Stanford University Press Blog

Islamic Law in Modern Life

Islamic militants in Pakistan have pledged to continue violence until Shari’a—best translated as Islamic religious law—is used to govern the area. Turkey, one of the most secular Muslim countries, is undergoing fierce debates over its secularism. This week’s verdict in the trial of the men who perpetrated the 2004 Madrid train bombing states that they want Shari’a to be implemented “in its most radical, extreme and minority interpretation.”

But what is Shari’a, and how is it viewed and invoked across the Muslim world?

A new book from Stanford University Press, Shari’a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context, seeks to answer these questions. It demonstrates how Shari’a, originally viewed as guidelines for approaching legal, moral, and social questions, came to be seen as a codified set of laws. The reader learns about how Shari’a has been implemented around the Muslim world, especially in post-revolutionary Iran, sees how some components of Shari’a have become prioritized over others, and is introduced to an influential Sunni scholar’s case that Shari’a necessitates democracy.

In a review of America’s Kingdom in the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali writes that, “Critical academic works on the Saudi kleptocracy are rare. …Which is why America's Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first concessions to Standard Oil of California in 1933. Combining history with political anthropology, Vitalis sheds a bright light on the origins and less savoury aspects of the Saudi-US relationship in its first phase, when oil production was accompanied by the manufacturing of myths that prettified the US presence."

   
Robert Vitalis not only provides a historical basis (spanning more than seventy years, three continents, and an engrossing cast of characters) for understanding this “special relationship” between the United States and the Saudi monarchy, but he also argues that despite the constant media scrutiny after 9/11, the special relationship continues today. And there’s plenty of evidence going around. The Wall Street Journal reports in an article today that instead of taking explicit measures against a powerful Saudi bank in 2003 (or even earlier), which allegedly finances terrorist networks from the Middle East to Indonesia, the U.S. government has chosen to lobby the Saudi royal family quietly about its concerns, with little success so far.

The book  points to a major divergence between the official “myths” (perpetuated by both the U.S. and the Saudis) and the political and historical realities in the Middle East. It shows how the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil under a racist and unfair US-owned company generated a lingering resentment and hatred against the West. As Tariq Ali's review suggests, these feelings persist in our times, even among Saudi elite.

Is Islam compatible with democracy?

In many ways the question, raised so persistently in our times, is not whether Islam is compatible with democracy, but rather how  Muslims can make these concepts compatible. Nothing intrinsic to Islam—or any other religion—makes it inherently democratic or undemocratic.

In Making Islam Democratic Asef Bayat draws our attention to an overlooked social movement in Muslim societies that represents an attempt to bridge the gap between Islam and democracy. Calling the phenomena “post-Islamism,” Bayat describes it as “an endeavor to fuse religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty (dīndārī ve āzādī). It is an attempt to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on its head by emphasizing rights instead of duties, plurality in place of singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scripture, and the future instead of the past.”

Since the late 1990s, against the backdrop of intensifying religious sentiment in the Muslim world, Bayat notes that there has been an emerging trend to accommodate aspects of democratization, pluralism, women’s rights, youth concerns, and social development. In Lebanon, the Hizbullah has, to an extent, transcended its exclusivist Islamist platform by adapting to the pluralistic political reality. In India, the Jama‘at-i Islami has transformed itself from a political party resting on an exclusivist Islam that rejected democracy into a movement that values democracy and pluralism. Even in a religiously orthodox and politically conservative country like Saudi Arabia, a post-Wahabi trend has attempted to incorporate notions of “liberal Islam” seeking a compromise with democracy. Recently, in Turkey, the country’s center-right AK party has sought to manifest a post-Islamist sensibility by combining modernism, nationalism, and democracy while cherishing religious precepts not withstanding an initial unease in the West about growing religious revivalism. The AK Party is poised to stay in power in  the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

It has been widely reported how the “war on terrorism” has increased the appeal of religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world, and Islamic political parties that have expressed opposition to U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, if Asef Bayat’s analysis is correct there are ways to combine Islam and democracy, and these emerging solutions will need to be sustained by the efforts of politically engaged citizens of the Middle East who feel “compelled to join a cosmopolitan humanity, to link up with global civil activism and to work for solidarity.”

America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier

Revisionist, new look at U.S.-Saudi Relations

In America's Kingdom, Robert Vitalis refutes popular claims that American-Saudi relations were idyllic for several decades and how the relationship between the two countries came into question, even fell apart, only after 9/11. On the contrary, the book shows how Americans in the Kingdom set up a kind of Jim Crow system or version of American Apartheid in the oil provinces in the 1930s. It traces the rise of a Saudi workers' movement (discussed in this book for the first time) that confronted the Americans in the 1950s. Vitalis makes a compelling case that the rascist system set up in Saudi Arabia was common everywhere American oil firms (and copper mining firms, and so on) set up operations, starting in the American West.  In fact it was part of a broader strategy of American empire building, motivated (somewhat ironically)  by the myth of U.S. exceptionalism. The book tragically shows how the same kinds of injustices that were hallmarks of American oil companies at home and abroad, continue in the world’s newest oil frontiers, in such far-flung places as Baku, Azerbaijan and in Nigeria.

  

Beinin on the Middle East

Joel Beinin, co-author of The Struggle for Sovereignty, discusses Middle East politics on the Todd Feinburg Show. 
LINKS: Listen

	The Struggle for Sovereignty Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 Edited by Joel Beinin and Rebecca L. Stein 2006 Buy this book
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