Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment Gönderileri
Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment kitaplarını, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment sözleri ve alıntılarını, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment yazarlarını, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
Those who see Islam as inherently rejecting religion–state separation may
regard my explanation as pessimistic. For them, if the ulema–state alliance is
the source of Muslims’ problems, then there is no way to solve them, because
the alliance is based on Islam’s essentially non-separationist approach to
religion–state relations. However, my analysis actually explains that the
ulema–state alliance is neither an essential part of the Quran and hadiths nor
a permanent feature of Islamic history. Early Islamic history includes examples
of religion–state separation, and it is a mistake to see Islam as inherently
rejecting such separation. But what might be the cause of this widespread and
by now conventional misunderstanding?
There have been some attempts to include additional sources of knowledge
into this jurisprudential epistemology. Although Ghazali was a leading promoter of this epistemology, particularly its sidelining of reason, he was also a
sophisticated scholar with complex, if not always consistent, ideas. He promoted the idea of the five “higher objectives” of Islamic law. About three
centuries later, the Andalusian jurist Shatibi elaborated these five objectives –
the protection of religion, of life, of intellect, of progeny, and of property – as a
way of making jurisprudence more flexible.18 Sufi shaykhs’ promotion of
mystical knowledge was another attempt to relax the epistemological constraints on Muslim intellectual life.Nonetheless, these efforts have mostly
remained inconsequential in comparison to the dominant epistemology originally formulated by Shafii, which assigns a marginal role to reason and no role to
empirical experience. This epistemology has been a source of the antiintellectualism among the ulema, Islamists, and Sufi shaykhs.
Consequently, Shafii’s jurisprudential method became a dominant epistemology that came to order other aspects of knowledge in the Muslim world.
“If it were admissible to name Islamic culture according to one of its products,”
wrote Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in the 1980s, “then we would call it ‘the
culture of fiqh (jurisprudence)’ in the same sense that applies to Greek culture
when we call it a ‘culture of philosophy’ and contemporary European culture as
a ‘culture of science and technology.’” For Jabri, the rules of jurisprudence
established by Shafii “are no less important in forming Arab-Islamic reason
than the ‘rules of methodology’ posited by Descartes about the formation of
French reason.
Early Muslims actually assigned a more significant and emancipatory role to
reason. Abu Hanifa (699–767), the founder of earliest Sunni school of jurisprudence, acknowledged a jurist’s reason-based judgment as an important
source of jurisprudential authority. Two generations later, however, Shafii
developed the jurisprudential method that prioritized the literal understanding
of the Qur’an and hadiths followed by the consensus of the ulema, limiting the
role of reason to mere analogy. Moreover, with the works of such eminent
ulema as Ghazali, Shafii’s jurisprudential method influenced other fields of
Islamic knowledge such as theology and Sufism. At first, Shafii’s method
was one of the many alternative jurisprudential approaches. By the establishment of the ulema–state alliance starting in the eleventh century, however, it
gradually became the main pillar of Sunni orthodoxy. Ultimately, Hanafis
adopted this methodology, as did Malikis and Hanbalis.
This substantially contributed to decentralization and balance of
power among Western European actors and institutions. Second, universities
started to be established and provided an institutional basis for the gradual
emergence and increasing influence of the intellectual class. Many revolutionary thinkers, from Aquinas to Luther, from Copernicus to Galileo and
Newton, would be university graduates and professors. Third, the merchant
class, which would be the engine of Western European economic break throughs, began to flourish. These new relations among religious, political,
intellectual, and economic classes eventually drove various progressive processes, including the Renaissance, the printing revolution, geographical
explorations, the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, the American and French Revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution. As a result of
these processes, Western Europe surpassed its once-superior competitors, the
Muslim world and China.
Modus Vivendi !
While the Muslim world was losing its intellectual and economic momentum, Western European progress began. In the second half of the eleventh
century, three transformations occurred in Western Europe. First, the Catholic Church and royal authorities tried and failed to dominate one another,
leading to the institutionalization of the separation between them as a modus
vivendi.
Central to Seljuk rule was the expansion of the iqta, an existing system of land
revenue assignment and tax farming designed to bring agricultural revenues
in particular and the economy in general under military control. This policy
weakened the economic capacity and social position of merchants, who had
previously provided funding to both the ulema and philosophers. One Seljuk
grand vizier (minister) also initiated the foundation of a series of madrasas, the
so-called Nizamiyyas, to synthesize competing Sunni schools of jurisprudence
and theology and to produce Sunni ulema who could challenge Shiis, Mutazilis,
and philosophers. A genius scholar, Ghazali, played a key role in this project,
writing multiple influential books criticizing these three “unorthodox” groups.
What happened in eleventh-century Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq was a multidimensional transformation. Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, severely weakened by
the rising Shii states in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and even Iraq, called for the
unification of Sunni Muslims to meet this threat. In order to unify Sunni sultans,
ulema, and masses, two Abbasid caliphs declared a “Sunni creed” in the early
eleventh century; those whose views were deemed to contradict this creed,
including certain Shiis, rationalist theologians (Mutazilis), and philosophers,
were declared to be apostates and faced the threat of execution. This call for
the formation of a Sunni orthodoxy coincided with the rise of the Ghaznavids, a
Sunni military state in Central Asia. Later, the Seljuk Empire (1040–1194)
emerged as an even more powerful Sunni military state that ruled over a large
territory including most parts of Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, and Anatolia.
Sayfa 4
Islamic scholars’ distance from state authorities went back to the midseventh century, when the Umayyads established their dynasty by persecuting
the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants and violently crushing any opposition to
their rule. This violent consolidation of power led to the disenchantment with the
political authority in the eyes of many Islamic scholars. These scholars’ aloofness
with respect to political authorities was reinforced in the late Umayyad and early
Abbasid eras, from the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth century. During this period,
the four main Sunni schools of jurisprudence (fiqh) were founded by independent
scholars – Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafii, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal – all of whom
refused to be state servants. Moreover, these founders were imprisoned and
persecuted by authorities due to their dissenting opinions. Shii religious leaders
faced even more persecution by the political class.
Sayfa 3