Islamic Religious Authority

This article concerns the Islamic community in contemporary Russia and the dynamic identities of Muslim migrants there. The focus of this study is the religious and wider social practices of those Muslim migrants who are considered leaders of local micro-communities, enjoy respect within their religious community, and have steadfast religious authority within their circles. These practices are considered in their local religious and migrant contexts through the prism of such concepts as religious individualism, everyday lived Islam, and tactical religion. The author shows multiple ties that emerge between the region’s Muslims, specifically between unofficial local leaders, and other believers who need this authority to elaborate their everyday Muslim practices in the context of migration and the authority crisis in Russian Islam. This study emphasizes the importance of the everyday in the formation of individual religiosity and shows how a local Muslim environment builds up around certain key figures outside the mosque.

This introduction, first, lays out the major themes in the study of Islamic authority and, second, explains how a study focused on female Islamic authority can contribute significantly to scholarship on Islam and Muslim women. 

It presents an alternative to Weberian approaches to the study of authority, one that focuses on the paths and processes that would-be leaders follow to obtain and consolidate their authority, looking in particular at knowledge -- the sort of knowledge of Islam a leader claims, how he or she acquired this knowledge, and how he or she performatively demonstrates mastery of it in front of various audiences.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a propitious yet challenging time for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as its elites sought to define the movement's priorities in the face of new opportunities to spread their call (da'wa). The debate over preaching, while one of strategic assessment, also involved a negotiation of intellectual hierarchy: Should laymen lead Egypt's oldest Islamist organization, or should scholars? In contrast to previous studies that focus on how laymen led the Brotherhood's return to grassroots preaching, this article reintegrates scholars into the story of da'wa by focusing on the organization's most prominent 'a ¯ lim, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and his vision of institution-based preacher education and extra-institutional activism. Drawing on three books written by Qaradawi on this topic between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, this article casts lights not only on this Islamist scholar's claim to religious authority as he sought to mold the Brotherhood, but also on the ways in which projects of mass mobilization – whether grassroots preaching or the reform of state-sponsored educational curricula – have transformed scholarly claims to authority more broadly. T he late 1970s and early 1980s were a propitious yet challenging time for the Mus-lim Brotherhood in Egypt. The organization had begun to rebuild its infrastructure within a political system that provided it space to mobilize on a grassroots level, even as it forbade national political participation. These new opportunities were particularly fraught for scholars within Egypt's leading Islamist group: Was this to be a movement of intellectuals or activists, of 'ulama ¯' or of laymen? Who was to lead it and how should it relate to state-controlled religious institutions? This article explores how the participation of scholars in the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the region's oldest Islamist organization and how this story reveals a radical

الطبيعة لا تقفز. هذه الحكمة المستخدمة من قبل الفلاسفة والعلماء منذ العصور القديمة تُعبّر عن الفكرة القائلة بأنّ كلّ تغيّر هو نتيجة مراحل متعاقبة وليس نتيجة تحوّل مفاجئ في الزمان والمكان.

وهذا ما تؤكّده بلا أدنى شكّ دراسة بنية وتاريخ الحنبليّة الوهّابية، فهذا العمل يطمح إلى إعادة بناء أصول هذا المذهب وتتبّع مساره التاريخي ووصف عقائده وممارساته وتحديد هويّته والوقوف عند الثوابت والمتغيّرات التي تخترقه.

فقد سمحت لنا دراسته في إطار تحقيب تاريخي طويل أن نُظهر المتغيّرات التاريخيّة والإجتماعيّة والسياسيّة التي أجبرت القيمين عليه أي العلماء على تكييف مدوّنتهم الفكرية وهياكلهم المؤسساتية بغرض الحفاظ على مركزية خطابهم الديني في المجال الإجتماعي السعودي وإشعاعه في مختلف أرجاء العالم وتكريس هيمنة العائلة الحاكمة على المعترك السياسي.

فالتحالف بين المرجعية الدينية والسلطة السياسية في المملكة العربية السعودية جعل المذهب الحنبلي الوهّابي أرثوذكسية الإسلام الجديدة والمستأمنين عليه علماء الإسلام الجدد.

The contributions in this book explore Muslim religious leadership in multiple forms and settings. While traditional authority is usually correlated with theology and piety, as in the case of classically trained ulema, the public advocacy of Muslim community concerns is often headed by those with professionalized skillsets and civic experience. In an increasingly digital world, both women and men exercise leadership in novel ways, and sites of authority are refracted from traditional loci, such as mosques and seminaries, to new and unexpected places. This collection provides systematic focus on a topic that has hitherto been given rather diffuse consideration. It complements historical work on community leadership as well as more contemporary discussion on the training and role of Islamic religious authorities. It will be of interest to scholars in Religious Studies, Sociology, Political Science, History, and Islamic Studies.

La piété et la foi La zebîba, marque de prière, et les signes d'engagement Les mots arabes sont translittérés selon la technique employée dans la revue Arabica. Cependant dans les retranscriptions la vocalisation se conforme l'usage dialectal égyptien. De plus, il convient de rappeler qu'au Caire comme dans le nord de l'Egypte la lettre ğim se prononce g, comme dans « garçon », et le qaf sauf exception comme un hamza, un coup de glotte.

Postcolonial nation states in Southeast Asia have taken different trajectories in the localisation of Islam within their respective societies. Post-independence Singapore’s experience of localisation of Islam is largely through a centralised Muslim religious authority created by legislation drawn from Singapore’s colonial legacy.  Policies and religious rulings of the central authority through the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) and the Fatwa Committee have significantly contributed to the Muslim community’s adaptation to Singapore’s urbanisation and multicultural society. I argue that as the evolving context becomes more complex in the future. Singapore’s centralised approach will require further adaptation. It cannot depend merely on reactive changes to state-directed policies, laws and regulations. It must be complemented with a more proactive, robust and organic approach where there is a thorough assessment of the changing conditions and deliberate critical re-evaluation of religious tradition conditioned by a vibrant discursive tradition within the community.

This paper tries to examine the concept of walāyah in Sufism and Shi’ism. Walāyah is one of the most important principles in both Sufism and Shi’ism, occupying such a fundamental status within the whole structure of their metaphysical doctrines. Walāyah constitutes the
idea on the necessary continuation of the spiritual authority of the Prophet Muhammad to
particular authorities after the prophet’s death. Drawing from the same religious sources,
both parties seem to develop the same concept of what constitutes walāyah and what the
characteristics of those who deserve that spiritual authority, although they articulated the
concept in different terminologies and functions.

This article examines the Bāʿ Alawī— a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of Prophet Muḥammad— in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it observes the Bā ʿAlawī scholars’ creative adaptation and manipulation of their sufi path, Ṭarīqa ʿAlawīyya, in their attempt to secure their place within the wider imagination of Indonesian nationhood while protecting their distinctive genealogical eminence. In the twentieth century the ṭarīqa which had long functioned to secure their identity, differentiate them from others and nurture their diasporic consciousness, proved incompatible with the assimilationist discourse of the nation. Further challenges came from Islamic reformism, preaching egalitarianism increasingly defined public articulation of Islam, confronting the Bā ʿAlawī’s notion of Islamic authority.
The Bā ʿAlawī scholars adapted by reshaping of the ṭarīqa rituals, shifting emphasis on Prophetic piety, expanding the Bā ʿAlawī textual community to include local scholars, and the projecting of a new form of Prophetic authority in an ḥadīthi framework. Such shifts were sustained by the construction of a new Bā ʿAlawī center in Kwitang, Jakarta and the cultivation of scholarly networks binding the Bā ʿAlawī and local kyais (Indonesian Islamic scholars). More specifically, this paper observes the career of three Bā ʿAlawī scholars and their efforts to reconfigure the discursive practice of the ṭarīqa in the early decades of the Indonesian republic. By presenting practices recognizable to the dominant modes of Islamic reformism in the country, the Bā ʿAlawī succeeded in maintaining their visibility in Sukarno’s Indonesia.

This dissertation examines the religious transformation of the Volga-Ural Muslim community during the long nineteenth century with a special focus on the ulama and shari'a. It argues that these Islamic institutions as well as the Muslim population have experienced important changes after the Russian state established the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly in 1788. Since that time and throughout the nineteenth century, Russian statesmen introduced numerous laws that affected the Volga-Ural Muslim community. Many of these laws were designed to regulate specifically the religious life of Muslims, thus reformulating traditional religious practices through state law. The state created new rules for the appointment of the ulama, construction of mosques, functions of religious scholars within the Muslim community, procedures on how to perform marriage or divide inheritance. This allowed the state to intervene deeper into the Muslim community, braking traditional communal relationships and affecting the practice of shari'a in unprecedented ways. This also prompted state officials to sanction the violation of these laws.

Contrary to popular belief, there are many forms of religious authority within Islam. However, they are scarcely institutionalized and hierarchized, especially in the Sunni world. This article aims at clarifying the role and function of ulama, by retracing their history and showing their significance for the present. In fact, their voice is still influential both in Islamic countries and among European Muslims. While many predicted their end, they were able to adapt to the radical changes induced by technology and today they are at the center of a project of re-institutionalization of Islam actively pursued by several states.

Published on https://www.oasiscenter.eu/en/ulama-who-they-are, Nov. 7, 2018.

This research was made possible thanks to a Mellon Teaching Fellowship on Women and Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, 2013-15. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Department of Religious Studies who hosted me and provided mentorship. I would also like to thank Eren Tasar, Marianne Kamp, Agnès Kefeli, and the anonymous reviewers for this Journal, for detailed, thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. All translations in the article, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.

A number of classical Sunni Qur'an commentaries quote several different types of exegetical materials attributed to a few female figures from the first century AH/seventh century CE--athar, hadiths, legal opinions and variant readings, as well as lines of poetry. _Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority_ provides a comprehensive introduction to such quotations, and offers an analysis of their place and significance within the pre-modern genre of Qur'an commentary, demonstrating that key hermeneutical concepts in classical quranic exegesis (tafsir) are gendered. Bringing together materials which have not previously been examined in detail and utilizing gender as a lens through which to study them, this book provides a new approach to the study of pre-modern tafsir.

В центре данной работы стоят взаимоотношения власти и народа в их институциональном оформлении, а именно проблематика соотношения власти правителя, действующей общественной нормы и ее носителей. На широком конкретно-историческом материале, включающем традиционные и модернизирующиеся общества, прослеживаются такие аспекты данной проблематики, как характер представлений о непогрешимости или, напротив, несовершенстве правителя и политической системы, возможности правителя по отношению к действующим социальным нормам, возможности критики в адрес правителя и принудительных общественных санкций в его адрес, понятия о легитимности правителя и ее источниках, концепция высших целей существования института верховной власти и др. Используемый конкретно-исторический материал обобщается на основе формализованного выделения ключевых параметров, характеризующих данные феномены с установлением корреляций между ними, что позволяет осуществить типологизацию социумов с точки зрения исследуемой тематики.

In this paper, I first summarize the results of an original survey on religious authority in Turkey and discuss how much credibility and trust Turkish citizens confer to different public figures as sources of religious authority. Then, I discuss the role of official religious authorities such as the Diyanet (the Directorate of Religious Affairs) and state religious
schools in bolstering the AKP’s political hegemony. The third section examines Ihsan Eliaçık’s Islamic political philosophy and delineates his pluralist, egalitarian, and democratic interpretations and how these differ from the AKP’s authoritarian Islamism. Lastly, I map AKP sympathizers’ views on key issues such as religious tolerance, belief in multivocality of
religion, corruption, democracy, gender equality, and the role of religion in politics, and compare their perspectives to those of supporters of the religious opposition in Turkey in an attempt to understand whether and how Eliaçık’s liberal democratic Islamic ideology resonates with his social base.

Egypt is one of the regions with the highest prevalence of female genital cutting (FGC): 87% of women aged 15 to 49 have been subjected to FGC. So-called female circumcision has continuously been legitimised with both religious and health reasons. At the same time, medical practitioners, religious scholars and other intellectuals already challenged FGC in the early 20th century, using both medical and Islamic legal arguments. Based on this observation, this interdisciplinary study explores the changes in normative ideas about FGC between 1940 and 2010. It thus reshapes our understanding of when, how and through what positions on FGC are subject to change.

Anyone considering the question of religious authority among the contemporary Shiʿa not least in Iraq will recognize the paramount significance of Ayatollah Sīstānī, described as the most important marjaʿ in the world. This paper examines the phenomenon of marjaʿiyya, considers how one becomes a marjaʿ, and traces the rise of Sīstānī to the pre-eminent position that he now holds and juxtaposes his model of leadership with other modern Shiʿi models of religious authority articulated by Ayatollah Kho-meini in Iran and Bāqir al-Ṣadr in Iraq. Marjaʿiyya is a multivocal and in many ways a quintessentially modern institution that has proved to be highly resilient and adaptable in the face of challenges coming from globalizing modernity. In Iraq and in the region, Sīstānī has proven to be the most effective non-state wielder of authority and influence not just among believers but more widely in society and constitutes the most successful example of the Shiʿi marjaʿiyya in modern times.

This one-day conference brings together academics and activists to explore issues of leadership, authority and representation in British Muslim communities.  Who speaks for British Muslims?  How is authority construed, constructed and exercised in an age of mass media and the Internet?  What internal and external factors shape leadership structures and modalities of representation for British Muslims living as a minority in a culturally Christian but largely secular social context?  Where do leaders come from in a decentralised religious tradition lacking a priestly hierarchy?  How do government discourses and media representations impact upon dynamics of leadership and authority in British Muslim communities?

This conference has been organised in conjunction with a special issue of the international journal Religions jointly edited by Professor Sophie Gilliat-Ray and Dr Riyaz Timol.  Delegates may be invited to submit a paper for publication, subject to normal peer-review procedures, after the event.  The deadline for final paper submissions is 25 April 2019.

This paper explores the complexity of how modern European norm of sovereignty was received in an Islamic society by looking at an early nineteenth century Malay literary text, the Hikayat Mareskalek. Written by Abdullah al-Misri— an Arab merchant in Java—, the hikayat tells the story of the colonial Dutch governor-general and his various attempts to establish modern sovereignty in Java. In the text, the governor-general is presented as a modernizer who reformed statecraft in ways that are more beneficial to the Muslim populations than that offered by local Muslim rulers. While al-Misri criticized traditional forms of sovereignty and championed the Dutch modern sovereignty, he nevertheless presented the governor-general as a character who is embedded in the medieval Islamic political philosophy. That is, rather than portraying the governor-general’s reforms as Western or European, al-Misri locates him in a trajectory that connects him to the medieval sunni political thinkers ranging from al-Māwardī, Nizām al-Mulk and al-Ghazālī.

In looking at the hikayat, this paper attempts to rethink the ways in which European norm of sovereignty was negotiated with its local context. It tries to go beyond the conventional assumption that places modernity and the shock of colonial encounter in the center of such processes. One way of reading the hikayat is by examining it as an attempt to domesticate the Dutch governor-general as a stranger king, bearing continuities with long held Islamic tradition in the region. The text also criticizes the sovereignty of the Islamic agrarian-based kingdom of Mataram. Thus, this paper examines closely the criticisms raised by al-Misri and reconstructs his vision of an ideal sovereignty while comparing it to medieval sunni political theories.

Analyzing the hikayat demonstrates the complexities involved in the translation of modern European sovereignty in a new context. It shows how European sovereignty was being imagined as Islamic and rooted in the medieval tradition. It illustrates the processes by which imported notions of sovereignty is being understood as local to the extent the governor-general animates the voice of a Muslim scholar. Hence an examination of this text opens avenues for further rumination regarding the various ambivalences that are operational in the transmission of foreign form of sovereignty in an Islamic society. In doing so, this paper rethinks the ways in which we understand evolution of sovereignty in the Islamic world.

This article analyses an ongoing conflict between two groups (Bargil and Kardal) over the management of a mosque located in an area near London. Based on fourteen months of intensive fieldwork, including participant observation, informal chats and semi-structured interviews, this article offers an in-depth and original account of the transformations taking place in mosques concerning the role of imams and mosque committee members. By analysing the object of conflict, the organisational structure, the dynamic of the groups and its leaders, as well as the process of bureaucratisation of mosques as a material condition, I intend to scrutinise the role and status of the imam and mosque committee members. The primary aim of this article is to reexamine and challenge the narrative of decline in religious authority (in Western mosques) propounded by some scholars as being the result of individualisation and the rise of new religious figures outside traditional institutions. I suggest that rather than experiencing a decline in imams' religious authority, mosques have become controlled by the bureaucratic authority of the committee members. In other words, imams' religious authority is still exercised, yet only within the bureaucratic framework set by the committee members.

Contrairement à ce que l'on pense, il y a dans l'Islam de nombreuses autorités religieuses. Mais elles sont peu institutionnalisées et hiérarchisées, surtout dans le monde sunnite. Le dossier que nous présentons a pour but d'aider à comprendre ce que sont les oulémas, en retraçant leur histoire et en montrant leur importance pour le présent. Ces experts en religion sont en effet bien écoutés, tant dans les pays islamiques que dans les communautés musulmanes présentes en Europe. Alors que beaucoup d'observateurs en annonçaient la fin, ils ont su s'adapter aux changements radicaux introduits par la technologie et sont aujourd'hui au centre d'un projet de ré-institutionnalisation de l'Islam poursuivi activement par plusieurs États.

Article publié sur https://www.oasiscenter.eu/fr/qui-sont-les-oulmas, 13 novembre 2018

Sufi identity and rituals became widespread among local Muslims during the colonial era due to the expansion of the Shadhuliyya and the Qadiriyya orders. But the history of Sufism in Mozambique has been little explored. Portuguese colonial officials began paying closer attention to Islam in general and Sufism in particular only toward the end of the colonial period, especially in the late 1960s. This sudden interest was prompted by the independence war that took place mostly in northern Mozambique, where significant numbers of Muslims lived. The colonial Secret Service was mandated to find out how and why Muslims were involved in the independence struggle and in which ways they could be subverted. Otherwise there has been very limited research on Sufism, especially since Mozambique achieved independence. This article examines the historical context into which the orders arrived, and what prompted their significant expansion, as well as the reasons why they subsequently split up into eight autonomous branches. It is based on archival research in Mozambique and Portugal and fieldwork conducted at Mozambique Island, and in Angoche, Nampula, Pemba and Maputo cities.

This article aims to pose a question and state a hypothesis rather than to come with a conclusive answer. I wish to draw attention to some interesting parallels that may be observed when comparing a number of core features of early modern Muslim reform movements to the structural impact of present-day Internet use in the Muslim world. The significance of these parallels-whether they are coincidental, or indicative of a trajectory-needs to be discussed using further evidence and examples from different contexts than what I can provide in this essay. My aim here is primarily to outline these parallels, in order to ask whether it is possible to speak of a "moral turn" as part of a dynamics that changed the Muslim world profoundly over the past two to three centuries. This dynamics, I hypothesize, led to expanding practical responsibility for moral control of behaviour, in principle, to every individual in the "crowd" of believers, eroding the hierarchy of religious specialists. Ideal-typically, one might say that the divide between al-khāṣṣa (the learned elite) and al-ʿāmma (the masses of commoners) was abolished; the ʿāmma obtained the same rights as the khāṣṣa. This must of course not be overstated or misinterpreted as a dissolution of religious authority; nevertheless, it seems indicative that the use of the khāṣṣa/ʿāmma-divide has fallen out of favour in the period under consideration. The dynamics I seek to identify here may be compared to processes often associated with "modernisation", and may thus be an element in a much larger investigation of the roots of "modernity" in the Muslim world.

L’inquiétude du public concernant la formation des imams est une caractéristique commune des débats dans de nombreux pays européens depuis plus d’une décennie. Alors que les tentatives de promou¬voir la création de centres de formation européens pour les imams remontent aux années 1980 dans certains pays, le thème n’est devenu un dénomina¬teur commun des débats européens que dans les années 2000. Au milieu de cette décennie, le rôle potentiel des imams dans les processus de radicali¬sation était un sujet récurrent dans les débats sur l’islam. Dans un premier temps, cet article décrira brièvement la façon dont la formation des imams était abordée avant que les préoccupations pour la radicalisation n’apparaissent au début des années 2000. Ensuite, c’est le concept de radicalisation qui sera examiné plus étroitement : que désigne exacte¬ment ce terme dans le discours politique? Et les ré¬férences omniprésentes à ce concept nous per¬mettent-elles de conclure qu’il constitue un objectif commun dans l’élaboration des politiques? Dans un troisième temps, j’examinerai les résultats des ef¬forts entrepris au cours de la dernière décennie et j’identifierai les obstacles structurels à la formation.

This article is an attempt to explore how ǧihādī authors make use of the Sunni tradition to bolster their case. Islamicists have rarely embarked on such a discussion, given the tendency to a priori chastise extremist authors for their untenable misrepresentation of Islam. Similarly, ǧihādī arguments are frequently tossed aside as an already familiar rehashing of an insignificant, isolated stream of thought that stretches directly from Ibn Taimīya via Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to Sayyid Quṭb. In revisiting this claim, I employ a close reading of the crucial ǧihādī manual al-ʿUmda fī iʿdād al-ʿudda li-l-ǧihād fī sabīl Allāh (The Essential Guide of Preparation for ǧihād on the Path of God), written in the mid 1980ies in the context of the Afghan ǧihād by an influential ideologue who is widely known as Dr. Faḍl. After presenting and evaluating a selection of the religious sources and authorities on which the author draws, the article enters into a discussion of his political thought. I argue that Dr. Faḍl makes a convincing case for a political project in the camps that is deeply embedded within the Sunni tradition while reading Ibn Taimīya faithfully. Dr. Faḍl does not turn him into a proponent of violence but rather sticks to the profound quietism the Damascene scholar is known for, thereby questioning supposedly established, clear-cut paths of reception.

Priesterinnen, Wahrsagerinnen, Zauberinnen, Prophetinnen-im frühen 7. Jh. gab es eine Vielzahl an weiblichen religiösen Autoritäten auf der Arabischen Halbinsel. Mit dem Aufkommen des Islam änderte sich das. Die ältesten Texte, die davon berichten und aus dem 8. und 9. Jh. stammen, rekonstruieren anhand ihres geschichtlichen Rückblicks einen ganz eigenen Transformationsprozess weiblicher religiöser Autorität. Dieser steht im Fokus des Beitrags und es wird gefragt: Welche Bilder von weiblichen muslimischen Autoritäten im Vergleich zu jenen des altarabischen Kults und anderer Religionen werden durch die Texte vermittelt? Wie gestaltet sich der Wandel weiblicher religiöser Autorität in den Texten? In welcher Relation stehen die literarischen Geschlechterkonzeptionen und religiösen Veränderungsprozesse? Um diesen Fragen nachzugehen, wird ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Terminologien in den Texten gelegt und gefragt, ob sich religiöse Autorität anhand bestimmter Termini oder einer bestimmten Modalität des Miteinanders erkennen lässt. Ziel ist es, Erkenntnisse darüber zu gewinnen, welche Formen weiblicher religiöser Autorität sich im spezifischen geschichtlichen Rückblick der Texte herausgebildet haben und wie diese bewertet wurden.

The article discusses the role of the concept of miracle (karamat) in the worship of two categories of religious authorities of the Nogai steppe: mullahs with genies (jinn) and saints. An analysis of the veneration of mullahs possessing jinn allows us to assert that it was based on their ability to perform miracles. The reputation of a miracle worker accompanied such a mullah throughout his life. However, this miraculous work was not associated with holiness, but, on the contrary, with the frowned upon orthodoxy connection with the jinn spirits. Accordingly, these mullahs could not be worshiped after their death. A completely different example of miracle workers in the Nogai steppe was provided by Muslim saints. They deserved the right to work miracles with their righteous life and religious practices. After the death of the saints (Sheikhs), their graves become an object of pilgrimage for the purpose of miraculous healing. Thus, in the Nogai steppe there were two institutions associated with miracles: mullahs who possessed jinn, and saints. The mullahs lost their ability to work miracles after death, while the saints acquired it with death.

В статье рассматриваются представления о чуде (карамат) в почитании двух категорий религиозных авторитетов Ногайской степи: мулл, обладающих джиннами, и святых. Анализ почитания мулл, обладающих джиннами, позволяет нам утверждать, что его основой была их способность к чудесам. Реноме чудотворца сопровождало такого муллу в течение всей жизни. Однако это чудотворчество не было связано со святостью, а напротив, с неодобряемой ортодоксией связью с духами-джиннами. Соответственно, эти муллы не могли почитаться после своей смерти. Совершенно другой пример чудотворцев в Ногайской степи являли мусульманские святые. Они заслуживали право на чудотворчество своей праведной жизнью и религиозными практиками. После смерти святых - шейхов их могилы становятся объектом паломничества с целью чудесного исцеления. Таким образом, в Ногайской степи существовало два института, связанных с чудотворчеством: муллы, обладавшие джиннами, и святые. Первые теряли способность к чудотворчеству после смерти, вторые же ее со смертью обретали.

Aux aspirations, revendications et initiatives de changement des normes de genre qui traversent les institutions et communautés religieuses dans la période contemporaine répondent des stratégies mises en œuvre par les autorités religieuses pour y résister. La grande variété des objets à travers lesquels ces interactions sont ici étudiées permet d’en saisir à la fois la cohérence et la complexité. S’inscrivant dans le champ scientifique en plein essor de l’intersection entre genre et religion, et mettant en avant les réflexions d’une nouvelle génération de chercheurs intéressés par ces thématiques, cet ouvrage a également pour objectif de porter un éclairage original sur des débats de société très actuels.

Pakistan's religious leaders, ulama, have been put under significant strain in relation to how to deal with questions about the political tensions and violence over the past decade flowing from the Taliban's role in the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The effects of this fraught environment on religious authority can be seen through the way that religious leaders have issued contradictory and opaque fatawa (non-binding, but highly influential, legal opinions). This article particularly considers the way that different fatwa-giving religious groups, such as Deobandis, Brevalis, and Ahl-i-Hadith, have dealt with these problems. The violence, which has struck the heart of Pakistan civil society, has led to a confusing array of fatawa from these religious elites. These opinions have sought to categorize violence as either legitimate or to be condemned. This article, therefore, shows how these fatawa and the conflicting positions they took have compromised religious authority in contemporary Pakistan.

The Issue At Hand
The American Muslim community is one of the largest and most diverse religious communities in the world, numbering roughly 3 million. However, remarkably, despite its longstanding presence in the United States, the Muslim community lacks strong institutions for religious and scholarly training, the cultivation of new leadership, and effective community-building. This gap in leadership and institutional supports, if left unaddressed, will have serious consequences for generations of Muslims, hence the need for this study.

The Project

Thanks to a generous grant by the Luce foundation, the Islamic CEnter at NYU was able to conduct a year-long landscaping project of leadership and educational programs based out of the United States whose primary focus is on the Muslim community. Headed by our senior researcher Sajjad Chowdhry, we went in with no assumptions but rather a hope to study what already exists and, possibly more importantly, to highlight questions which have not received the level of serious discourse required. We will utilize the findings that follow in this paper to move forward conversations on leadership and authority in the Muslim community. Our ultimate goal is to build out a robust co-curricular model of leadership in addition to a much-needed academic program that starts to train and fill critical gaps that exist in the frame of leadership in the American Muslim community.

This book explores the position of Islamic theology and jurisprudence towards people with disabilities. It investigates how early and modern Muslim scholars tried to reconcile their existence with the concept of a merciful God, and also looks at how people with disabilities might live a dignified and productive life within an Islamic context.
In his analysis of Islamic Theology, Ghaly pays attention to how theologians, philosophers and Sufis reflected on the purposes behind the existence of this phenomenon, and how to reconcile the existence of disability with specific divine attributes and an All-Merciful God. Simultaneously exploring the perspective of Muslim jurists, the book focuses on how people with disabilities can lead a dignified life in the financial and non-financial sense, in an extensive analysis of topics such as the human dignity of people with disabilities and the role of Greek physiognomy, their employability, medical treatment, social life with main focus on marriage-related issues, financial life and means of living.
Investigating the topic of disability from early and modern Islamic perspectives, the author provides an analysis of Muslim discussions on various bioethical questions. As such, this book will be of great relevance to current heated debates on human rights of people with disabilities, as well as providing a valuable resource for courses on Multicultural bioethics, Islamic theology, Islamic law and medical anthropology.

In examining the relationship between the political theology of Malcolm X, also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and the socio-political cultural attempts of British and North American Muslim performing artists to cope with the power structures they experience, the influence of Malcolm X appears to be mediated, personalized, and expressed in manifold ways. Besides the liberating and normalizing effects of Malcolm X and his political theology by externally directed expressions towards societies and states, I found transformative, emancipative effects among expressions directed towards Muslims and Islamic currents. On the meta- level, specific Muslim artists may have become part of the informal Anglophone network of interdependent Islamic teachers and institutions that is focussed to re-explain the most powerful mainstream of Islam and its cultural standards in the world by incorporating the inclusive symbol that Malcolm X is.

From the early 1970s until 2011, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab flourished as a minor centre of Shiʿi learning. It predominantly served Iraqi Shiʿi refugees, but also temporary visitors from Iran and the Gulf countries. The seminaries viewed it as their responsibility to draw in transient Shiʿa and turn them into students and loyal followers of important marājiʿ al-taqlīd or Shiʿi legal scholars who mainly reside in major centres of Shiʿi learning, such as Najaf, Karbala and Qom. While the seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab aimed at strengthening institutional affiliation among lay Shiʿa, they concurrently aided the questioning of authoritative religious edicts and opinions emanating from Iranian and Iraqi centres of learning and produced local religious authorities. This article examines two spheres in which central authority was challenged in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. First, it was contested in seminaries where students and teachers debated legal rulings, and second, in contested public Muharram practices such as self-flagellation processions and the showing and selling of recorded laṭmiyyāt, which are chants performed during ritual mourning gatherings.

This is my draft of a syllabus on Religious Authority in Islam within Islamwissenschaft (Islamic Studies/Middle Eastern Studies) for BA and MA students. I seek to combine a historical and a systematic perspective on functional roles, offices, terms and concepts, both Islamic as well as academic. I would appreciate your comments and suggestions for improvement.

The Cambridge Muslim College was established in 2011 with the purpose of giving a contextual 'update' to the heavily text-based training of British Muslim seminary graduates. It has been called a 'finishing school' that provides a higher education experience for graduates of the traditional Indian-style Darul Ulooms in the United Kingdom. The college offers a one-year programme for both men and women with a curriculum emphasizing citizenship, political and cultural awareness, interfaith understanding, community building, counselling, and other pastoral skills. This chapter discusses the Cambridge Muslim College programme and how it relates to earlier, more traditional imam-training programmes in the United Kingdom.

This article examines the Bā ʿAlawī—a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of the Prophet—in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it looks at the ḥawl, an annual commemoration of, or collective pilgrimage to, the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī saints/scholars. Focusing on two contemporary ḥawls in Central Java—that of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1346/1927) in Pekalongan, and that of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabashī (d. 1330/1912) in Solo—the article charts the transformations of both ḥawls from diasporic Arab gatherings into Indonesian public expressions of Islam. In the post-colonial period, when the place of the Ḥaḍramīs in the national imagination was far from being settled, the ḥawls have enabled the recasting of the Bā ʿAlawī as an integral part of the nation while allowing them to maintain their genealogical and spiritual distinctions. The sites, rituals, and commentaries of the ḥawl sustained the construction of networks connecting Bā ʿAlawī scholars to local Muslim scholars, providing the Bā ʿAlawī with cultural ties that maintain their distinction while anchoring them to the wider Muslim public. Examining the Bā ʿAlawī ḥawl underlines the importance of rituals in the creation and maintenance of informal Muslim networks, which in turn facilitate the practical integration into the larger public of a group previously considered an ethnic minority.

This volume is a record of the 2010 Building Bridges seminar for theological dialogue between Muslim and Christian scholars. Chaired by Rowan Williams (at the time Archbishop of Canterbury) and held at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, the seminar explored how Christians and Muslims have connected their traditions to modernity, looking especially at understandings of history, changing patterns of authority, and approaches to freedom. The volume includes a substantial selection of relevant texts from leading Muslim and Christian thinkers from John Henry Newman to the present day. Contributors include Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Vincent Cornell, David Bentley Hart, Philip Jenkins, John Milbank, Sajjad Rizvi, Abdullah Saeed, Recep Şentürk, Janet Soskice, and Rowan Williams.
A PDF of the whole volume is provided by kind permission of Georgetown University Press. For more information on Building Bridges and other volumes in the series, see http://press.georgetown.edu/category/promotions/buildingbridges and https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/projects/the-building-bridges-seminar.

Quale rapporto lega istanze femministe, politiche di genere e Islam nel Marocco contemporaneo? E come è cambiato negli ultimi decenni e nel periodo successivo alle proteste del 2011? Grazie a una serie di approfonditi focus etnografici, questo libro lascia emergere le voci dirette delle protagoniste del dibattito sui diritti delle donne: dalle attiviste laiche del femminismo storico alle sempre più importanti intellettuali del femminismo islamico, fino alle teologhe e alle predicatrici dell'Islam di stato. In questo scenario, i due principi di uguaglianza di genere e di complementarità di ispirazione islamica vengono risignificati da attori sociali e istituzioni islamiche ufficiali. E, nel solco del fermento politico e culturale innescato dal Movimento del 20 Febbraio, si intravedono possibili sinergie.