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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

This paper discusses the role of Khārijī thought in modern Arab intellectual history and attempts to answer the question: What prompted Arab scholars to suddenly become interested in the Khārijīs? After a brief introduction, the paper begins by looking at the modern reinterpretation of Khārijī history in Ibāḍī scholarship and notes that modern Ibāḍī scholars seem convinced that a favourable image of the Khārijīs will help to reconcile Ibāḍism with Sunnism. The second part of the paper argues that modern Arab scholars, who have unearthed and analyzed the vast corpus of Khārijī poetry, have used the poetry as a rhetorical vehicle to rehabilitate the image of Khārijīs in the turath and to narrow the religio-political gap between Khārijīs and Sunnīs. The paper’s third part contends that ideologically-oriented Arab scholars have reinterpreted and, most importantly, made use of Khārijī history and thought in order to promote modern (Western) ideologies and beliefs long shunned in the Arab/Islamic world. In all cases, one may argue that the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism and its portrayal as neo- Khārijīsm by some has led Arab scholars to reconsider the role and image of the historical Khārijīs. Although only a handful of modern Arab scholars have discussed and analyzed Khārijī poetry, they have produced an important and essential genre of literature on the history and beliefs of the Khārijīs. This study is significant because it unravels a body of literature that is still little known in the West.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is analyzed With three interrelated goals: first, to improve understanding of the reasons for failed conflict resolution in the Middle East by contrasting it With successful peacemaking in South Africa; second, to critically probe analogies between the two disparate situations and scrutinize whether the frequently used apartheid label fits Israeli policies; third, to draw specific lessons from the South African experience for alternatives in the Middle East. Analogies With the South African case are increasingly applied to Israel/Palestine for two different purposes: to showcase South Africa as an inspiring model for a negotiated settlement and to label Israel a ‘colonial settler State’ that should be confronted With strategies similar to those applied against the apartheid regime (sanctions, boycott). Both assumptions are problematic because of the different historical and socio-political contexts. Peacemaking resulted in an inclusive democracy in South Africa, while territorial separation in two states is widely hailed as the solution in Israel/Palestine, Ihe death of Arafat and the realignments in Palestinian politics are not changing the basic structural interests and power relations in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

This paper argues that we have entered a ‘Tocquevillean’ phase in world affairs that represents the culmination of a long-gestating historical process. Since 1945, there have been three phases of global politics: between 1945 and 1989, the world was Marxist-dominated by the discourse of economics; from 1989 until 2001, it was Weberian-dominated by the discourse of cultural conflict; and, since 2001, it has been Tocquevillean —dominated by the discourse of American exceptionalism, which here refers, in particular, to the United States’ peculiar combination of religious openness and constitutionally-guaranteed individual rights. As the state retreats from its former role, the relationship between these two elements has come to represent the central historical issue of our time and this will be the case for the foreseeable future. This is a matter in which the United States has a peculiar experience, well-analyzed by Tocqueville. September 11, 2001 marked the definitive switch to a Tocquevillean world, the principal characteristic of which is rifts within the societies of ‘the West.’ Beyond more immediate points of contention, the current tension has a great deal to do with religion and its role in a secular democratic order, a subject about which Tocqueville had some very illuminating things to say. Against this background, this paper explores the ways in which religious belief resonates or conflicts with political freedom in movements around the world and the role of the United States in a world bubbling with religious ferment.

The argument presented in this paper develops in relation to three interrelated themes. It begins by considering the current LIS-dominated discourse on democracy and democratization, which argues that democratic values and practices are essential to human freedom and peace. However, as I next observe, the urgency to democratize is mediated through the power of the State. Moreover, in the current conjuncture, the objective of democracy is integral to the construction of what may be described as postmodern formations of political and economic power. These are appearing as a transmogrification of preceding orders, creating a New Leviathan which, from many positions, might seem to be predicated on constant war, rather than the production of peace and the conquest of human misery. The ordering dynamic of the New Leviathan is one of continual fracture, an expanding plane of contested sovereignties of various kinds. I describe this dynamic, which forms the paper’s third theme, as one of Wild Sovereignty. Here, I expand upon Giorgio Agamben’s discussion ofHomo Sacer, which considers a concept of sovereignty defined in terms of one’s relation to ‘bare life.” Wild sovereignty as a dimension of the New Leviathan is radically productive of regions and spaces of bare life in which more and more People are thrust to the very edges of existence as a consequence of the contesting forces of constituting power in its wild sovereign form‬.

Numerous pilgrims and travellers report that the tombs of the Arab prophets are much longer than the tombs of ordinary people, ranging from ten to fifty metres in length. Little has been written on these long tombs despite their frequent mention in a variety of sources and the clear association between the Arab prophets and the giants of antediluvian times. This paper proposes a broad theoretical context within which to interpret the long tombs of prophets in the Hadramawt and in other locales throughout the Near East and Africa. Rather than providing a systematic overview, this paper highlights a number of details that link Islamic examples with those from other religious traditions, including classical Greece and the ancient Near East. It examines some of the different explanations given for the lengths of particular tombs with the goal of reaching a larger conception of how these long tombs are related to Islamic models of prophethood and the spread of religion. The comparison of various traditions suggests that the long tombs are to be understood as part of an Islamic mythology of the origins and development of civilization from the time of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden to the era of the Prophet Muhammad and beyond.

Islamic scholarship records a large number of accounts featuring sayings by Christian monks (both monastics and ascetics) and their encounters with Muslim ascetics and mystics. On one level, these accounts attest to the fact that the perception of Christian monks as holy figures in the Near East survived into the early Islamic period and that they were still acknowledged for their spiritual authority and aura in Muslim circles well into the fifth/eleventh century. The continuity of this recognition indicates the degree of its diffusion among Muslim scholars. On another level, these accounts reinforce the conclusion that encounters between Christian monks and Muslim ascetics and early mystics must have played a role in the emergence of particular attitudes, views and practices within Islamic ascetical and mystical traditions.

This article examines the chain of events that facilitated an Islamic revivalamong second-generation Arab-American Muslims. Based upon research inmetropolitan Chicago, it argues against trends in the literature that describeWestern-born Muslims as foreigners, immigrants or, worse, anti-Western.Similarly, it argues against setting their religious experiences solely in a domes-tic context. The article begins by documenting the lack of religious institutionsand practices among immigrant Arab Muslims before the 1990s and the limitedreligious socialization of their American-born children. These conditionsemerged in part from secular trends in the immigrants’ homelands. By the1990s, a period of global Islamic revival, both immigrant and second-generation Arab Muslims found practiced Islam attractive, particularly its capacity to provide meaning and resilience for their own experiences in America. Individual decisions to embrace Islam as more than a fact of birth were facilitated by developments resulting from globalization and the creation of American Islamic institutions, yet were, at the same time, intensely personal choices rooted in local experiences. Although Islamic revival is global, its conduits should not be viewed as causal. The article engages findings by Yang and Ebaugh (2001) and Hirschman (2003), arguing that analyses of religiosity in the United States must take into account historical contexts. Religiosity is an intensely personal experience that must be explained at the intersection of the individual, the local and the global.

This paper takes as its starting point the identification of the element of risk as a structural condition of advanced industrialization. The concern here is less with the ‘systematically produced hazards’ of ‘risk society’ (those matters which are, at least to some degree, open to political, scientific and ethical deliberation), than with something more fundamental–what is termed the complex interaction of human and natural systems. The argument is that the human condition-and, by extension, the range of possible social futures- is coming to be conditioned by global dynamics that fall outside of the calculation of risk and, indeed, sometimes outside of timely human comprehension. Even as the range and power of actors with global reach or potential impact has increased, there has also been a proliferation of new centres of power, competence, authority and allegiance, reflected in the burgeoning literature on global governance. Whether the new modes of regulation and control suggested in much of the global governance literature are likely to be equal to the task of sustaining the globalized and globalizing world we have made for ourselves comprises the second half of the paper.‬

“Recent events in world politics have heightened public attention to the concept of risk in social life. In a world where danger and violence have become media commodities, it seems that risks to health and well-being have never been greater. However, because attitudes toward risk are learned cultural behaviour, ‘perception of risk’ has become more essential as a predictor of political and social behaviour than actual tangible risk. In this paper, I discuss contrasts between notions of personal and public risk from the standpoint of the societies of the United States, the Islamic Middle East and the Buddhist Far East. Though broad generalizations may be dangerous, the cultural styles in each of the three regions allow individuals and larger social groupings, such as corporations and governments, to engage in decision-making which seems rational in terms of the broad attitudinal frameworks dominant in these regions, but which may contrast sharply with the rational actions of individuals and groups in other regions. As the world becomes more integrated globally, knowledge of the differences in these perceptions and their concomitant implications for the actions taken by decision-makers will become increasingly essential to international understanding. As a case-study for this discussion, I focus upon the war in Iraq, highlighting reactions and attitudes in the United States, where risk is in proportion to fear; among Irag’s Islamic Middle Eastern neighbours, where risk is really ‘no risk; and among the nations of East Asia, particularly Japan, where risk is normative and drives the course of history.”

Despite the best efforts of many scholars, contemporary Middle Eastern politics is often understood as a battle between individuality, rationality and modernity, on the one hand, and group identities, religion and tradition, on the Other. Such images are current not only among external observers, but also among many of the participants in regional political activities. The perception of such a clash has real costs since it directs attention away from emerging syncretic approaches. In this paper, I examine two areas in which these two oft-claimed incompatible approaches have operated—constitutionalism and civic education. I seek to Show not only that syncretic approaches are possible, but that they have emerged and promise new possibilities for regional politics.