Abashin S. Gellner, the 'saints' and Central Asia: between Islam and Nationalism // Inner Asia. 2005, vol. 7 (1) (original) (raw)
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Islamism, the West and Our Concern: A Social Reflection
Budapest International Research and Critics Institute (BIRCI-Journal): Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
This article argues that a number of Western orientalists tried to impress that Islam and the West could not meet, imaged that all the Islamic ones seemed to be unable to meet all the nuances of the West, as all the western images imaged always contradict Islam. Such tensions continue to this day. Towards the end of the 20th century, Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism has retreated or failed in maintaining political power in the Islamic world. But the enforcement of Shari'ah in society, remains a central theme of the demands of these Islamic fundamentalists. Thus, their target as a group is no longer just a country, but also a society. The political experiments of Islam, however, as shown in Algeria, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan have failed and are out of date, but anyway, by the beginning of the 21st century Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism has been revived, marked by the WTC bomb 9/11 and other terror attacks in Indonesia, Europe, the US etc.
This volume explores the changing place of Islam in contemporary Central Asia, understanding religion as a "societal shaper" -a roadmap for navigating quickly evolving social and cultural values. Islam can take on multiple colors and identities, from a purely transcendental faith in God to a cauldron of ideological ferment for political ideology, via diverse culture-, community-, and history-based phenomena. The volumes discusses what it means to be a Muslim in today's Central Asia by looking at both historical and sociological features, investigates the relationship between Islam, politics and the state, the changing role of Islam in terms of societal values, and the issue of female attire as a public debate.
In the last two decades, Islam has gained a spectacular presence in the public lives and debates of both Muslim and Western societies. Contemporary Islamism, as it has emerged in Muslim homelands and European countries of immigration, seeks to make religious difference visible in public through micro-practices such as veiling at schools, the construction of mosques in Europe, gender segregation on public transport, food taboos (-helal‖ meat, alcohol prohibition) etc. Islam is carried to the forefront of public life by the new political claims and daily practices of Muslim migrants, urban youth, Islamic intellectuals and pious middle classes. Through such practices, Muslim actors distinguish themselves, elaborate collectively a religious self, and carve new public spaces of their own in conformity with the requirements of their faith and an Islamic lifestyle. This is a book about understanding the ways in which Islam acquires visibility and presence in three different public spheres, namely, secularist Turkey, post-revolutionary Iran, and pluralist Europe. We aim to understand the ways through which Islam moves into public life and attempts to redesign the borders between private and public, religious and secular domains, and thereby challenge the modern secular and democratic definitions of the public sphere. We also hope to contribute to the theoretical debate on the public sphere from the vantage point of Islam, bringing attention to the role of religion, women, body, and space in defining the borders between the private and public spheres. What we are searching for is a better understanding of the complexities of contemporary practices of Muslims as they unfold in public life. We therefore focus on the second phase of Islamism, whereby a cultural program of Islam becomes more apparent. The first phase, which reached its peak with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, created a model for Islamization throughout the 1980s. During this phase, Islamic public action was mostly defined by militant fundamentalists thinking in revolutionary terms. In contradistinction, in its second phase, it is new social groups such as Muslim intellectuals, cultural elites, entrepreneurs, and middle classes that more greatly define the public face of Islam, thinking and acting in reformist terms. Their social profiles are an outcome of both the Islamist movement and modern secular education, market values and political idioms. They are a hybrid and embody to the extreme the ambivalence between Islam and modernity; they make a claim for Islamic difference, and yet accept certain imperatives of modern life. They are disenchanted with the utopian fundamentalism that Islamist militants cherished two decades ago and seek to make a place for themselves in professional, political and public life. If the first wave of Islamism is defined by an anti-systemic stand and a rigid ideological corpus, in its second wave a new generation of Muslims makes its way into the world of shared publics, interacts with secular actors and modern spheres of life, and thereby changes the dynamics and orientation of the movement. This, however, does not mean the end of radicalism, which increasingly manifests itself in terrorist acts. The social integration and public visibility of these new Muslim groups is felt as betrayal and judged as a political failure by those who still hold on to the original fundamentalist project.
From The Land of the Pure to the Guardian of Islam for ASPAC 2019 Preprint20200119 36785 1ietjms
Proceeds of the ASPAC 2019 Conference, 2019
As the seventies waned, Pahlavi flailed in Iran, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan seized the opportunity to resolve the situation of ontological insecurity created by the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. The timely American revaluation of its geopolitical position concerning Afghanistan, the Soviets, and the Muslim world spurred Pakistani's military and religious elites to redirect the national identity debate toward a radicalized form of Islam. Initiated under the leadership of Bhutto, and continuing today, this effort has centered around shifting Pakistan's national identity narrative form that of the 'Land of the Pure,' a public theology form of Islam set by the founders of the nation, to the posture of the Guardian of Islam. Central to this narrative shift was the attainment of a nuclear device. This strategy would serve to defend Pakistan's sovereignty and integrity from nearby powers-three of Pakistan's neighbors belonged already to the nuclear club-while qualifying it as the rightful representative of Islam since any atomic device in the hands of an Islamic nation would rightfully be eligible as an Islamic Bomb. This paper proposes that Pakistan's pursuit of its ontological security through a nuclear device may have been driven by more than just the desire for self-strengthening and hedging, that identity and national narrative may have been equally important in this effort. Furthermore, the timely invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR and the subsequent US intervention transformed Pakistan into the balancing needle in the struggle for supremacy in the region among world powers
Islamism and Its Role in Modern Islamic Societies (Springer, 2019)
2019
A multifaceted, multidimensional, changing, and inconsistent Islamism is a subject under study in this chapter. It is impossible to comprehend modern Muslim societies without an account of the impact of Islam on all sides of life. It would be a mistake to present Islamism as a node on the body of Muslim societies. In fact, Islamism in many respects reflects the essence of modern Muslim societies, of their mode of thought and life. It helps to maintain social, economic, political sphere at different societal levels as well as create a peculiar Islamic pattern of modernization. That is why Islamism cannot be eliminated at the present stage; it can be only overgrown. And this will take a long time. One should understand clearly that it is impossible to reduce the dangers of radical and terrorist Islamism only by force. It will decrease only after it is separated from moderate Islamism having made the latter a more respectable, open, and involved in normal political life movement. We analyze in this chapter a number of issues. Among them are general characteristics and functions of Islamism; confrontation of Islamism with secular regimes; evolution of Islamism; modern trends and the future of Islamism, etc.
Towards the Carving of Islamic Space in 'the West
1998
Since the early 1970s, Western Europeans and North Americans have demonstrated increasing concern over the latest chapter in the Western encounter with Muslims. This concern is focused on the current trend of human migration from South to North and from East to West, with the potential of altering the ethnic and religious composition of Western nation-states and, what some fear, their democratic and capitalist traditions, as well as liberal social values. To those in the West who believe in the purity of race, civilization, or culture, or in a supersessionist 'Judeo-Christian' worldview this movement of people is a menacing threat to their cherished ideals of a homogeneous Western society. For many, it increasingly represents a significant demographic shift that posits a major cultural challenge whose precise consequences are unpredictable and unforeseen since they require a variety of adjustments by the host countries and by the new immigrants.