Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (43 page)

43.
Christopher Melchert, “How Hanafism Came to Originate in Kufa and Traditionalism in Medina,”
Islamic Law and Society
6, no. 3 (1999): 340.

44.
Al-Tabari, quoted in Norman A. Stillman,
The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), p. 168.

45.
Jonathan P. Berkey,
The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 129.

46.
Ibn al-Athir,
Al-Kamil
8:307; quoted in Nimrod Hurvitz, “From Scholarly Circles to Mass Movements: The Formation of Legal Communities in Islamic Societies,”
American Historical Review
108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1003–4.

47.
Ibn al-Jawzi,
al-Muntazam fi ta’rikh al-muluk wa al-umam
, vol. 15 (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-ilmiyya, 1992), pp. 125–26; quoted in Eric J. Hanne,
Putting the Caliph in His Place: Power, Authority, and the Late Abbasid Caliphate
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), p. 70.

48.
Ibid.

49.
Hodgson,
Venture of Islam
,
vol. 2, p. 288.

50.
Ibid.

51.
R. H. Lossin, “Iraq’s Ruined Library Soldiers On,”
The Nation
, April 9, 2008.

52.
David McDowall,
A Modern History of the Kurds
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 24.

53.
According to British historian Christopher Catherwood, “Western Europe was fortunate that the Mongols turned back before going on to seize the rest of Europe. One only has to look at the history of Russia, the part of Europe that was conquered by the Mongols, to see the devastating effects that a Mongol invasion could have. Westerners should realize that there was nothing intrinsically better about them, and that if Hulagu had not stopped, the Mongol Empire would have stretched from the Pacific to the Atlantic. We in the West are not in any way superior, simply very lucky!” Christopher Catherwood,
A Brief History of the Middle East
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), p. 112.

54.
David Levering Lewis,
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 202-7.

55.
The Almoravids of North Africa, who arrived in Muslim Spain to help the Muslims against their Christian enemies, soon established their own dominance and imposed their own strict version of Islam. They did not even tolerate the works of Imam al-Ghazali, a Traditionist thinker by any reckoning, and they burned his works publicly in Cordoba in 1109. Menocal,
Ornament of the World
, p. 44.

56.
Estimates on the number of books burnt in Granada in 1499 vary from five thousand to a million. Haig A. Bosmajian,
Burning Books
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), p. 64. Turkish historian Hilmi Ziya Ülken also gives the number as eighty thousand. Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Islam Felsefesi, Kaynakları ve Tesirleri (Istanbul: Is Bankası Books, 1967), p. 317.

57.
Fazlur Rahman,
Islam
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 39–40.

58.
Fazlur Rahman, “The Status of the Individual in Islam,”
Islamic Studies
5, no. 4 (1996): 319–30; in Bryan S. Turner, ed.,
Islam: Critical Concepts in Sociology
, vol. 1 (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), pp. 240, 241.

59.
According to Fazlur Rahman, by emphasizing the religious experience of the individual, Sufism upheld the “individualist trend” in Islam. Ibid., p. 241.

60.
Karen Armstrong,
A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 225.

61.
“Contrary to all appearances, Sufism and the Mu‘tazila share common roots. Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110/728), considered one of the founding fathers of Sufism, is known to have been the teacher of Wasil b. Ata, who is associated with the origins of the Mu‘tazila . . . . [Later on][t]here were some Mu‘tazile who wore the woolen Sufi frock and manifested ascetic traits . . . . However, as the Mu‘tazila and the ahl al-sunna wa‘l-jama‘a developed into separate denominations, with the Sufis by and large being members of the Sunni community, their common heritage was soon lost sight of. Traces of a corps of Sufis within the Mu‘tazila cease to be discernible.” Florian Sobieroj, “The Mutazila and Sufism,” in
Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics,
ed. Frederick De Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 68, 70. Also see Osman Aydınlı, “Ascetic and devotional elements in the Mutazilite tradition: The Sufi Mu‘tazilites,”
The Muslim World
97, no. 2 (2007): 174–89.

62.
“Maturidi’s reasoning is nearer to that of the Mu‘tazila than Ash’ari’s.” Joseph Schacht, “New Sources for the History of Muhammadan Theology,”
Studia Islamica
1 (1953): 35.

63.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam
, vol. 3,
The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 181.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DESERT BENEATH THE ICEBERG

1.
X. de Planhol,
The Cambridge History of Islam
, vol. 2B (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 443.

2.
Francis Robinson, ed.,
The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Catherwood,
Brief History of the Middle East
, p. 92.

3.
Hanefi, “Geleneksel Islam Düsüncesindeki Otoriteryenligin Epistemolojik, Ontolojik, Ahlaki, Siyasi ve Tarihi Kökenleri Üzerine,” Islamiyat, p. 28.

4.
Fernand Braudel makes the same suggestion in
A History of Civilizations
, p. 85.

5.
C. Dodgson,
Tertullian
(Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1842), p. 442; quoted in Rodinson,
Islam and Capitalism
, p. 125.

6.
David Bukay,
From Muhammad to Bin Laden
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), p. 186. I should note that I disagree with this author’s depiction of Islam as incompatible with democracy in toto.

7.
Taha Akyol,
Hariciler ve Hizbullah
, p. 17.

8.
Halim Barakat,
The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 50, 53.

9.
The quote is from Ali al-Wardi, cited in Barakat,
The Arab World
, p. 53.

10.
Hadith reported by both al-Bukhari and al-Muslim, quoted in Ramadan,
Radical Reform
, p. 188.

11.
Qur’an 9:97, Bewley translation, with Arabic words anglicized.

12.
W. Montgomery Watt,
Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980), p. 57.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Clive Foss, “Islam’s First Terrorists,”
History Today,
December 2007.

15.
Küng,
Islam
, p. 223.

16.
Ramadan,
Radical Reform
, p. 53.

17.
Mohammad Hashim Kamali, “The Shari‘a: Law as the Way of God,” in
Voices of Islam
, ed. Vincent J. Cornell (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007), p. 159.

18.
Ramadan,
Radical Reform
, pp. 50–51.

19.
Ibid., p. 192.

20.
Cooperson,
Classical Arabic Biography
, p. 151.

21.
Ibid., p. 113.

22.
Hodgson,
Venture of Islam
, vol. 1, p. 391. Hodgson notes, with reference to another historian, that the term might also mean “redundant speech.”

23.
S. Sabari,
Mouvements Populaires à  Baghdad a l’epoque ‘Abbasside ix–xi siècle
(Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1981), pp. 102–3; referred to in Nimrod Hurvitz, “Schools of Law and Historical Context: Re-Examining the Formation of the Hanbalı Madhhab,”
Islamic Law and Society
7, no. 1 (2000): 50–51.

24.
Michael Cook,
Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 87.

25.
Hodgson,
Venture of Islam
, vol. 1, p. 369. This is most curious, because nothing in the Qur’an bans sculpture; there is indeed a passage in which the “statues—that Prophet Suleyman (King Solomon) had built for himself are mentioned in a positive tone. Qur’an 34:13 (Bewley translation) reads: “They made for him [Suleyman] anything he wished: high arches and statues, huge dishes like cisterns, great built-in cooking vats. ‘Work, family of Dawud, in thankfulness!’ But very few of My servants are thankful.” And if there is any form that can be disapproved through a literal reading of the Qur’an, that is poetry. “And as for poets,” reads Qur’an 26:224 (Bewley translation), referring to the Arab “poets—who mocked the Qur’an, “it is the misled who follow them.”