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"Islam and state Egypt 20th century."
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Remaking muslim politics
There is a struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims unfolding across the Islamic world. The conflict pits Muslims who support pluralism and democracy against others who insist such institutions are antithetical to Islam. With some 1.3 billion people worldwide professing Islam, the outcome of this contest is sure to be one of the defining political events of the twenty-first century.
Bringing together twelve engaging essays by leading specialists focusing on individual countries, this pioneering book examines the social origins of civil-democratic Islam, its long-term prospects, its implications for the West, and its lessons for our understanding of religion and politics in modern times.
Although depicted by its opponents as the product of political ideas \"made in the West\" civil-democratic Islam represents an indigenous politics that seeks to build a distinctive Islamic modernity. In countries like Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, it has become a major political force. Elsewhere its influence is apparent in efforts to devise Islamic grounds for women's rights, religious tolerance, and democratic citizenship. Everywhere it has generated fierce resistance from religious conservatives. Examining this high-stakes clash,Remaking Muslim Politicsbreaks new ground in the comparative study of Islam and democracy. The contributors are Bahman Baktiari, Thomas Barfield, John R. Bowen, Dale F. Eickelman, Robert W. Hefner, Peter Mandaville, Augustus Richard Norton, Gwenn Okruhlik, Michael G. Peletz, Diane Singerman, Jenny B. White, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.
eBook
Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam
Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000 subdistricts. A multilevel analysis shows that Muslim Brotherhood branches were more likely in subdistricts connected to the railway and where literacy was higher. Branches were less likely in districts with large European populations, and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence also points to the railway as key to the movement’s propagation. These findings challenge the orthodoxy that contact between Muslims and the West spurred the growth of organized political Islam, and instead highlight the critical role of economic and state infrastructure in patterning the early contexts of Islamist activism.
Journal Article
A Theory of a State? How Civil Law Ended Legal Pluralism in Modern Egypt
ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī (d. 1971), the father of the Egyptian legal code, theorized a relationship between dīn (religion) and dawla (state) that was key to his project. In this relationship, al-Sanhūrī posited a delineation between the spheres of dīn and dawla that allowed him to map these categories onto the existing distinction between matters of ʿibādāt (acts of worship) and muʾāmalāt (transactions) in Islamic law (fiqh). I propose that Islamic jurisprudential distinctions between ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt—for al-Sanhūrī—was the ideal medium to maintain and police the borderlines between religion and state in the postcolonial Egyptian state. Al-Sanhūrī's objective was to keep the domain of dīn outside of state sanction and to facilitate a transition whereby the state's legal institutions assumed exclusive lawmaking powers based on its own independent legal reasoning in Islamic law (ijtihād). I argue that al-Sanhūrī was a committed comparatist, not a reformer of Islamic law. Al-Sanhūrī's legal project should be viewed as a faithful commitment to French comparative law as a method of legal inquiry and a reflection of his nationalist agenda of creating a unified legal order that cannot exist without relying upon indigenous forms of law and culture. Al-Sanhūrī saw Khedival legal pluralism as an obstacle for national sovereignty. As a result of the institutional and legal readjustments from the 1920s through 1950s in Egypt, al-Sanhūrī did not see a future for Islamic law in the emerging legal state apparatus outside of civil law strictures and insisted that Islamic courts and religious tribunals for Jews and Christians must be subsumed under nationalized secular state courts.
Journal Article
Hamas and civil society in Gaza
Many in the United States and Israel believe that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, and that its social sector serves merely to recruit new supporters for its violent agenda. Based on Sara Roy's extensive fieldwork in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during the critical period of the Oslo peace process, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza shows how the social service activities sponsored by the Islamist group emphasized not political violence but rather community development and civic restoration.
eBook
The Idea of the Civil State in Egypt: Its Evolution and Political Impact following the 2011 Revolution
The model of the \"civil state\" (dawla madaniyya) occupies a central place in the public debate over the character of Egypt following the January 25 Revolution of 2011. The demand to establish a civil state was ostensibly shared by all the political currents in Egypt. However,
when these currents attempted to set out agreedupon guidelines for Egypt's future, it soon became clear that they were far from a consensus, and that defining the civil state was at the heart of the controversy. This article examines the roots of this concept in Western political philosophy,
tracing its evolution in Egypt from its first appearance in the beginning of the 20th century until the recent debate on its inclusion in Article 1 of the 2014 constitution.
Journal Article
EGYPTIAN BY ASSOCIATION: CHARITABLE STATES AND SERVICE SOCIETIES, CIRCA 1850–1945
In this article I argue that the Egyptian state emerged as a welfare provider in the mid-20th century, first by depending on the services of charitable societies to feed, educate, and provide medical assistance to the poor, and later by imitating and harnessing the activities of charitable societies. Drawing on correspondence between the state and service societies from the 1880s to 1945, when King Faruq (r. 1936–52) granted the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) the authority to define and to circumscribe the activities of social welfare organizations, the article illustrates the interactions of and the similarities between private and state-sponsored charity. The article further suggests that the establishment of MOSA helped to consolidate the hegemony of the Egyptian state over society and, at the same time, exemplified a dialectical process of state formation engaged in by Egyptian heads of state, service organizations, and the Egyptians whose needs they served.
Journal Article
The Making of the Arab Intellectual
In the wake of the Ottoman Empire's nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly 'estate' underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the state's new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image.
This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing on the period after the tax-farming scholar took the bow and before the alienated intellectual prevailed on the contemporary Arab cultural scene, it situates the making of the Arab intellectual within the dysfunctional space of competing states' interests known as the 'Nahda'. Located between Empire and Colony, the emerging Arab public sphere was a space of over- and under-regulation, hindering accountability and upsetting allegiances.
The communities that Arab intellectuals imagined, including the Pan-Islamic, Pan-Arab and socialist sat astride many a polity and never became contained by post-colonial states. Examining a range of canonical and less canonical authors, this interdisciplinary approach to The Making of the Modern Arab Intellectual will be of interest to students and scholars of the Middle East, history, political science, comparative literature and philosophy.
eBook
Revolutionaries and reformers : contemporary Islamist movements in the Middle East
Islamist movements seeking power today are faced with difficult choices regarding strategy, ranging from armed struggle to electoral efforts. An emerging alternative consists of a rethinking of Islamist politics, where the goal of a “totally Islamic” polity would be abandoned in favor of some form of Islamic-oriented society. In this reformulation, Islamist politics would function as a pressure group to make society more Islamic, reinforcing the walls of semi-separate internal communities and reinterpreting Islam in more liberal ways. The September 11, 2001 terror attack on the United States, however, demonstrates that the radical approach remains attractive to many Islamists. Addressing these issues, the contributors look at the countries where Islamist movements have been most important. Case studies of revolutionary and reformist groups are followed by chapters discussing future alternatives for Islamist politics, presenting arguments both advocating and critical of a potential liberal, reformist, interest-group Islamism.
eBook