Islam, Politics, Anthropology (Osella/Islam, Politics, Anthropology) || Talking Jihad and Piety: Reformist Exertions among Islamist women in Bangladesh
✍ Scribed by Osella, Filippo; Soares, Benjamin
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 601 KB
- Edition
- 1
- Category
- Article
- ISBN
- 1444332953
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Two themes have been prominent in the proliferating scholarship on contemporary Islamic revival or resurgence since the late 1970s. One is jihad (literally 'struggle' , 'exertion' , or 'striving'), usually discussed in its aspect of violent engagement to establish the hegemony of Islam at the state level (e.g. Kepel 1985; 2002; Roy 1994). The other is a tidy distinction between the political and the religious whereby Islamic efforts to secure political power are characterized as merely 'political' 1 and therefore divorced from the truly 'religious' . On this view, traditions within Islam that do not seek political ascendancy, such as Sufism, liberal Islamic modernism, or orthodox pietism, are more genuinely religious or desirable than Islamic movements with explicit political goals.j rai_1548 156.. 174 Recently,these dominant themes have been complicated in several ways.The emergent scholarship introducing these complications focuses, however, less on localized Islamic movements than on globalized forms of Islamist aggression. For example, Faisal Devji (2005) argues that the attention-grabbing violence of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda is grounded in ethical sensibilities similar to those of other global movements such as the environmentalist and peace movements. Yet Devji also continues to subscribe to the conventional view that localized Islamic movements seeking to establish Islamic states belong largely to the realm of 'traditional politics' and so are divorced from religiousethical concerns.
David Cook (2005) broaches the topic of jihad from a religious-studies perspective grounded in meticulous historical research using original Arabic sources. He shows, among other things, that Sufis have participated in armed jihad at different periods of Islamic history, both to expand the territory of Islam and to defend its borders from real and perceived threats. While unsettling certain conventionalities, however, he tends to reproduce others. For example, he argues that jihad in both historical and contemporary Muslim societies has been mostly violent rather than devotional-spiritual. Dismissing as apologists those scholars and activists who have sought to privilege jihad's spiritual aspect over its militant one, he predicts that as non-Arabic-speaking Muslims gain greater access to original Arabic (and hence, in his view, more authentically