What were examples of Muslim secularism and when was this path popular? What European sources did it draw on? What other parallels in world intellectual history can you see?

 

Ataturk thought the caliphate was a silly fiction: the whole Muslim world looked to the caliph as their ruler, the symbol of their unity -- but in fact it had ceased to be a real power after the fourth caliph and in fact it was the Turks who really funded it.

With the caliph gone, Turks could develop the Turkish spirit. Ataturk took other measures to stop “backward” Islam interfering with his nationalist vision of Turkey: he made Turkish, not Arabic the language of the call to prayer; he replaced the last vestiges of Islamic law with European law; he introduced laws to make mosque worship clean and orderly; he replaced Arabic script with Latin script; he made Sunday a weekly holiday; he introduced the brimmed hat instead of the fez, making it more difficult for men to spontaneously pray

A particular target of Ataturk's reforms was the Sufi lodges: like the monasteries and Church in Russia, they had been close to the imperial government and propagators of the religious ideology.

De-secularization shows that certain aspects of Enlightenment modernity have evinced dissatisfaction around the world. While it used to be a truism that religion was a "regressive" force, the oppressive Soviet and Kemalist experience of militant secularism has caused some Russians and Turks to rethink. Religion was violent, but secular nationalism or communism also reached genocidal proportions: the Ottoman empire had been multi-ethnic and had many systems of religion and law. Ethnic tolerance decreased with the rise of Turkish nationalism; the Armenian genocide of 1915, it is interesting to note, was more a product of this than of religious Islamic ideology. Also, after the founding of the Turkish republic there mass expulsions of Greeks and other Christians who had lived for centuries in the tolerant Ottoman empire. Hence the debate about modernity and religion has gone through different phases both in the Islamic and the non-Islamic world. This broader perspective should be kept in mind, and it is worth remembering that both religious and secular regimes have their repressive moments when carried to extremes.

 

4. Where do Salafism and Wahabism fit on the scale of the "six options" outlined at the beginning? (This is not so simple to answer; one might need to mix options).

Movement within the Ottoman empire that was to become highly significant in future history, the movement of Ibn 'abd al-Wahhab, or al-Wahhab

Wahhabism - the sort of Islam that has a particular keenness for harsh and literalistic interpretation of shariah law, partly as a backlash against Western modernity.

As a term, especially in Russia, Wahabism is also practically synonymous with radicalism and terrorism.

Its general logic was typical: since the Prophet, the idea had been widespread that every 100 years a mujaddid, or renewer, would come to the world to renew and purify Islam and make it comprehensible to the believers of the age again.

Al-Wahhab associated Muslim decline not with the colonial West but with non-Arab domination of the Islamic world. He found a sponsor in a tribal chief called Ibn Sa'ud. In the next 150 years, the fortunes of Wahhab and Wahhabi ideology would become linked to Ibn Saud: the latter clan used Wahhabism as a rallying cry to unite the Arabs of Arabia against the Ottomans and this would eventually culminate in the foundation of the independent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

SALAFISM

When oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, Saudi Arabia too turned into a theocratic regime: its religious class, the ulema, practiced the highly repressive and conservative form of Islam put forward by al-Wahhab. With oil wealth, the Saudis could buy off possible dissenting classes and reinforce their Wahhabite theocracy. They also used oil to encourage Islamic conservatism in countries like Egypt: there were links between the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi clerics in the 1960s and onwards, and sometimes the whole Saudi-Egyptian and broader brand of conservative Islam is called Salafism, the Islam of the Salaf or original companions of the Prophet. Once again, Salafism is more accurately seen as neo-traditional: that is, it presents itself as the genuine unbroken tradition of Islam, but in reality it ignores vast amounts of Islam, narrowing down the diversity and pluralism of historical Islam across the world to a small selection of preferred texts and practices, and violently condemning anything and anyone that does not fit in with this impoverished vision of the religion.

 

 

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