Thursday, November 5, 2020
Ben Hubbard on MBS (Saudi) - MBZ (UAE)
MBS was also little known in the wider Arab world, including among Saudi Arabia's closest neighbors. Like its fellow smaller monarchies in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates had long viewed Saudi Arabia warily as the region's giant, whose wealth, power, and population dwarfed its own. For years, the Emiratis had wanted to step out of the Saudi shadow and develop their own national standing, and their leaders privately looked down on their Saudi counterparts as elderly conservatives wedded to ossified ways. [...]
The de facto ruler of the Emirates was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, a helicopter pilot and sharp tactician known by his own three-letter moniker, MBZ. He was tall, kept in shape, and maintained a modest demeanor that was uncommon among Gulf royals, sometimes rising during meetings to serve guests coffee or tea. MBZ had worked to give country international clout that outweighed its size. The Emirates had fewer citizens than Dallas, Texas, and a relatively small army. But he equipped it with billions of dollars' worth of American weapons and built special forces units that fought alongside American troops in Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. While few Americans had heard of his country or its leader, he had poured huge sums into lobbying efforts in Washington to make sure that his views on the Middle East reached the centers of power.
[...] MBZ impressed his vision of the region on the inexperienced young Saudi [MBS], particularly his animosity toward Iran and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.
-Ben Hubbard, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman (New York: Ti Duggan Books, 2020), pp. 37-8
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
'Ubayd Allah Sindhi's (1872-1944) 'socialist leaning' 'Qur'anic Revolution'
Brief background: "Born a Sikh in the Punjab, he had converted to Islam as a youth, spent some time with a Sufi master in Sindh and, as signified by the suffix 'Sindhi,' made it his adopted home. [39] He subsequently studied at Deoband, where the most important of his teachers was Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920), a revered professor hadith." (Zaman, p. 11).
For now, we should note that Sindhi rails often in his discourses against the dual oppression of the capitalists and the religious elite ("Brahmanism"), and he sees their alliance as being at the heart of much economic misery. [15] The capitalists are sometimes also referred to as the 'imperialists,' [16] which, of course, is in line with his solid anti-imperialist credentials. As for his criticism of the religious elite, it is not limited to the 'ulama. Scholars in other traditions are equally culpable for their 'intellectual capitalism,' by which he means not only their placing limits on people's access to religious knowledge or a concomitant desire to maintain their own privileged position through such knowledge but also their failure to address the economic concerns of ordinary people. Sindhi had no doubt that, properly understood, all religious traditions are deeply concerned with economic issues. And, on his return to India, he urged Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh scholars to devote themselves to demonstrating the accord between 'the spirit or philosophy of their religion and European economic thought,' [17] by which he evidently meant socialism.
[...] Another work comprises the Sindhi's commentary, after his return from exile, on select chapters of the Qur'an with a view to providing a model to fellow Muslims on how to understand the Islamic foundational text. [18] Social and economic concerns and indeed, a call for radical socioeconomic change in light of the Qur'an teachings -- a 'Qur'anic revolution' -- are at the heart of this latter work, and it is on this that I will primarily focus here.
Justice ('adl) is foremost among the norms Sindhi finds in the Qur'an. [19] In fact, the idea of justice is taken to be constitutive of taqwa itself, a central Qur'anic idea often translated as 'the fear of God.' [20] Establishing justice in society means, inter alia, removing inequalities and providing for the poor and the unprivileged. The rich will be questioned on the Day of Judgment for how they conducted themselves in the world. [21] At the time, people will experience the consequences of their actions: a miser who had seen a person starving but had done nothing to help him will undergo the latter's suffering on that day. [22] Yet such reckoning is obviously not to be deferred only to the hereafter. A government guided by Qur'anic norms is equally obligated to rein in the rich and mighty, and a central concern of such a government would be to serve the interests of the poor. [23] To this end, the government has the right to impose whatever taxes it sees as necessary beyond the zakat, which all Muslims of means are required to pay annually and which is one of five pillars of the faith (alongside the profession of belief, prayer, fasting, and Hajj). [24] Helping the poor, either individually or by way to a government guided by Qur'anic norms, is not, however, a matter of maintaining an army of beggars. Rather, as Sindhi envisions it, the poor ought to be provided with education and means of livelihood so that they, and all others, can become productive members of society. [25]
All this has a strong socialist ring to it, and Sindhi has, indeed, often been characterized as a socialist. [26] He would not have disdained the label, except in cautioning against the atheism with which socialism was often intertwined. His reading of the Qur'an and his understanding of the work of Wali Allah seemed to him to offer ways of combining an engagement with the socioeconomic uplift of the impoverished masses with ethical norms derived from religious, and it is this combination that he wanted to impart to his audiences. This was not just a strategic choice, driven by the conviction that a reformist program divorced from religion would not succeed in the Indian context. Underlying it was also his belief that the love of God offered the surest basis for the love of God's creatures. [27]
-Muhammad Qasim Zaman, "Socioeconomic Justice," in Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225-7.
Monday, November 2, 2020
AHM on France and Muslims in his book "Travelling Home"
The French model, grounded in Enlightenment anticlericalism, claims a fierce exclusion of religious affiliation of any kind from its concept of belonging. This does not concern Islam alone, but was made clear more than a century ago in the Republic's response to the Syllabus of Errors: a law was passed preventing priests from mentioning the papal document from the pulpits. Thus was a process established whereby secularity could win important victories over freedom of speech.
[n10: Which has more recently surfaced in the form of censorship of Muslim literature, including, since 1994, the pamphlets of Ahmad Deedat.]
And Catholicism, though the victim of a deep anticlericalism, was at least seen as indigenous. In the republic's more recent travails with Islam, a empathy with Maronites, the dirty war in Algeria and a general official disdain for religion have made the exclusion of Muslimness in the name of Republican laicity particularly natural and emphatic, and Jim Wolfreys' book Republic of Islamophobia offers an impeccable and troubling study of this ideology.
[n11: Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (London, 2018).]
Hence the constant susurration of French media rage against Muslim difference, and the broad-based consensus among liberals that women who wear the niqāb, or Parisian Muslims caught praying together in public places, should be detained by the police.
-Abdal Hakim Murad, "Can liberalism tolerate Islam?" in Traveling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe (Cambridge: The Quilliam Press, 2020), 22-23.