually from straightforward material and economic survival to combating Islamophobia and overcoming barriers toward symbolic and political recognition in public life. In working from exclusion at their society’s edges to inclusion in the mainstream of public life, the role of Islamic organizations, religious leaders, and Muslim activists has been crucial.
But one concern, apparently common to may Muslim minority communities, remains: the availability of an appropriately trained leadership. In many ways, the dissatisfaction, especially among young people, with imported imams and a corresponding desire for home-grown imams is an important marker of this ongoing transition. Their psychological and spiritual orientation is less and less toward their parents’ and grandparents’ countries of birth and more toward the societies in which they live.
Finding scholars and religious leaders who are familiar and concerned with issues related to living Islam in non-Muslim societies is perhaps a key challenge facing Muslims in the West. It is key due to the challenge of finding Islamically informed individuals who can speak to and unite Muslims from a variety of ethnic and philosophical schools of thought, and who can recognize and address the needs of a frequently overlooked group: women. Furthermore, it is a significant challenge because, as Tamara Sonn points out in her chapter on South Africa, Muslims in minority western contexts also act as “pioneers in the struggle to reconcile Islamic principles with life in technologically developed and pluralistic societies.” Seminaries located in the Islamic world are perhaps not the best training ground for meeting these diverse challenges.
Far from telling anything like a complete (or even incomplete) story of Muslim minority experience in the West, this book nevertheless brings together a fascinating collection of diverse and often rich accounts of Muslim life in different contexts. The surprises are many (Did you know that New Zealand was the largest exporter of halal meat?), but the variability of the contributions in terms of actually relating empirical experience to the theoretical issues of visibility and invisibility makes the book useful, but not outstanding.
Reviewed by:
Sophie Gilliat-Ray
Religious and Theological Studies
Cardiff University, UK
Islam and Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria by Frederic Volpi London: Pluto Press, 2003, 168 pages.
In all of the Middle East North Africa, Algeria was the first country to be infected by the wind of democratization that swept the developing world in the 1980s and 1990s. The country became a political laboratory for the rest of the Arab world, as liberalization opened spaces for moderate and radical Islamic groups to contest elections. Unfortunately, these elections quickly descended into a long drawn-out and brutal war with the secularist rulers. This bitter battle, fought most fiercely between 1992-99, turned Algeria into a hot spot, thereby raising the question of whether democracy is feasible in the Muslim world. Frederic Volpi’s new book seeks to answer this question by analyzing the process of political liberalization and the severe problems it generated in Algeria.
Volpi presents early and mid-twentieth-century North African scholars’ reinterpretations of the Islamic creed that activated the emergence of anti-secularist movements in the Maghreb as a point of departure for his historical narrative of the Algerian conflict. Although Algeria’s militant movement was coopted by the state party (the National Liberation Front [FLN]) and lost its dynamism during the post-independence years, it still sought to change the political system by operating from the community level, where it had built a network of associations. The author shows how this network’s provision of services designed to meet the people’s welfare needs helped thrust Islamic leaders into the political limelight as they utilized their organizational capacities and authority to transform the 1988 October food riots into a political protest.
The riots forced the Chadli Benjedid government to embark upon major reforms, which entailed designing a new constitution and institutionalizing the political pluralism that opened the door for official recognition of such Islamic associations as political parties, including the influential Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Here, Volpi does a good job of reporting the daily events that occurred during the October riots and the subsequent liberation, but fails to provide basic information about Algeria’s political history. Readers with little knowledge of this unstable North African country are left confused about such basic facts as how and when independence was attained, the types of regimes (civilian or military) from independence to 1988, and the relationship between the FLN and the military. These ought to have been presented prior to the narratives contained in chapter 3.
Volpi’s accurate description of the transition process indicate that the FIS won the nationwide local government elections (June 1990) and also obtained nearly half of the votes during the first round of parliamentary elections (December 1991), thereby trouncing the ruling FLN, which won only 15 seats. He shows that anxieties over a FIS victory triggered a chain of events that included President Benjedid’s resignation after his covert dissolution of Parliament, and the suspension of the second round of parliamentary elections. Then there was the transfer of power to a provisional government, the State High Committee (HCE), the deployment of soldiers on the streets to quell riots by Islamist youths, the arrest and imprisonment of the FIS leadership, and the imposition of a state emergency. All of these culminated in the banning of the FIS (February 1992) and the assassination of Mohamed Boudiaf, head of the HCE, by one of his bodyguards (June 1992).
The question that arises here is why did the government intervene to halt the election? Was it because the government in office was not prepared to relinquish power, or because it feared that the FIS would turn Algeria into a theocracy if it formed the government? Volpi does not sort out these issues with his heavily narrative style of writing. His argument that a behind-the-scenes “coalition of military officers” was the de facto ruler of Algeria does not help the reader to know if the intervention was driven by the need to prioritize secularism over the Islamist party’s electoral victory.
One of the book’s high points is Volpi’s discussion of the military’s internal power struggle and of the FIS’ internal dynamics (chapters 4 and 5 respectively). He shows that the internal rivalries between some of the principal military officers spilled over into the political arena, a development that made for periodic leadership changes and determined the fate of Algeria’s troubled transition.
He shows that the FIS split over internal differences as how best to respond to the electoral suspension and to the ensuing military crack-down. The most notable splinter groups were such guerrilla organizations as the Armed Islamic Movement, the Armed Islamic Group, and the Islamic Salvation Army (FIS’ official armed fighting wing). These guerrilla groups waged a very violent and deadly “holy war” that forced the government to hold elections in which the pro-government and moderate religious parties were allowed to participate. The guerrilla groups were disbanded following the 1999 general amnesty (the law of civil concord), which sought to promote national reconciliation, and Algeria remains a secular state. However, the question of whether the 1992 intervention was justified remains unanswered.
On balance, the book is very informative and is written in beautiful prose style. However, the focus on processes and events could have been tempered with a brief discussion of the merits and demerits of the 1992 halted transition.
Reviewed by:
John Boye Ejobowah
Department of Global Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada