Salafism, often referred to as ‘Wahhabism’, is widely regarded as a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that fuels Jihadism and subjugates women. Some even lump ISIS and Salafism together—casting suspicion upon the thousands of Muslims who identify as Salafi in the West. After gaining unprecedented access to Salafi women’s groups in London, I discovered the realities behind the myths.
The post 6 common misconceptions about Salafi Muslims in the West appeared first on OUPblog.
Mass sexual violence against women and girls is a constant in human history. One of these atrocities erupted in August 2014 in ISIS-occupied territory and persists to this day. Mainly targeting women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority, ISIS officially reinstituted sexual slavery.
The post Caring about human rights: the case of ISIS and Yazidi women appeared first on OUPblog.
Shari’a in the West is a collection of essays, edited by Rex Adhar and Nicholas Aroney, written by leading scholars from a range of countries, academic fields, and political and faith positions in reaction to some public lectures given by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales regarding the practice of Shari’a Law in the Western world. The excerpt below is taken from John Milbank’s essay ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury: The Man and the Theology Behind the Shari’a Lecture’ and focuses on the Muslim reaction to Dr Williams’s speech.
Over the first two weeks of February 2008 in the United Kingdom, a sizable controversy was stirred up by a lecture given to the Royal Courts of Justice by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, entitled ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective’, and a prior interview which he gave to the BBC Radio 4 news programme, ‘The World at One’. In the course of both the talk and the interview, the Archbishop suggested that certain extensions of Shari’a law in Britain were both ‘unavoidable’ and also desirable from the double point of view of civil cohesion and the defence of the ‘group rights’ of religious bodies.
Public reactions to this pronouncement were both swift and overwhelmingly negative. The Prime Minister distanced himself from the remarks, declaring that there could be but one common law for all in Britain, which must be based upon ‘British values’. Most political leaders from all the main British political parties more or less followed suit. The popular press suggested that the Archbishop was clearly as mad as his hirsute appearance had always led them to suppose, while the quality press by and large accused him of extreme political naivety, obscurity, and misplaced academicism. Certain commentators at the higher end of the media spectrum dissented from the latter verdict, and allowed that Dr Williams had bravely raised issues of great future importance. They also conceded to him that some supplementary elements of the religious law of all three monotheistic traditions were already incorporated by British justice and that further extensions of this accommodation should not be ruled out.
Yet, with near unanimity they declared that he had gone too far in apparently condoning parallel legal systems with an option for people to have certain cases considered either by a civil or religious tribunal. Any such possibility was also condemned by the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Rt Rev Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and this was discretely echoed by the majority of even the Anglican bench of bishops. It was reported that only three per cent of the members of the Synod which helps to govern the Anglican Church in England favoured the Archbishop’s opinion, while up and down the country, on the Sunday following the initial furore, priests found themselves forced in their sermons to make some sort of allusion to it, and were only received well by their congregations if they wholeheartedly confirmed their support for one common law for all people resident in England. The population at large, encouraged by some sections of the media, predictably associated the word ‘Shari’a’ with the chopping-off of hands and the punishment of raped women as fornicators—a reaction which, it seems, the Archbishop’s advisors had predicted and warned him against.
By Geneive Abdo
Over the past several weeks, leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have placed on public display the lessons they have learned as Egypt’s officially banned but most influential social and political movement by trying to pre-empt alarmist declarations that the country is now headed for an Iran-style theocracy.
Members of the venerable Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by an Egyptian school teacher to revitalize Islam and oppose British colonial rule, have so far stated no plans to run a candidate in the next presidential election, and they surprised many by their halting participation in the transitional government, after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. They also have made it clear that they have no desire to seek a majority in the Egyptian parliament, when free elections are held, as promised by Egypt’s current military rulers. In fact, the Brotherhood has voiced its commitment to work with all groups within the opposition – including the secular-leaning youth who inspired the revolution – without demanding a leading role for itself.
These gestures have produced two reactions from Western governments and other international actors heavily invested in Egypt’s future: Some simply see this as evidence that there is no reason to fear the Brotherhood will become a dominant force in the next government.
Others view the Brotherhood’s public declarations with skepticism, saying the promises are designed simply to head off any anxiety over the future influence and scope of the religious-based movement. For example, British Minister David Cameron, who last week became the first foreign leader to visit Egypt after Mubarak’s downfall, refused to meet Brotherhood leaders, saying he wanted the people to see there are political alternatives to “extreme” Islamist opposition. Such simplistic characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood simply echoes Mubarak’s long-term tactic to scare the West into supporting his authoritarian rule as the best alternative to Islamic extremism.
But the future on the horizon for the Brotherhood lies most likely somewhere between these divergent views. Now that Egyptians have freed themselves from decades of restraint and fear, a liberalized party system will logically follow, reflecting the values, aspirations and religious beliefs of Egyptian society as a whole.
What the outside world seems to have missed during the many decades since the Brotherhood was banned is the fact that the movement has never been a political and social force somehow detached from Egyptian society. Rather, the widespread popularity of the movement – which is fragmented along generational lines – can be best explained by the extent to which it reflects the views of a vast swathe of Egyptians.
The Brotherhood has waited patiently for society to evolve beyond the Free Officers movement of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Beginning in the early 1990s, it was clear that Islamization was taking hold in Egypt. In my book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, which documented the societal transformation from a secular to more religious Egypt during the 1990s, I made it clear that the Brotherhood was on the rise. This was in part responsible for the Brotherhood’s strong showing in parliamentary elections in 2005, when they ran candidates as independents because Egyptian law prohibits religiously-based parties to run candidates in elections.
The question now is wh
