Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (40 page)

15.
Rashid Rida, a reformist Muslim of the early twentieth century, critically wrote that “the men of learning (
ulama
), who were charged with the responsibility for maintaining the [Shariah], became corrupted through compromise with temporal authority (
sulta
) and consequently often lent themselves to the support of tyrants.” Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori,
Muslim Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 31.

16.
Fazlur Rahman, Islami Yenilenme, Makaleler II [Islamic Renewal, Articles II], trans. Adil Çiftçi (Ankara: Ankara Okulu, 2000), p. 106.

17.
Haim Gerber,
State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 57.

18.
Haim Gerber,
Islamic Law and Culture, 1600–1840
(Leiden: Brill, 1999). p. 65.

19.
The
mufti
was Khayr al-Din al-Ramli. Gerber,
Islamic Law and Culture
, p. 65.

20.
Ibid.

21.
Feldman, “Does Shariah Mean the Rule of Law?”

22.
Feldman,
Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
, pp. 48–49.

23.
Hodgson,
Venture of Islam
, vol. 1, p. 339.

24.
Franz Rosenthal,
The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 1960), pp. 36–37.

25.
Imam Al-Shatibi’s Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law
, trans. Ahmed al-Raysuni (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2006).

26.
See Fazlur Rahman,
Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

27.
It is not too hard to see how stoning made its way from the Torah, via the Hadiths, to Islam. A Hadith in
Sahih Bukhari
says that in Medina (then a Muslim-Jewish city), Jews brought an adulterer and an adulteress from among them to Muhammad (then the head of state), asking for his verdict. He asked what the Jewish scripture said about adultery, and when he was told that stoning was the rule, then the Prophet of Islam reportedly ordered the execution. For the classical scholars of Islam, this incident made stoning a part of the Sunna (tradition) of the Prophet.

28.
Bernard Lewis,
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p. 30.

29.
Ibid.

30.
Qur’an 2:190.

31.
This is a Hadith in Sunan Abu-Dawud, book 14, number 2608. Also quoted in Gérard Chaliand,
The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age
(Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1994), p. 390.

32.
“[R]adical [jidahist] groups are guilty of taking exceptions listed in the classical texts and making them the rule “for example, with regard to killing innocents.” David Cook,
Understanding Jihad
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 164.

33.
Karen Armstrong,
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World
(New York: Anchor Books, 2001), p. 178.

34.
Ibid., p. 259.

35.
Feldman,
Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
, pp. 46, 47.

36.
Ibid.

37.
Louay M. Safi, “Overcoming the Religious-Secular Divide,” in
Muslim Contributions to World Civilization
, ed. M. Basheer Ahmed et al. (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2005), p. 21.

38.
Qur’an 62:10. For more on the Qur’an, wealth, and trade, see Rodinson,
Islam and Capitalism
, pp. 41–42.

39.
Fernand Braudel,
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
, vol. 2,
The Wheels of Commerce
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 558.

40.
Hamid Hosseini, “Understanding the Market Mechanism before Adam Smith: Economic Thought in Medieval Islam,”
History of Political Economy
27, no. 3 (1995): 544.

41.
Rodinson,
Islam and Capitalism
, p. 51.

42.
Ira Lapidus, Review of
Merchant Capital and Islam
by Mahmood Ibrahim,
American Historical Review
97, no. 1 (February 1992): 257.

43.
Rodinson,
Islam and Capitalism
, p. 8. In addition, one should note that “the contrast between capitalism as a ‘commercial system’ and capitalism as a ‘mode of production’ is schematic and overstated.” Jairus Banaji, “Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism,”
Historical Materialism
15 (2007): 67. The same author (p. 62) explains: “Islam made a powerful contribution to the growth of capitalism in the Mediterranean, in part because it preserved and expanded the monetary economy of late antiquity and innovated business techniques that became the staple of Mediterranean commerce.”

44.
Abraham L. Udovitch,
Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 171.

45.
Joseph Schacht,
An Introduction to Islamic Law
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 78.

46.
Braudel,
Civilization and Capitalism,
vol. 2,
The Wheels of Commerce
, p. 559.

47.
Timur Kuran, “The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East,”
The Journal of Economic History
63, no. 2 (June 2003): 439. Kuran’s argument is that Islamic law failed to update itself after the initial centuries and thus became a roadblock to economic progress.

48.
The theory is that the British common law, which was created by King Henry II of England in the twelfth century and was notably less state-oriented than the civil law tradition in Europe, might be rooted in Islamdom, via a route from Islamic law in North Africa to the Norman law of Sicily and from there to the Norman law of England. See John A. Makdisi, “The Islamic Origins of the Common Law,”
North Carolina Law Review
77
,
no. 5 (June 1999): 1635–1739. For the resemblance to the common law and the Shariah, see Bryan Turner,
Max Weber: From History to Modernity
(London: Routledge, 1993), p. 49.

49.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 167.

50.
Lewis,
Crisis of Islam
, p. 40.

51.
This had something to do with the intellectual revolution that the Qur’an brought to the Orient. Before Islam, Arabs and most other peoples of the region used to perceive nature as a chaos of sacred yet fearful entities. “Snakes and other dangerous animals were worshipped to avert potential harm from them.” The Qur’an reserved sacredness only to God and decreed that man, the highest of His creation, is destined to both subdue and utilize nature and also reflect upon its ways. From this came the spirit for scientific endeavor. Dilnawaz Siddiqui, “Middle Eastern Origins of Modern Sciences,” in
Muslim Contributions to World Civilization
, ed. M. Basheer Ahmed et al., pp. 55–56.

52.
Martin Kramer, “Islam’s Sober Millennium,”
Jerusalem Post
, December 31, 1999.

53.
In the words of a Christian commentator, “[medieval] Muslim thinkers addressed a series of philosophical and theological topics—God and the world, creation out of nothing, the freedom of God, faith and reason”that Christian thinkers would also take up. The resulting dialogue raised the level of sophistication of Western thought and helped Christian thinkers clarify and deepen their own approach to similar issues.” Robert Louis Wilken, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,”
First Things
, January 2009.

54.
Maria Rosa Menocal,
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
(New York: Back Bay Books, 2003), p. 12.

55.
Hodgson,
Rethinking World History
, p. 106.

56.
Jonathan Lyons,
The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), p. 59.

57.
Graham Fuller,
A World Without Islam
(New York: Little, Brown, 2010), p. 247. As Fuller notes, this imbalance in the number of cities occurred despite the fact that the populations of the Middle East and Europe in the ninth century were roughly equal”around thirty million each.

58.
Zachary Karabell,
People of the Book: The Forgotten History of Islam and the West
(London: John Murray, 2007), p. 67.