American Journal of Islam and Society

Response to Zainab Bint Younus’ Review of "Women and Gender in the Qur’an"

2024-08-01T14:23:41+00:00

I thank AJIS for recently reviewing my monograph Women and Gender in the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 2020) and thank Zainab Bint Younus of MuslimMatters.org for taking the time to review the work. I must, however, take issue with the reviewer’s line of critique.
As an academic exercise, Women and Gender in the Qur’an offers a reading of the scripture that investigates intra-textual coherence through philological and structural methods. To miss this point is to miss the theoretical foundation of the project. The book does not purport to analyze hadith corpuses or the tafsīr tradition writ large, and I do not attempt to systematically analyze other early Muslim representations of female figures. In constructing a book-length work, a scholar must discern how to narrow the source material to an appropriate scope. In seeing that no previous scholar had produced an intra-textual reading that examines all Qur’anic verses involving female figures, this is where I contributed. The justifications for my scope and methodological focus are included in the book but are unfortunately not presented clearly in the review.

Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest

2024-03-12T15:42:23+00:00

The American Midwest is not a region typically associated with racial and religious diversity. his is in part because, in popular narratives about the US, urban coastal cities are diverse and small towns in “Middle America” are monolithically white and Christian. When ethnic and religious heterogeneity is acknowledged, it is seen as a new historical development based on mid-twentieth and twenty-first century immigration patterns. Muslims, perceived as quintessential outsiders, are perceived as recent and unwelcome interlopers in the religious fabric of America. Edward E. Curtis IV’s Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest calls our attention to both the inaccuracy of these assumptions, and the factors that contribute to these inaccuracies in the first place. Based on archival research, Curtis weaves together vivid portraits of the deep roots that Arab Muslim immigrants have in the Midwest, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. By uncovering these erased narratives of Muslims in the Midwest, Curtis provides readers with a powerful corrective to commonplace assumptions about immigration history in the United States.

Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire

2024-03-14T16:34:49+00:00

The subtitle of the book under review suggests that it deals with modern relationships between Hindus and Muslims in India, but the scope of the book is actually much wider. It deals with the general question of the various Muslim views of the relationship between Muslims and adherents of other civilizations and religions, ranging from the 9th century al-ʿĀmirī and the 11th century al-Bīrūnī, to the 18th century Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including such luminaries as Abū al-Kalām Āzād, Aḥmad Riźā Khān, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and several Deobandī scholars.
One of the great virtues of the book is the author’s use of the sources, some of them rarely mentioned in scholarly literature and certainly not to this extent and in such detail. In an academic culture in which various “narratives” have taken the pride of place, it is most welcome to have a work which is replete with theory, but also surveys and analyzes a substantial amount of hitherto unknown source material. The book is also another proof of the great variety of Muslim tradition which enables Muslim scholars to find Islamic justification for their modern world views and policies, even if these are contradictory to each other. Because of its rich content – much of it unknown – the book deserves a detailed review.

Islamic Architecture: A World History

2024-08-01T14:23:39+00:00

Contemporary scholarship about the architecture of the Islamic world continues to expand with new explorations beyond the ‘canon’ of high-profile historical examples typically included in surveys. Recent publications now include studies of lesser-known buildings, new thematic lenses and studies of contemporary buildings designed for and by Muslims.

The Reconceptualization of the Umma and Ummatic action in Abdullah Bin Bayyah’s Discourse

2024-08-01T14:23:36+00:00

In the post-Arab Spring period, Abdullah Bin Bayyah has emerged as one of the principal exponents of the anti-revolutionary front. Dissatisfied with the Islamist solution to the socio-political crisis in the Middle East, Bin Bayyah has called for the establishment of a new jurisprudence based on fiqh al-wāqiʿ (jurisprudence of reality), which acknowledges and accepts the dictates of modern reality. He conceived his call for renewal (tajdīd) as one of the best ways to restore peace and unity in Muslim societies. This article aims to shed light on those aspects of Bin Bayyah’s reformist discourse that directly affect how he envisions the role and function of the umma in the modern context. The essay then explores the place that ummatic unification occupies in Bin Bayyah’s discourse and the kind of Islamic politics his post-Arab Spring religious discourse entails. Particular attention is also paid to the ways Bin Bayyah theorizes the significance of religious allegiances within the modern nation-state. The essay also considers Bin Bayyah’s view of the role of the Muslim umma in the global community, its relationship with other religions, and the wider human community when responding to global challenges.

An Egyptian Ethicist

2024-08-01T14:23:44+00:00

The sources shaping a moral theory range from “reason” to “societal command” to “religious texts.” The prominence and relationship between these sources is contingent upon the ethicists’ approaches and inquiries. Although Kant’s proposition of “pure reason” as a source of moral obligation marks a significant turning point in the field of ethics, scholars like Søren Aabye Kierkegaard argue for a divine command law of ethics, where religious texts become an inevitable source complementing individual ethical choices. This essay explores the intersection of religious texts and reasoning—the fusion between heteronomy and autonomy as sources of morality. It analyzes Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz’s “Moral Obligation” as a categorical imperative within moral theories and his incorporation of Western scholars such as Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson into his work, among others. The discussion features a significant episode of Muslim intellectual engagement with Western scholarship and its impact on understanding morality in the Qurʾān. The study shows that Drāz’s La Morale du Koran adapts certain Western ethical theories and reinterprets specific Qurʾanic passages, creating a new synthesis: an integration of knowledge.

The Other Legitimate Game in Town? Understanding Public Support for the Caliphate in the Islamic World

2024-08-01T14:27:45+00:00

In recent years, essentialist claims about the incompatibility of democracy and Islam have been swept away by public opinion research revealing that democracy is widely supported in the Islamic world. However, while this literature has demonstrated the popularity of democracy over authoritarianism, we argue that it misses a key piece of the puzzle by not examining Muslim public support for an alternative model of government: the Caliphate system. After outlining three different visions of the Caliphate in Islamic political thought – an autocratic view, a democratic view, and an instrumentalist or “good governance” view – we analyze how it is conceptualized today by its supporters with existing and original surveys conducted in several Islamic countries. We first engage with an existing cross-national survey conducted in several Muslim-majority countries that include Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan in order to investigate the sources of public support for the Caliphate, broadly speaking. We then move on to our own original, nationally representative survey conducted in Pakistan to analyze more deeply the political institutions and dimensions most associated with the Caliphate and democracy. Our results suggest that, like democracy, the Caliphate is understood by its supporters primarily in instrumental terms, as a vehicle for effective systems of welfare and justice rather than as a specific institutional configuration or simply as a means for policing public modesty and morality.

The Reparative Work of the Imagination

2024-08-01T14:28:07+00:00

This paper explores the psychic implications of nation-state politics on Yemenis and the necessity of repair and restorative justice. It examines some burgeoning work by artists and filmmakers that work on the image of the Yemeni as a reaction to the mental health crisis, ongoing war, and dispossession. For many of my interlocutors, the exploration and reimagining of Yemeni history, identity, and their place within a larger umma beyond nation-state formation becomes a necessary act of repair—and a precondition toward broader political aspirations. The essay traces the works of art by two Yemeni artists that meditate on the conditions of community, trust, and individual and communal wellbeing in relation to the Muslim umma. In turn, it considers how an ummatic aspiration is mediated by local political histories, but also the difficult psychic work necessary to articulate this aspiration amid cultural desolation.

Editorial Note

2024-06-04T12:55:16+00:00

Volume 41 Issue 2 of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four main research articles, each of which engages themes of Muslim collectivity, community, and umma from different vantage points. The first article is Rezart Beka’s contribution, “The Reconceptualization of the Umma and Ummatic Actions in Abdullah Bin Bayyah’s Discourse.” The second article is titled “An Egyptian Ethicist: Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz (1894-1958) and His Qurʾān-Based Moral Theory” by Ossama Abdelgawwad. The third research article for this issue is “The Other Legitimate Game in Town? Understanding Public Support for the Caliphate in the Islamic World”, a co-authored study by Mujtaba A. Isani, Daniel Silverman, and Joseph J. Kaminski. The fourth and final research article in this issue is Ashwak Hauter’s, “The Reparative Work of the Imagination: Yemen, ‘Afiya, and Politics of the Umma”.

This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society also includes a number of insightful book reviews, including editor Ovamir Anjum’s review essay engaging Joel Hayward’s recent work The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad and War and Celene Ibrahim’s author response to a review authored in a previous issue on her book, Women and Gender in the Qur’an.

The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad and War

2024-08-01T14:23:32+00:00

Joel Hayward’s The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad and War (Claritas Books, 2022; I only have access to the Kindle version) is an important recent addition to the English language Sira literature. The book, erudite and amply referenced throughout, investigates the Prophet Muhammad’s motives for waging jihad against Mecca after his flight to what became Medina. Professor Hayward, a specialist in military history, sets out to explain the well-established facts of the Prophet’s martial career: In his ten-year stay in Medina, the Prophet sent out some 80 expeditions, himself leading some 27 of them, of which about 9 saw significant combat. These campaigns led to his conquest of Mecca and the rest of Arabia, culminating in numerous encounters with the Arab tribes allied to the Roman Empire in Syria. A challenge for historians has been that whereas the Qurʾan, Hadith, and the Sira materials—the three early sources for Hayward’s history—furnish a great variety of microscopic detail about these battles, the events are so interlocked that an observer trying to isolate a clear and sufficient motive for the initiation of hostilities against Mecca faces a challenge. Hayward’s book is an attempt to answer that challenge.