Studies in Contemporary Islam Editorial Advisory Board Zafar Ishaq Ansari, International Islamic University Ralph Braibanti, Duke University Frederick M. Denny, University of Colorado, Boulder John L. Esposito, Georgetown University Azizah Y. Al-Hibri, University of Richmond Ali A. Mazrui, State University of New York, Binghamton Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Washington University Sulayman S. Nyang, Howard University Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez, Youngstown State University William B. Quandt, University of Virginia Abdulaziz Sachedina, University of Virginia Tamara Sonn, College of William & Mary John E. Woods, University of Chicago Editors Mumtaz Ahmad, Hampton University Mustansir Mir, Youngstown State University Managing Editor/Book Review Editor James J. Sacco Center for Islamic Studies 421 DeBartolo Hall Youngstown State University One University Plaza Youngstown, Ohio 44555-0001 (330) 941-1625 (330) 941-1600 (fax) http://www.as.ysu.edu/~islamst 2003 Center for Islamic Studies, Youngstown State University This volume is dedicated to Dr. Hafeez Malik, founding director of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies. Studies in Contemporary Islam Volume 5, Numbers 1-2, Spring and Fall 2003 Based on Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies (ACSIS) University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, 2-3 May 2003 Contents Editors Note vii Introduction 1 Tamara Sonn Articles The Rise of a Womanist Movement among Muslim Immigrant Women in Alberta, Canada 5 Earle H. Waugh and Jenny Wannas The Theological-Ideological Dispute Between Imam Warith Deen Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan 37 Clifton E. Marsh The Shiah as a Minority Community in Pakistan and India 49 David Pinault Shii Political Activism in Pakistan 57 Mumtaz Ahmad Pressures on the Muslim Minority in India 73 Theodore P. Wright, Jr. Islam and Minorities: The Case of the BahՒs 83 Christopher Buck The Kurds and the Turkish National State: The Interaction of Nationalism, Secularism, and Islam 107 Michael B. Bishku Israeli-Druze Relations: An Appraisal 137 Jacob Abadi The Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman Empire 161 Faika elik Book Reviews Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World (1) By Tamara Sonn 183 (2) By Asma Afsaruddin 189 Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg, eds., Islam and Democracy in the Middle East 192 By Amidu Olalekan Sanni Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East Enters the Twenty-first Century 196 By Amidu Olalekan Sanni Vojtech Mastny and R. Craig Nation, eds., Turkey Between East and West: New Challenges for a Rising Regional Power 199 By Cemil Aydin Negin Nabavi, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the Dilemma of Authenticity 201 By Jason B. Mohaghegh By Daniel L. Smith-Christopher Majid Fakhry, Averroes (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works and Influence Majid Fakhry, Al-Farabi, Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works and Influence 234 By Oliver Leaman Islam and Science: Journal of Islamic Perspectives on Science 235 By Brendan Minogue Gary B. Ferngren, Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction 240 By Muzaffar Iqbal Attilio Petruccioli and Khalil K. Pirani, eds., Understanding Islamic Architecture 244 By Stephanie Smith Sarah Louise Baker, From Utah to Eternity: A Mormon-Muslim Journey 249 By Maysam J. al Faruqi Gordon D. Newby, A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam 254 By Mohamed Taher S. Frederick Starr, ed., Xinjiang: Chinas Muslim Borderland 206 By Dirk Richard Morton Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain 208 By Sheila McDonough Naveed S. Sheikh, The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States 212 By Robert D. Lee Just World Trust, Human Wrongs: Reflections on Western Global Dominance and its Impact Upon Human Rights. Hashim Makaruddin, ed., Globalisation and the New Realities: Selected Speeches of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia 216 By Keith Lepak Joseph A. Camilleri and Chandra Muzaffar, eds., Globalisation: The Perspectives and Experiences of the Religious Traditions of Asia Pacific 221 By David Porter Farish A. Noor, ed., Terrorising the Truth: The Shaping of Contemporary Images of Islam and Muslims in Media, Politics and Culture 224 By David Porter M. J. Akbar, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity 230 Editors Note Dr. Tamara Sonn, Wm. R. Kenan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, and a member of the advisory board of Studies in Contemporary Islam, joins us in editing this special volume on religious and ethnic minorities. Most of the papers included in this volume were originally presented at a conference on Islam and minority rights held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, 2-3 May 2003, under the auspices of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies. Dr. Sonns contribution to the preparation of this volume is greatly appreciated; we are especially grateful to her for writing an introduction to the volume. Introduction * Tamara Sonn The twentieth annual conference of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies (ACSIS) was an important milestone. ACSIS is a unique organization made up of scholars interested in the study of Muslim societies throughout the world. Promoting the highest standards of scholarship, ACSIS continues to provide a forum for students and scholars of Islam from a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, philosophy, history, political science, and literature. Dealing with the Muslim world as a whole (rather than just one region, such as the Middle East or South Asia), ACSIS reflects the complexity and dynamism of Islam across time and cultures. In its twenty-year history, ACSIS has grown from a small group of dedicated scholars to an international organization whose annual conferences attract scholars and diplomats from all over the world. Much of the credit for this growth belongs to Dr. Hafeez Malik of Villanova University, founding director of ACSIS. Without his support and that of Villanova University, which continues to host ACSIS meetings on alternate years, ACSIS would have remained a fond dream of scholars in the field of Islamic studies. This volume is dedicated to Dr. Hafeez Malik. The 2003 ACSIS conference focused on an area in Islamic studies that is of critical and growing importance: the status of minorities. The question of minorities is important for two reasons. More Muslims than ever before are living as members of minority communities; currently, some one-third of Muslims worldwide live * Tamara Sonn is Wm. R. Kenan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary. outside of the Muslim majority world. In addition, the status of minorities within the Muslim world is receiving greater attention than ever before. While minority rights have traditionally been protected under Islamic law, the turmoil caused by postcolonial conditions has resulted in numerous strains in that regard. The ACSIS conference, therefore, included papers on both aspects of minority issues. This volume presents a sampling of those papers. The first two papers included herein deal with Muslim minority communities in North America. Earle Waugh and Jenny Wannas, in The Rise of a Womanist Movement among Muslim Immigrant Women in Alberta, Canada, present the results of five years of research among Muslim women in a variety of immigrant communities. Their analysis indicates a trend toward Muslim womens empowerment that accommodates novel living conditions yet affirms traditional values. Interestingly, the emerging discourse transcends ethnic and sectarian divisions within the immigrant community. Clifton Marsh, in The Theological-Ideological Dispute Between Imam Warith Deen Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan, presents an analysis of ideological debates of two Muslim minority groups living in the United States and finds an ongoing effort at cooperation and development. On the issue of religious minorities in the Muslim world, David Pinault, in The Shiah as a Minority Community in Pakistan and India, explores the interaction of various minority Shii communities in South Asia. Looking at the practice of muharram processions in a number of locales, he observed levels of accommodation varying with the nature of the majority population. Interestingly, he found a high level of Sunni-Shii cooperation where both groups constitute minorities. Mumtaz Ahmad, in Shii Political Activism in Pakistan, offers a trenchant analysis of Sunni-Shii interaction in Pakistan. He demonstrates that, until the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Pakistans Shii community remained part of the mainstream political process. Rivalries between foreign states and the exclusively Sunni Islamization program of the countrys former president, Zia-ul-Haq, combined to encourage tendencies toward exclusivism and centralization in Pakistans Shii community. Theodore Wright, in Pressures on the Muslim Minority in India, finds a generally pessimistic picture. He concludes that Muslims in India are at a crossroads requiring difficult choices affecting their economic and political futures. Christopher Bucks Islam and Minorities: The Case of the BahՒs finds that conditions for BahՒs in Iran have fluctuated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and remain an important test case for those advocating tolerance. An example of another type of minority in the Muslim worldethnicis discussed by Michael Bishku in The Kurds and the Turkish National State: The Interaction of Nationalism, Secularism, and Islam. He notes that international politicsincluding the Turkish bid for inclusion in the European Union and the instability in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasionhave had a significant impact on the status of the Kurds. Jacob Abadi, in Israeli-Druze Relations: An Appraisal, presents a little-studied areathat of an Islamic minority community within Israel. He finds that the integration of Druze into Israeli society has been a difficultand unfinishedprocess, although their status compares favorably with that of Druze in neighboring countries. Finally, Faika elik, in The Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman Empire, examines another examplethat of a community that is both a religious and an ethnic minority. Her paper fills an important gap in scholarship on the status of minorities, with particular stress on historical development. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:5-36 The Rise of a Womanist Movement among Muslim Immigrant Women in Alberta, Canada Earle H. Waugh * Jenny Wannas The Muslim community in Alberta is one of the oldest in western Canada, with records of Muslim peddlers and early migrants dating to the early 1900s.1 While a number of studies exist about the community as a whole, or some aspects of its development, little in-depth analysis has been focused on Muslim women per se. This paper is a modest beginning to such an enterprise.2 This research was supported by the Prairie Centre for Immigration and Integration, a Canadian center of excellence sponsored by the federal government. It was conducted within Alberta from 1996 to 2001, and it set out to determine how Muslim women perceived their roles within Albertan culture and within their communities. The primary vehicle of data gathering was a questionnaire that covered such areas as piety, activism, work habits, home activities, relationships to children and spouses, and relationships with the mosque. The questionnaire was * Earle H. Waugh is Professor Emeritus of Divinity at the University of Alberta. Jenny Wannas is a member of the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. 1Earle Waugh, Reducing Distance: A Muslim Congregation in the Canadian North, in American Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 572-611. 2Ibid. See also Earle H. Wuagh, Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, and Regula Burkhardt Qureshi, eds., Muslim Families in North America (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1991). supplemented by conversations held with twenty-four women volunteers over the five-year period (fictitious names are used for the women cited in this paper). Four different questionnaires were given, one to each of the following groups: married Muslim immigrant women, divorced Muslim mothers, single Muslim women, and converts; it was decided, in the interest of manageability, not to examine Muslim women born in Canada. The questionnaires were made available to any Sunni, Shii, or Ismaili woman who wished to participate, but their completion was often made difficult by their size and language. Nevertheless, with about 150 copies completed across the spectrum of groups, some interesting trends have become apparent. For the purposes of this article, we will confine ourselves to the material gathered on married immigrant women. While the findings of this paper are tentative, several of the interesting issues that have surfaced are of major theoretical concern. We will, therefore, break down our analysis into two sections. Section 1 will address prominent sociocultural issues, giving some consideration to the perception of Canadian society by the immigrant women as well as to the changes that have occurred in the community owing to globalprincipally, post-9/11events that have put the spotlight on their religion. Section 2 will deal with what the researchers regard as a surprising trend: the development of a Muslim womanist perspective among those surveyed. We will conclude with a brief reflection on the significance of these trends for future study. Section 1: Sociocultural Perspectives of Married Muslim Immigrant Women in Alberta In Canada, the experiences of Muslim women within the Islamic community are extremely varied; similarly, their attitudes about their country of origin differ. The experiences and adaptation patterns of the majority of these women reveal how their interpretation of the Quran and their attempts to master the Canadian system affect their degree of isolation. Research within the field carried out shortly after the Gulf War by Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban and Baha Abu-Laban suggested that the Arab-Canadian community was moving toward isolation within Canadian society. Moreover, Michael W. Suleiman, in his article entitled Islam, Muslims and Arabs in America: The Other of the Other of the Other, suggested that stereotyping had created several levels of otherness for Arab Muslims and that little headway had been made in changing the situation.3 Our research does not entirely support these findings, at least in regard to the respondents we questioned, 80 percent of whom were Arab Muslims. Rather, the responses of Muslim women and interviews with a variety of participants reveal that the experience of isolation varies with socioeconomic class, with the older or younger generation, and with ethnic or national origin. These three factors affect the degree of isolation experienced, and even the definition of it. Also, the evidence of our research suggests that, despite geographical isolation in the city, many Muslim women who are socially segregatedthat is, those living in communities dominated by Arabs and Muslimsare articulate activists for the Arab-Islamic cause. Furthermore, mainstream media reports about the social status of women in Islamic societies, as well as such ongoing crises as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Iraq situation since 2003, serve as a strong social impetus for Muslim womens activism and furnish powerful Islamic womanist arguments. Consequently, many Muslim women feel the need to become well-versed in Islam, cultivating the ability to respond to growing criticism, in North America or in the West generally, of Islam as a religion that oppresses women. In fact, the questionnaires yielded data on diverse subjectssuch as Muslim womens social life, child-rearing trends within Muslim families, and the creation of hybrid identitiesto which these factors bear a direct relationship. This 3Baha Abu-Laban and Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, Arab-Canadian Youth in Immigrant Family Life, in Arabs in America: Building a New Future, ed. Michael Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1999), 113-128. See also Michael Suleiman, Islam, Muslims, and Arabs in America: The Other of the Other of the Other, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19 (1999), 1:33-48. section will deal particularly with the interactions and influences of these three factors on the practical, day-to-day lives of Muslim women, also paying some attention to the theory that supports their positions. Cognitive Dissonance among Respondents Past research conducted by Waleed Mustapha on Arab Muslims in education appropriates the theory of cognitive dissonance to examine the value conflict Muslims experience within Canadian society and its educational system. According to founder Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable state of tension resulting from the contradiction between ones belief system and ones actual lived experiences. In order to reduce cognitive dissonance, individuals may avoid experiences that cause dissonance or increase experiences causing consonance. Mustapha has used the word doctrinal dissonance to refer to the specific religious experience of dissonance of Muslim Canadians.4 We may illustrate doctrinal dissonance by referring to an example in which religious values clashed with secular values. A Muslim youth is invited to attend a birthday party during which potentially forbidden foods, such as meat hors doeuvres, are served. The youth is faced with refusing to eat these foods because of the likelihood that pork or pork products might be within them. Rather than offend the host, the Muslim youth may decline to go to the party or may choose to state that s/he is on a diet. Such is cognitive dissonance, since the doctrinal affirmations raise issues of dissonance with the Canadian value system, leading to varieties of tensions. Our findings indicated that cognitive dissonance was part of the adaptation process in Canada. They reveal how the experiences of Muslim women and the dissonant tensions they encounter may 4Waleed Mustapha, The Islamic Cultural Paradigm, in Multicultural and Intercultural Education: Building Canada, ed. Sonia V. Morris (Calgary: Detseling Enterprises Ltd., 1987), 207-213. vary according to the three main factors signaled abovethose of socioeconomic status, generational cohorts, and ethnicity/country of origin. Furthermore, this cognitive dissonance plays out at least in two ways. First, Muslim women of higher economic status are more likely to have the capability of educating themselves and learning how to master the Canadian system. Many of them were used to upper-class living in their country of origin, and they occupy a privileged place among their associates in Canada. Some of them have raised their families and, for the most part, have seen the transition from one generation to the next. They all reflect the will to preserve Islamic values, which they see as compatible with their increased stature as they proceed through the age ranks. This concern for preservation was a key ingredient in Regula Qureshis study over a decade ago, and, for the most part, it seems to have been met through a variety of strategies in the Canadian context, including the importation of acceptable spouses and through conversions among Canadians.5 These women experience cognitive dissonance with Canadian society, albeit to a lesser degree than those of lower socioeconomic status do, perhaps because, as they age, they have built extended families and friendship networks in Canada. For some of them, there is an increased cognitive dissonance with fundamentalist Muslim women, especially those who choose to react openly and negatively to Canadian society. Some of these established women have little in common with those women who want to blame Western society for everything since the former have had a measure of success within the very society that is castigated. They also know very well the problems that women face in Muslim countries, especially in those countries with fundamentalist regimes, and they are not about to trade what they have achieved in Canada for what they believe is an inferior situation in the countries from which they come. One way they handle this dissonance is by forming social groups of women from 5Regula Qureshi, Marriage Strategies among Muslims from South Asia, in Muslim Families in North America, 185-213. their socioconomic class so that they can discuss relevant issues. Some, but not all, of these women join groups like the Muslim Womens Association of Canada and address broad, liberal policy issues within the Canadian context, of which their sisters who are recent immigrants would have little comprehension. Second, Muslim women who belong to the older, first-generation immigrants are able, because of their financial privilege and awareness of the system, to overcome most of the economic difficulties encountered by the more recent, less tuned-in immigrants. Nevertheless, this is not always the case, for some recent immigrants with financial means also reflect some of this trend but without the same convincing depth. Rather, the results indicate that there is a less significant correlation among wealthy immigrant women and cognitive dissonance for the very real reason that they do not have to work outside the home to sustain the family. And while socioeconomic status is a central force in easing the pressures encountered by first-generation Muslim Canadians, we should not assume a lack of compensatory features for similarly economically privileged immigrant women. Indeed, as Daisy H. Dwyer points out in the Moroccan case, Muslim women have a high degree of adaptability, developing networks and bilateral connections best suited to their needs. They are not bound by formal ideologies.6 In fact, what seems to hold in the Alberta case is that even recent immigrant women from lower socioeconomic classes, or those with a more modest educational background, reduce cognitive dissonance considerably because the local community into which they move is a tightly knit Arab-Muslim environment. Sister Sayyida from this group responded quite openly to a query about the formal requirements of Islam and about the dissonance felt by these women: We are freer here because we can go to the four books of law (the four Sunni legal schools) and decide which one appeals to us, then ask the imam to apply that 6Daisy H. Dwyer Women, Sufism, and Decision Making in Moroccan Islam, in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). law. It gives us greater flexibility than back home where we are bound by the local law. Thus, while there are areas of cognitive dissonance, there are also factors that make life in Canada attractive. Many do not feel the need to interact much with the larger Canadian society. This gives them considerable stability and less tension with Canadian culture. What also became clear was that women working outside the home or working in the presence of male Canadians, which might traditionally be held to be a potential problem area, is better handled by older, first-generation women. This is probably because they and their families have adapted to Canadian culture and have less difficulty negotiating relationships with Canadians in the office or in stores. These women can present well-articulated arguments for Islam. Such ability illustrates both their mastery of the Canadian discourse procedures, on the one hand, and, on the other, their strong religious commitment. These women know very well the social lines in the sand that govern relationships of working males and females in Canadian society. As Fatima, a working first-generation lady, put it: Office relationships today are very much shaped by the feminist and women s rights movements, and most people have a level of banter that is acceptable, but we all know when the line has been crossed; what I like is that women office workers play an important role in defining that line. Knowing that I am Muslim also is a controlling factor. Moreover, with respect to intergenerational differences, it seems reasonable that Muslim women who are from second or third generations have been more accustomed to the Canadian way of life than those from the first. Adaptation in this context refers to the ability to reach a happy medium between two often opposing cultural value systems through a fusion of the cultural and religious values into one belief system. Second-and third-generation Muslim women are also not as likely as first-generation Muslim Canadians to have strong ties to the Middle East, nor are they likely to know their native language well, whether it be Arabic, Indonesian, Farsi, or some other language. Indeed, third-and fourth-generation Canadian Muslim women are more likely to experience a feeling of widespread dissonance with contemporary Islamic societies owing to the vast changes brought on by the globalization process. The Americanization of urban capitals in Arab and Islamic nations is, therefore, an influential factor in Muslim womens adaptation to Canada as well as in their child-rearing practices. Indeed, returning to ones country of origin for a period of years was the traditional way of effectively dealing with gender issues specifically, with the honor and shame structure for adolescent girls in North America. Instead, because of the overwhelming influence of globalization, many Muslim families are increasingly dependent on local Islamic communities in this process as the urban capitals of the Arab and Muslim countries are seen as succumbing to the same pressures that are a concern to Muslim mothers in Canada. As one parent stated in response to a question regarding returning to ones country of origin, where children might be raised in a more Islamic environment: Are you kidding? Go back there? The problems there with youth are getting worse than here. Over there they are trying to imitate the worst behaviors of the youths here. This familys experience indicates that returning to the country of origin is no longer a guarantee of a stable, traditional religious and/or cultural way of life. Moreover, many parents feel that they themselves must readapt to their country of origin. In the words of a parent who has immigrated to Canada, Although I lived back home most of my life, going back is a real effort where even cab drivers and street vendors notice from my accent that Ive been away and Im treated like a foreigner. Post-9/11 and the Global Concerns of Muslim Women and Mothers Responses within the community since 11 September 2001 illustrate the growing concern among Muslim women about their sons. This is in contrast to the traditional concerns in North America about daughters. They are afraid that their sons will be perceived as terrorists. Many Muslim women reported that, even before the events of 9/11, they felt that their sons were under the watchful eyes of society. Indeed, some community leaders had mentioned the increasing numbers of males who were ending up in prisons. Increasingly, since the events of 9/11and as related research conducted by Jenny Wannas showsmale youths have become increasingly frustrated at (1) the biased mainstream media reports, which, they feel, directly leads to their denigration in societal spheres and (2) the ongoing events in Israel-Palestine, which, they feel, remains unnoticed by the international community.7 They see this as a process of denigration of Islam. This demonization of the Islamic tradition in the media has, according to this research, led to the increasing likelihood of young Arab-Muslim males committing politically motivated crimes. These new global pressures are forcing many in the Islamic community to raise Muslim-Canadians awareness of their rights as citizens. Nevertheless, many Muslim mothers fear that their sons will be perceived as sympathizers of terrorism, and this fear has caused much anxiety and has led to the refocusing of gender concerns more toward male behavior and discourse than toward gender concerns of honor and shame. Such experiences raise the issue of the country of origin in the worldview of the Muslim woman. In this third area, we were concerned with cognitive dissonance leading to the hope of return to the country of origin. As the following table indicates, the majority of Muslim women participants in our research wish to visit their country of origin (92.5 percent). Conversely, only 50 percent of the respondents wish to return and live permanently in their countries of origin. The need to return home no longer seems attractive. Indeed, it may be seen as fruitless for Muslim families who wish to raise their children in an environment that can 7Jenny Wannas, Globalization and the Reconciliation of Dissonant Hybrid Identities: A Case Study of Canadian Arab Youth (PhD diss., Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2003). guarantee services such as health care and education. As one mother, Madiha, mentioned during an interview: If you dont have money in our countries you have no life; you beg. Here, if you have no money at least you can apply for social services. . . . There is no future for my children back home, so that is why, despite the difficulties of raising children here, I would still rather stay here. But I wish to visit my country of origin some day. Here are two questions that illustrate this trend: I want to visit my homeland soon. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 37 2 1 40 Cumulative Percent 92.5 5.0 2.5 100.0 I wish to return and live permanently in my country of origin. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 20 8 12 40 Cumulative Percent 50.0 20.0 30.0 100.0 Country of origin is of special significance within this research context. Generally speaking, Islamic nations that have been in the news because of 9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, oil, or war seem to be constantly challenged to respond to stereotypes, or, worse still, hate material in the media. Because a significant majority of the Alberta Islamic community is of Lebanese origin and often have families involved in some way with the Israel question, the religious community is highly politicized. Some of this is due to Middle Eastern wars and political conflicts involving Lebanon and the large number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The events of 9/11 have served to increase the politicization of the Arab-Islamic community in Alberta. For example, members of the Islamic community and the World Lebanese Cultural Union have initiated a Media Coalition Committee to respond to stereotyping against Muslims. From the Muslim perspective, some media reports have become almost overtly racist since 9/11. Certainly, media exposure of the Islamic nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt complicates the adaptation process of recent immigrants from these nations. Consider this selection from an editorial in the Southam publication, the Edmonton Journal (2 April 2002): Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. . . . The conflicts within Islam [have also been] more numerous than those in any other civilization, including tribal conflicts in Africa. . . . But even by the barbaric standards of the Arab Middle East, Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian terrorist organizations that operate freely under his writ have hit new lows. Thus, Muslim women from nations of ongoing conflict and/or from those nations that are in the public eye for a reason like the new war on terrorism are more likely to be politicized than others. The effects of this ongoing conflict-ridden situation serve to complicate adaptation processes among new immigrants to Canada. While being concerned about relatives and friends in their countries of origin, Canadian Muslims from war-torn nations must also find employment, secure housing, and seek education for themselves and/or their children. Additionally, the divide between these highly politicized Muslim Arabs and the larger secular, mainstream society may be growing because of the increasing importance attached by these Muslim families to news coverage from the Middle East. Scores of Canadian-Arab families now have access to mainstream media coverage from the Middle East, and from an Arab/Islamic perspective at that. This has made life for many Muslim immigrant women considerably easier. Research conducted by Wannas reveals the instrumental role of satellite news coverage from the Middle East. Her research illustrates how Arab Muslim women are increasingly cross-checking the information they receive from mainstream media networks, such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) or Cable News Network (CNN), with sources such as Al-Jazeera or the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC).8 These satellite television programs are providing young Muslim women and mothers with enough information to rebut arguments by coworkers and colleagues in mainstream society. Hence, youth growing up in the Islamic diaspora are able to access commonsense notions of their parents perspectives on wars, conflicts, and political events in the Middle East, thereby enabling the youths of this generation to understand better their parents ethnoreligious, political, and cultural values. Consequently, many Muslim women receive their daily news coverage of world events through an Islamic perspective, which qualitatively differs from the mainstream media perspective in North America; as such, these women do not trust mainstream media coverage unless it is verified through other sources. The influence of mainstream media versus that of alternative media is, therefore, an important factor to consider when examining the Muslim womens lived experience and their perspectives. Section 2: Shift to a Feminism/Womanism Position among Muslim Immigrant Women One other factor that appeared important during this research on Muslim immigrant women was the movement toward coalescence that had ramifications for their position both in Canadian society and in their own community. The role and status of Muslim women in this study reveals a womanist perspective on Islam. As such, these Muslim women have rejected feminist interpretations or movements within Islam. For them, such feminist discourse is seemingly far removed from the contemporary issues that they must encounter and is, indeed, perceived as an extension of a hegemonic neocolonial agenda. For example, Muslim women actively make connections with women outside their community for strategic and other reasons. In light of the responses made to the questions listed below, for Muslim women, both religion and 8Ibid. ethnicity become means for establishing themselves within the Canadian context. As an Edmonton area social worker, who requested anonymity, said: I have a lot of Muslim women clients living here and trying to adapt to the culture but still seem to have their actions and ways of commun ication still stuck in the old ways of how it is back in their homelands. I tell them if you want to live in Canada successfully you cannot afford to have one foot here and foot back in the Middle East. I feel most at ease with Muslim women from the same ethnic origin. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 32 3 5 40 Valid Percent 80.0 7.5 12.5 100.0 I feel most at ease with Muslim women in general. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 31 3 6 40 Valid Percent 77.5 7.5 15.0 100.0 The connections to Islam highlight the use of religion to maintain stability and to adapt to Canadian society. We found that religion plays a central role in the identity of Muslim women in Alberta, not only as an anchor of their identity as people, but also as a strategy for confronting Canadian indifference or antipathy. Thus, one way of perceiving the movement toward a feminist/womanist perspective is to see it as a reinforcement or, even more pertinent, as allowing for the further successful defense of the position of women in Islam to non-Muslim Canadians. A young Lebanese Muslim woman stated to Wannas (a Coptic Egyptian-Canadian) that Christian or Druze Lebanese women do not encounter the same damaging stereotypes as Muslim women do. Fatimah, a Palestinian Muslim woman stated: You as a Christian can hide and say you are not Muslim. But I have the double whammy challenge of stating that not only am I Arab, but I am Muslim, too. The religious issue thus moves beyond a faith tradition into the realm of identity and difference within the Canadian mosaic and becomes a defining element for Muslim women as they deal with others. However, this is not the only emphasis present. Once Muslim women move beyond the local ethnic enclave, they show a remarkably broad relational network, including both immigrant Muslim and local Canadian associates: I have an equal number of local Canadian and immigrant Muslim friends. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 16 17 7 40 Cumulative Percent 40.0 42.5 17.5 100.0 I spend more time in social gatherings with other immigrant Muslims than with local Canadians. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 27 5 8 40 Cumulative Percent 67.5 12.5 20.0 100.0 The above tables demonstrate that, while the group of Muslim women who have and the group of Muslim women who do not have both local Canadian and immigrant Muslim women as friends are almost equal in size (40 percent and 42 percent), it is easier for the majority of women from both the groups to spend more time in social gatherings with other Muslim immigrant women. In fact, many Muslim women made it clear that, often, when interacting with local Canadian women, everything they are and everything they believe constantly seems to be called into question. While a few took the opportunity to try and raise awareness of Islam among local Canadian women, this was only perceived favorably by those local Canadian women who showed an interest in the religion, for, otherwise, such an approach seemed more like proselytizing or defending ones beliefs. The situation seems less troublesome for wealthier Muslim women, who are quick to discern those local Canadians with whom they can or cannot have such conversations. This seems reasonable, considering the language difficulties many Muslim women must overcome in order to relate to local Canadians. What is remarkable is that such a high number have local Canadian friends at all, since cognitive dissonance would suggest that it would be easier for them to relate solely with other Muslims. These findings demonstrate that Muslim women of this group not only vary their social gatherings, but also cultivate social connections with non-Muslim Canadians; any cognitive dissonance they sense is offset by other factors, such as the ability to articulate arguments against Western conceptions based on exposure to Arab and Islamic news channels. Another factor may be that they have found a network of female friends who would support them as local Canadian women would, so broadening their network becomes another strategy for adapting themselves to Canada. Such findings illustrate the beginnings of an emphasis on womans networks, on a sisterhood, with links beyond the Muslim community to a fund of support among local Canadian women at large. We have identified this as a Muslim feminist/womanist component to immigrant adaptation, and while the above data relate to social gatherings, interviews further indicated that the women like to spend more time with their coreligionist women, who, regardless of their background, have had similar life experiences and have faced similar challenges. It might be fruitful to examine in some depth the theoretical implications of this trend. Should it be conceived of in feminist or womanist terms? When we first encountered this trend, we assumed that the experiences of Muslim women in Alberta could be contextualized within an Islamic feminist framework. Our findings, however, demonstrate that the experiences of Albertas Muslim women fit far better into the womanist theoretical framework. A brief examination of the theoretical options of Islamic feminism, fundamentalist feminism, and the Muslim womanist movement will demonstrate why we hold this view. Islamic Feminism Coined by female Muslim scholars in the West, the term Islamic feminism has, by and large, referred to the attempts made by Muslim women to attain equality with their Muslim brethren within the context of Islam. Islamic feminists believe that, through the ijtihad process of independent interpretation or reinterpretation of the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet, or Hadith, Muslim women can effectively respond to and influence the Islamic edicts or fatwas imposed upon them by male Muslim scholars. Islamic feminist theories such as those described by Evelyn Shakir hold that the oppression of women in Arab and Islamic societies has erroneously been attributed to religion; they, instead, link this phenomenon to cultural, rather than to religious, norms, and especially to the patriarchal traditions endemic in Arab-Muslim communities.9 One example is the custom militating against women attending mosques on Fridays, which contradicts the Islamic concept of the ummah as well as the lifestyle of the Prophets wives. Indeed, Fatima Mernissi claims that the active participation of women in all spheres of Islamic society is sanctioned by the ijtihad process, which teaches respect for human intelligence by drawing on practical individual experience in applying religious law. She argues that the participation of women in ijtihad in Arab-Muslim societies does not occur on a large scale because despotic political regimes suppress accurate interpretations of Islam and encourage those that promote reactionary trends such as those present in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.10 The success of the feminist approach in the Middle East, like the influence of women in religious spheres, is limited. This seems to be due to the fact that proponents of the feminist approach are 9Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab American Women in the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). 10Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975). See also Mernissi, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1991). seen as propagating a neocolonial agenda. Within the West, according to our findings, Islamic feminism seems preoccupied with responding to criticism by Western feminists as well as those whom we have identified as womanists.11 For example, Islamic feminists charge their Western feminist counterparts with mistakenly perceiving as oppressive an empowering symbol of gender identity, such as the veil, regardless of the meaning behind it for Muslim women. As one young Edmonton Muslim put it, I dont lose my brains just by putting on a scarf, so why should the veil be regarded as oppressive? It is only because the [Western] feminists regard it as a symbol of oppression. They dont understand its significance for us. It is precisely because of such discourse that Islamic feminists are perceived by Muslim women as being more preoccupied with justifying feminist theory than with actually describing the lived experiences of Muslim women. Another problem raised by the women we interviewed was that Islamic feminist theory seems too heavily embedded with academic discourse and pays little attention to the day-to-day lives of Muslim women in North America, in the West, or even back home in the Middle East. Until now, the local Muslim women held that there was little, if any, evidence suggesting that Muslim women, whether in the East or West, have used Islamic feminism as a theory to successfully enhance their positions. Rather, most women with whom we spoke regard Islamic feminism as an alien concept. Although Margot Badran argues that Islamic feminism represents a medium useful to Muslim women in the West, a medium they can use to negotiate between Western and Islamic values, our interviews with women in Alberta indicated a strong belief on the part of the women that Islam should not have to justify itself to the West.12 The women believe that mediation is a 11Shahrzad Mojab, Theorizing the Politics of Islamic Feminism, Feminist Review, 69 (2001), 1:124-146. 12Margot Badran, Islamic Feminism: Whats in a Name? Al-Ahram Weekly, issue no. 569, 17-23 January 2002, http://ahram.org.eg/weekly. See also her Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Such arguments show how Badran seems to overlook three main contradictions form of rejection of Islam. So, while many of these women challenge the secular values of the West, they will adopt those valuessuch as using technology like the Internet or satellitesthat will enhance their Islamic concerns, but they reject the application of Western secular analyses to the human situation. Religion, they contend, must set the guidelines for social life. Hence, one of the basic assumptions of the whole feminist agenda is not accepted by these women. Islamic Fundamentalist Sisterhood Some scholars in the field of international political affairs define Islamic fundamentalist movements as reactive phenomena to the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of rapid modernization and neoliberal globalization taking place in Middle Eastern nations.13 The political strength of the fundamentalist movements has been supported and enhanced by an institutional construction, the Fundamentalist Muslim Sisterhood movement, in her conceptualization of Islamic feminism. First, even while contending that Islamic feminism embraces both secular and religious Muslims and is a product of neither East nor West, Badran insists that the entire discourse of Islamic feminism originated in and is circulated in the English language, not in Arabic. That English language is the language in which Islamic feminist discourse has been most fruitful demonstrates the limited application of the theory to Muslim women. Second, while stating that Islamic feminism includes the religious and the secular, Badran fails to mention how the interpretation of Islam differs according to secular or religious viewpoints. Finally, while the rereading and reinterpreting of the Quran is a duty for all Muslims, male and female, Islamic womanists do not attempt, for example, to become imams. This is simply not seen as their religious duty. Islamic feminists such as Badran do not take into consideration Muslim womens varying levels of education, familiarity with the English language, and perception of, or degree of, religiosity in arguing for a universal Muslim feminist ideology. 13Helen Hardacre, The Impact of Fundamentalisms on Women, the Family, and Interpersonal Relations, in Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, ed. Martin E. Marty and Scott Appleby, vol. 2, The Fundamentalism Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 313-340. See, in the same book, Majid Tehranian, Fundamentalist Impact on Education and the Media: An Overview. See also Joel Benin and Joe Stork, eds., Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). which embraces conservative values. The byword of these values has been the wearing of the hijab (complete covering of the hair with a headdress)or, for some, the burqaand gender segregation in all spheres of society. Historian and sociologist William H. McNeill remarks that desperate economic conditions are the prime factors swelling the Islamic fundamentalist sisterhood ranks, noting the correlation between the breakdown of the peasant society that is heavily dependent on women and the increasing capitalist exploitation of labor through the implementation of price controls.14 These issues have led to the increased power and influence of fundamentalist groups. The Muslim sisterhood provides a critical space for women in the Arab-Islamic world to voice their concerns and to become respected leaders in communities, and even in political parties or in Islamic governments, such as that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalist sisterhood movements in the Middle East, while touching on many of the sociopolitical sensitivities of the Muslim ummah worldwide, cannot itself be applied to the specific experiences and challenges of Muslim women within the North American context. For example, Muslim women in Alberta who choose to mimic the fundamentalist dress and mannerisms of Muslim fundamentalist sisters in the Middle East, actually remain isolated from the rest of the Muslim women. In fact, the majority of the Islamic community in Canada regards their ultraconservative demeanor as inappropriate to Islamic life in North America. The Womanist Alternative As one would expect, Albertan Muslim women categorically reject Western feminism. What was surprising, however, was the castigation of Islamic feminism. As an Arab Muslim mother, Suad, emphatically stated, Feminists have no idea that Muslim women 14William H. McNeill, Epilogue: Fundamentalisms and the World of the 1990s, in Marty and Appleby. enjoy many rights and freedoms that they (Western women) themselves dont even have here. She continued by affirming how the Prophet had guaranteed women several crucial rights and that, therefore, Muslim women do not feel the need to turn to a feminism couched in Islamic jargon to be able to voice these God-given rights. The fact that such rights were guaranteed to women several centuries before the emergence of Western feminist or Islamic feminist thought leaves, in Suads view, many Muslims with the conviction that they possess a divine knowledge in the Quran. This is deemed far superior to any theoretical framework conceived of by the limited human intellect. Suad continued: Who are we as finite individuals to be arrogant enough to say that we can come up with better laws than the laws of God himself? Whether its Islamic feminism or Western feminism it can never come close to the teachings of the Holy Quran because we, as believing Muslim women, possess greater knowledge through Gods own words in the Quran than do all feminists and humans combined. She said that, although Islamic feminism has tried to mesh Islamic concepts and values into its arguments, this was perceived as a mechanism to justify Islam to women and scholars in the West. The very fact that the term feminist is used at all shows Islamic feminism to be a Western-based conception since it implies a dichotomy between men and women based on gender differentiation. Such polarization of men and women is against Islam, she argued, for Islam views both as equally necessary for the ummah. The notion that Islam as divine knowledge requires no justification by human intellect was a statement made repeatedly by several women over the duration of this project. Such statements demonstrate how the Islamic feminist approach is seen as a discourse and theoretical framework shaped mainly by Western-based Muslim scholars to respond to Western feminism rather than as a theory that reflects the actual feelings and experiences of Muslim women themselves. In sum, the women in our study regard Islamic feminism as the antithesis of their lived experiences. Womanist theories begin with the assumption that much of the knowledge and many of the theories that are legitimated within the social sciences have been dominated by white, Eurocentric theorists and, hence, cannot be applied to the lived experience of ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or women of color. They further contend that much of Western theory is actually responsible for the continued subjugation of African and other suppressed nations and peoples. Womanist theorists attempt to demonstrate that much of civilizations technology, philosophy, writing, spirituality, health care, schooling, and education in the West actually had their roots in an African value system. Moreover, womanists argue that the richness of such African values have been intentionally deleted from history because of racist theorists who do not wish to shed any positive light on Africa, its history, and its civilization in order to continue perceiving themselves as superior.15 Arguing from a womanist theoretical perspective, Cheikh Anta Diop describes the differences between Western and African societies through the use of his cradle theory. According to him, African civilization, the cradle of humanity, was inherently matriarchal and, therefore, the antithesis of Western Indo-European societies, which are patriarchal. He argues that it was due to the migration to colder climates that led to a mind-set conducive to patriarchy because of the need for men to dominate the nomadic lifestyle and develop hunting-and-gathering techniques. Diop disagrees with the claim that matriarchy represented a lower form of development. Rather, he attributes matriarchy to the agrarian lifestyle that predominated in Africa while patriarchy, he argues, was more suited to the harsher and colder climates and nomadic lifestyles of Western societies to the north. Understood from this perspective, the concept of matriarchy is seen within the complementary nature of male-female relations that are considered 15Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974). nonhierarchical. The womanist struggle, therefore, qualitatively differs from feminist movements in that it does not attempt to achieve parity between the genders. According to womanist theories, the female is viewed as the giver of life and the bearer of culture. This notion stands in sharp contrast to the role of the female in Western cultures, where the female is limited to childbearing, her practical role in nomadic society being insignificant.16 Through colonization, Western societies and values began to dominate and subjugate African values. Consequently, patriarchy subjugated matriarchy and led to the racist perception among Western feminists and theorists that the oversexed African male was inherently aggressive toward the femalehence, the rationalization of rape of African women by their male counterparts. This notion ignored the fact that it was the introduction of Western cultural values that began to subjugate the African woman to the African man and the African man to white Western men and women. Womanist theory shows that many African womanists perceive feminism as a movement that originated in the West to solve Western womens problems with patriarchy. Whereas the Western feminist attempts to critique patriarchy in order to improve womens status in society, the womanist merely has to reexamine her societys history to illustrate how patriarchy is actually a value alien to African values and to the traditional way of life. As the above description illustrates, womanist theory can more successfully incorporate the arguments used by Muslim women while fending off the more troublesome Islamic or Western feminist theories. Egyptian-Sudanese author Leila Aboulela (as cited in Al-Ahram, July 2001) contends that there is plenty of room for an Islamic womanism that is not at all a replica of Western feminisms. The notion that Islamic feminism is a replica of Western feminisms illustrates the disdain many Muslim women have of the concept. 16Nah Dove, African Womanism: An Afrocentric Theory, Journal of Black Studies 28 (1998), 515-540. Islamic womanist theory rests on three central assumptions. First, Islam created with it civilization, science, philosophy, and education centuries before Western civilization began. Despite such advances, Islam is still portrayed and stereotyped by Western media and even scholars as a fundamentalist movement with terrorism at its core. Second, Islamic womanists neither wish nor attempt to achieve parity with their Muslim male counterparts, considering such notions un-Islamic. Third, Islamic womanists perceive Islamic feminism and all feminisms as attempts to actually dismiss the equality guaranteed by Islam by attempting to reinterpret equality in Islam within a feminist discourse. There is, according to them, an element of blasphemy involved in this, hence the Islamic womanist contention that all feminisms are antithetical to Islam. Framing it in Western jargon, when Islamic feminist theories use Islamic concepts to fit into a feminist theoretical framework, they become a neocolonialist attempt to further subject Arab and other Islamic nations to the neoliberal globalized world order while corrupting the Islamic womanist values embedded in the Quran. Muslim Women in Alberta and the Role of Womanist Islam Womanist theory provides a framework for the analysis of the experiences of Muslim women in Alberta. We can illustrate this movement by examining some of the directions Muslim women in Alberta are taking. Increasingly, they are taking on leadership roles within both ethnic and conservative religious communities. An anecdote from our research will be helpful. Early in our work, we approached some mosque councils for permission to distribute our survey among the women associated with the mosques. The council positions are almost always filled by males, usually by a vote, but sometimes by virtue of their role in the mosque community. The three Sunni mosques in the Edmonton area formed a single body to deal with Muslim issues and the larger Edmonton public. The members of this body were picked from among the leaders of the individual mosques. Yet this was not just another committee; it had considerable power, as we shall see. We were asked to present our plan to this committee. We met with the committee and presented copies of the questionnaires and talked about the goals of the research. The committee took the questionnaires under advisement and promised to report back within a month. When we had not heard from it after two months, we contacted the head of the committee and asked what was happening. We were informed that the committe, based on a vote, would not approve the distribution of the questionnaires. After we had made repeated calls to determine if the nature of the questions was at issue, we were told, off the record, that the likely reason was that the men on the committee were fearful that the women might say something that would sour relationships with the Saudis, to whom one of the groups was appealing for funds for a school. The resistance to the questionnaires, thus, arose not out of ideology or inappropriateness, but from the political conservatism of the sources of Saudi money. This turn of events was a major blow to our in-depth survey. Nevertheless, we persevered with returns from individual women who wished to participate. When the data from these returns were presented to some women in the mosques along with the explanation as to why some of the women had not received a questionnaire, they demanded to know why they had not been consulted. When the above-stated reason was cited, they were, naturally, infuriated, and immediately formed a Muslim womens organization to deal with the matter of the questionnaires. We will not have these men second-guessing what we want to do, they insisted. These women have developed an activist attitude toward their issues, even though many of them wear the hijab and, in most respects, have very conservative beliefs. Most of the Muslim women with whom we spoke described their frustration with the Canadian publics lack of general knowledge of Islam, especially its lack of understanding of the significance of the hijab. These women stated how they felt about Canadian society viewing them as oppressed women who could not do anything without their husbands permission. They further said that a Canadian lack of knowledge about issues such as the hijab complicated their experiences further because they personally felt the need to wear the hijab and would even go as far as to state that, even if their husbands asked them to take it off, they would divorce them rather than take off the veil. They felt that, on the basis of individual rights alone, Canadians should understand their position and encourage them. In fact, such statements were echoed by a respected Muslim community leader, who stated that even recent immigrant women from Islamic and Arab nations quickly pick up Canadian laws bearing on womens rights in situations such as domestic abuse. They simply do not let their husbands get away with things they might have been able to get away with in their homelands. Such views reveal that women are making independent religious and spiritual decisions regarding the issue of the hijab and that the need to do so is greater within the Canadian context. Indeed, one could say that such independence is in tune with personal space within Canadian culture. The issue of the hijab merits special consideration in light of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. According to the womanist perception among the Muslim women we interviewed, the perception of subjugation and isolation of women in Afghanistan constitutes a highly media-driven frenzy to put Islam in a negative light. According to them, many of the Muslim women in Afghanistan still choose to wear the niqab despite the ousting of the Taliban government. Thus, Aisha forcefully articulated her views about the war against terrorism in Afghanistan: The Americans left the Taliban to do what they wanted [against women] since 1996, when they did nothing about them. Why do they want to make Islam look bad now? Because of September 11th? They dont care about the Afghan women or Muslim women in general, so the overthrow of the Taliban cant be justified on the basis of restoring womens rights. While acknowledging that the Taliban have denied women their rights to education and health care, Aisha and her fellow womanists insist that many Muslim governments allied with the West (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan) continue to oppress women and are never subjected to the same criticism. Hence, these Muslim women believe that the Western media, especially in North America, choose to focus on oppression of women by Muslim men only when the situation is conducive to some form of social or political gain for U.S. interests. That Afghan women continue to wear the burqa demonstrates that, as much as North American mainstream media would like the public to believe, the women in Afghanistan are not being forced into wearing the niqab, that they would wear the niqab no matter what the reasonit could be protection from unwanted male attention, or it could simply be a matter of conviction. In fact, many of the women interviewed in Alberta said that, if Afghan women are convinced of the benefits of the burqa and are happy to wear it, then they have the right to wear it. Recent scholarship backs up this view. In a recent paper, Shahnaz Khan points out that the urgency to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban often had as its rationale rescuing the Afghan women from a repressive regime, while what really was at issue was the American (and the Western worlds) need for retribution and cheap oilin short, a more complex type of colonialism that was connected to a critique of Muslim culture and the demands of international politics and had little to do with womens liberation.17 Muslim womanists often make reference to what they perceive as an ironic advancement in womens rights. To them, the fact that women in the so-called developed or civilized nations feel compelled to adopt a certain lifestylethey wear makeup, short skirts, tight clothing, and subject themselves to starvation diets in order to attain the ideal figureshows that one form of oppression has been merely replaced with another, more implicit form. Their 17Saving Afghan Women: Interrogating Post-Colonial Imagery of Liberation (paper presented at the Yvonne Y. Haddad Plenary and Symposium at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, 27 May 2002). views are backed by scholars such as Mohammad Mazheruddin Siddiqi and Deniz Kandiyoti, who argue that the great scientific and technological achievements of Western societies have also been accompanied by a serious deterioration in womens life standards, including a rise in violent sex crimes, the proliferation of pornography and prostitution, and a decline of health as manifested in such eating disorders as bulimia and anorexia nervosa.18 Muslim womanists in Alberta hold that the veiled Muslim woman, by contrast, is aware of the inherent biological differences between men and women in terms of sexual drive. Veiled Muslim women do not attempt to enter male-dominated spheres of employment, nor is this a goal of theirs. Men and women have equal, but different, roles. Many veiled Muslim women told us that they accept the biological and psychological differences between the sexes and how they try to nurture these differences in the equality guaranteed to them by God through Islam. Shahnaz says: Just look at the reactions of any man when having a conversation with a veiled Muslim woman versus a woman dressed in a tight shirt, short skirt, and makeup. With the uncovered woman, all the man can do is focus on her body and attempt to undress her with his eyes, but the veiled woman receives respect for her mind and he listens to what she is saying. Unlike Islamic feminist arguments, which would focus only on the empowering nature of the veil, as if the presence or absence of the veil set the rules of male-female relations within society, Islamic womanists accept the notion that women are also sexual beings. They argue, for example, that a woman may also become physically attracted to a males appearance, and that a pious man, no less than a woman, should be humble in his appearance and wear a beard as a sign of religiosity. 18Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996). See also Kandiyoti, Women, Islam, and the State, in Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, ed. Joel Beinen and Joe Stork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 185-194, and Mohammad Mazheruddin Siddiqi, Women in Islam (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1990). There are several womanist interpretations of commonly misunderstood gender issues in Islam. The majority of the Muslim women interviewed from upper and middle classes were able to articulate the Quranic view of gender issues from a womanist perspective. They were particularly concerned about polygamy. One Muslim woman, after observing that polygamy is an extremely rare practice today, went on to describe in detail how and why the practice began. According to her, during the lifetime of the Prophet and until shortly thereafter, many Muslim men were killed in wars. In order to keep the Islamic way of life alive, the men at that time would marry more than one wife and have children with each of these wives for the purpose of replacing the numbers of Muslims killed in warfare. Thus, polygamy arose in a particular situation. There are two opposing womanist explanations of polygamy today, one being an essentialist, the other being a historical, view of maleness. On the first view, polygamy that exists today is preferable to the free sexual relations that occur prior to and even during marriage in Western societies. Womanists holding this view conclude that most men have a stronger sexual drive than women and would, therefore, inevitably take more than one partnersuch behavior being reflected in young Muslims behavior before they marry. The Prophet, because of his God-given knowledge, foresaw this and allowed men to take more than one wife. By contrast, many Islamic womanists believe that practice of polygamy by any Muslim male other than the Prophet is a sin. In their view, the Quranic stipulation that any Muslim man who takes more than one wife must treat all wives equally with respect to their material, emotional, and psychological needs renders polygamy untenable. As such, the potential of polygamy for any man other than the Prophet is nullified. Such womanist views describe well the Muslim women interviewed in our research and reflect a different set of perceptions about gender relations than that held by either Islamic feminists or the sisterhood. The empowering ability of the network is also a feature of the Alberta study. The high inclusion rate of Muslim women within Muslim-only circles allows them to develop a sense of Muslim strength. In effect, their Islamic womanist position allows them to join social gatherings and discuss Islamic politics with their non-Muslim Canadian friends. Thus, these women will enter into a conversation that may cause a high degree of cognitive dissonance, but since their arguments are highly developed, they feel that they have the moral strength to discuss such explosive sociopolitical issues. I discuss politics in Islamic states more with my Muslim friends than with my Canadian friends. Agree Disagree Neutral Total Frequency 23 6 11 40 Cumulative Percent 57.5 15.0 27.5 100.0 The large number of disagree and neutral entries indicates that these women were only slightly less likely to argue for a particular view with their non-Muslim Canadian friends. They could do this because they were aware of the existence of a group of women with whom they share a common perspective and with whom they could openly discuss explosive political issues. We found this empowerment from a womanist groups perspective, which is so much a part of the traditional Middle Eastern womens society, to be an important factor in the adaptation to Canadian society. Conclusion Our study leads to several conclusions. First, while the views reported in this study may represent only a local trend, they do raise some important theoretical issues. While liberal Western feminists have critiqued Islamic feminism as an oxymoron because, in their view, Islam is inherently oppressive of women, Islamic feminists argue that Western feminists usually misperceive Islamic feminism because their faulty assumptions of empowerment cannot be applied to the perceptions of Muslim women. Muslim fundamentalist sisters also criticize Islamic feminists for attempting to mimic Western movements. The womanist framework provides a mediation and alternative to these contending views. Moreover, the responses of the women in our study make it imperative that an alternative theoretical framework be developed, for the Muslim women in Alberta do not see any of the current approaches reflecting the way they live their lives. They quite rightly believe that they have brought a distinctive response to the Canadian scene, and they believe that they are helping shape a better way of understanding Islam and its relationship to Canadians and the West. They want to fully integrate their approach into their understanding of Islam today. Second, national laws and cultural movements play an important part in the development of womanist values, a point made tellingly in Abdos poignant study of Islamist women in Cairo.19 In the case of Alberta, it appears that Islamist women think that the Canadian values affirming womans rights that are advocated by Muslim womanists are established in the Quran and in Islam. They further argue that just because patriarchy exists in the Middle East does not mean that Islam condones it. In fact, Muslim women have taken leading roles in Canada and have asserted the rights they feel are guaranteed first by Islam and then by Canadian law in an effort to reinforce what was already promised to them by the Quran but was later corrupted by Muslim scholars. (Some would also suggest that the need for Muslim men to become patriarchal became evident under colonialism and under the threat posed by the Western man and that globalization and the influx of fashion images have only exacerbated this tendency.) The Canadian context (laws and codes) provides Muslim women with the ability to reinforce Islamic womanist values (which are guaranteed by Islam) in a space where neither scholars nor their husbands can interfere. 19Genevieve Abdo, No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Third, no single discourse adequately addresses the needs of Muslim women, any more than it would address the needs of the women of Canada. It would appear that Western feminist discourse has a homogenizing tendency, and the Muslim woman, whether she has an Islamist, an Islamic feminist secular, or a womanist perspective, is wary of the genderization upon which the entire feminist enterprise is based. Some are even aware of the role played by global politics in identifying themwhich reflects a perception studied by Chandra Mohanty. The womanist movement in Alberta may have more to do with the articulation of a personal Albertan voice than with a particular ideology of feminism. If so, then it would be much closer to Dunya Maumoons claim that too much is made of the average Muslim woman in Western literature. Maumoon sees that as an attempt to reduce the impact of religion as a tool of liberation for Muslim women. In that sense, then, the concern about Muslim womens rights in Western scholarship is really only another form of enthocentrism or Orientalism and is not a real concern about the liberation of a group of people who want to be liberated by their religion.20 Even the study of Muslim women in specific cultural and national environments, as in the above-cited older study of Beck and Keddie, could well skew ones examination of the way women find the international values of Islam a positive force in their struggles. Of course, the study of Muslim womanism itself can be problematized by a similar critique. Finally, we believe that Islamic womanism will continue to evolve as a theoretical framework within which to understand the lived experiences of Muslim women in Western societies. In other words, the maintenance of Islamic beliefs in a North American society that is highly critical of and even denigrating toward Muslims and Islam will serve as an impetus for such a theory and movement, especially because it is not couched in Western terms or theories. As shown above, many Muslim women are taking on leadership positions not only within their local Islamic 20Dunya Maumoon, Islamism and Gender Activism: Muslim Womens Quest for Autonomy, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19 (1999), 2:269-283. communities, but also in mainstream Canadian society, where womanist arguments and claims are often presented. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:37-48 The Theological-Ideological Dispute Between Imam Warith Deen Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan * Clifton E. Marsh Introduction Minister Louis Farrakhan and Imam Warith Deen Muhammad were in conflict over the ideology, theology, and direction of the Nation of Islam. It resulted in the disputatious division between Blacks who are Muslims (so called orthodox) as opposed to Blacks who are Black Muslim Nationalist.1 W. D. Muhammad disagreed with his father, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, over the theology (black Muslim nationalism) and ideology (black separatism) of the Nation of Islam during the turbulent 1960s. Being a student of orthodox Islam and having come under the influence of Malcolm X, W. D. Muhammad often communicated with Malcolm, with whom he discussed the unorthodox Islamic approach of the Nation of Islam. W. D. Muhammad refers to Malcolms influence: Minister Malcolms contribution to the changes that took place in the Nation of Islam * Clifton E. Marsh is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, at Hampton University. 1Adib Rashad, The History of Islam and Black Nationalism in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Beltsville, MD: Writers Inc., 1991), 74. goes further back than my own. When I was a young man maybe the early twenties [sic], Malcolm X was an influence in my life.2 Once Malcolm had made the hajj to Mecca and eaten and slept with blue-eyed devils, he was convinced that Islam had changed their hearts and minds. Malcolm believed Islam would achieve the same (that is, would change hearts and minds) in the United States. W. D. Muhammad refused to accept the God image (God in person) of Master Fard Muhammad. The designation of Elijah Muhammad as the prophet of Allah was also a point of contention for W. D. Muhammad. According to W. D. Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad was a messenger and not a prophet in the true Biblical and Quranic sense. W. D. Muhammad says, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad didnt speak in the same theological spirit as the Bible and Koran. He was saying, a man came to me with solutions for your health problems, social problems, and I bring you the message he gave me.3 Eventually, W. D. Muhammad followed orthodox Islam, and Farrakhan followed the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (black Muslim nationalism). W. D. Muhammad took the Nation of Islam on a path that reflected his spiritual character and his spiritual experiences. He was never a devoted teacher of nationalism of any kind. Therefore, his approach to the Nation of Islam should be understood within the context of his spiritual experiences.4 Imam W. D. Muhammads Ideological Conflict with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad For several years, members of the Nation of Islam were aware of W. D. Muhammads ideological and theological differences with his father. The frequent excommunications (at least three or four) of 2Clifton E. Marsh, The Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. 3Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Resurrection, Transformation, and Change of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America, 1930-1995, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 164. 4Rashad, 74. W. D. Muhammad were a prelude to the changes to come; therefore, no one privy to the functions of the organization was surprised by the man chosen for the Mission and his changes. W. D. Muhammad explains his excommunications and his relationship with Malcolm: I was the first to be excommunicated. I was charged with trying to influence Malcolms theological thinking. I was charged with giving him personal, private knowledge of the Honorable Elijah Muhammads living, which was a lie. I told him I was falsely accused and I would like to face my accusers. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told me, Malcolm X is not facing his accusers either. We are talking to you separately. So he talked to me separately and he made his decision right there. His decision was to excommunicate me. 5 In 1970, W. D. Muhammad was accepted back into the Nation of Islam for the last time. In 1974, he was accepted back into the Nations ministerial ranks and immediately began his theological revision and his ideological duels with his father. He continued the ideological dispute by, in his words, saying things I knew were different from some of the things the people had been taught under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.6 Approximately one year before his death, Elijah Muhammad, according to W. D. Muhammad, accepted the revisions in theology and ideology from his son, who describes his meeting with his father in 1974: One time a tape was brought to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad by officers of FOI (Fruit of Islam), who were like the police in the Nation of Islam, checking everything. He hadnt heard it himself. He called me over and played it while I was present.. . . He jumped out of his seat and applauded and said, My sons got it! Thats what he told the officers sitting around the table and his wife. He said, My son can go anywhere on earth and preach. 7 5Marsh, The Lost-Found Nation of Islam, 101. 6Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims, 102. 7Ibid., 103. Initially, Farrakhan supported W. D. Muhammad and, out of a spirit of unity, he resisted the temptation to contradict the new leader. In a public address at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, on 4 February 1976, Farrakhan spoke about the transition of power from Elijah Muhammad to W. D. Muhammad: Out of the dark shadows emerged the Honorable W. D. Muhammad. The son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The world was shocked! The son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who was he? The public had no knowledge of Imam W. D. Muhammad. But many of us in the leadership knew that this was the one who was supposed to work behind the father and bring to fruition that which the father designed. There was no squabble for leadership, no bickering, no arguing, but a smooth transition of power.8 Imam Muhammad Unveils the Nations Secrets The organization had been very secretive about its finances, membership, and other aspects. For many years, when asked about such matters, its members would always respond, Those who know, dont say. Those who say, dont know! In June 1975, W. D. Muhammad made a public disclosure of the Nation of Islams financial affairs. The major source of income was a $22-million fish import business. The Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammads tenure also purchased $6.2 million in farmland and employed one thousand people on a payroll of $1.3 million and paid $1 million in corporate taxes. The total assets were approximately $46 million. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a staunch advocate of integration, praised the new direction of the Nation of Islam. In a 28 June 1975 New York Post article entitled The Muslims, he exclaimed: The new leader of the Black Muslims revealed a new interpretation of their religion. Todays Muslims do not exclude people merely because they are 8Ibid. White. It was only a few years ago that the term White Devil was applied by Black Muslims to all Whites. Its Boogie Time in The Nation The changes in the Nation of Islam were sudden, radical, and earthshaking. On 1 September 1975, fight promoter Don King gave a party in the Nations Chicago headquarters for the manager of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad). Ali had become a two-time heavyweight champion with a rope-a-dope knockout of George Foreman in October 1974. The guests included Ron Superfly ONeal, Andy Williams, Howard Cosell, and even talk-show host Phil Donahue. There were performances by Clifton Davis and Della Reese. Stevie Wonder sang Superstition, and the sensuous Lola Falana did a disco dance. One partygoer shouted, Its boogie time in the Nation. Somewhere in the crowd of partygoers, Farrakhan was probably shaking his head in disbelief, clutching the star and crescent and remembering the red, black, and green legacy of Elijah Muhammad. During the transition of leadership from Elijah Muhammad to W. D. Muhammad, Farrakhans title was national representative of Chief Minister W. D. Muhammad. Farrakhan, who was minister of Mosque No. 7 in New York City, developed a strong following. When W. D. Muhammad transferred Farrakhan to Chicago, many perceived the move as a demotion and an attempt to control and rein in the charismatic Farrakhan. Malcolm X Shabazz Temple No. 7, New York City W. D. Muhammad continued to reshape the Nation of Islam, and on 2 February 1976, he decided to honor El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) for his contribution to the Nation of Islam. Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, New York, was renamed in honor of Malcolm. W. D. Muhammad explained why he had restored Malcolm to a position of honor in the Nation of Islam: I couldnt accept that Minister Malcolm be written off. He was, in my opinion and many other ministers, the most faithful minister to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in the whole history of the Nation of Islam.9 This proclamation by W. D. Muhammad and his obvious admiration for Malcolm constituted another sweet-and-sour change for the rank and file. The sweet was W. D. Muhammads restoration of Malcolm to an honorable status; the sour was his announcement that Malcolm was the individual who had been the most faithful to Elijah Muhammad. It was a cruel irony for Farrakhan to hear W. D. Muhammad praise Malcolm and rename the mosque after him after Farrakhan had toiled in the fields of Harlem to resurrect the mosque after Malcolms assassination. Farrakhan perceived Malcolm as being impatient for the changes that W. D. Muhammad ultimately made. In a 2 February 1976 New York Times article entitled, Black Muslims Harlem Temple Renamed in Honor of Malcolm X, Farrakhan explains Malcolms impatient behavior: Malcolm X knew where the Nation of Islam should go and would ultimately go, but as a leader he lacked the patience to wait for the development of the minds of the followers toward that direction. Malcolms place in the history of Islam is assured. It forces the community to deal with it and think about it, and assess this man unemotionally. It stimulates growth and development. Saviours Day 1976 Saviours Day, 26 February 1976, marked the end of one year of W. D. Muhammads leadership. On that day, W. D. Muhammad revealed the cash flow problem dating back to 1967. These problems left the Nation of Islam in a $4.5-million debt. The debt reached $9.5 million in 1973. The largest liability was a $3-million loan taken out to purchase Mosque No. 2 in Chicago. W. D. Muhammad devised an eighteen-month plan to reorganize, to prioritize business opportunities, and to streamline 9Ibid., 105. the payroll. W. D. Muhammad also revealed that the Nation of Islam had state and federal tax problems. The Nation owed the federal government several million dollars in back taxes and owed money to Social Security and to the Department of Labor on account of workers compensation and minimum-wage laws. The southern farmland was not monitored by the organization, and many of the farms were not profitable. W. D. Muhammad began to sell the various business enterprises and offered Muslims the first opportunity to purchase stores and shops. The Nation of Islam also worked with the U.S. Small Business Administration to arrange loans for the new owners. The mission of Elijah Muhammads social problems program was slowly being dismantled, sold off, and abandoned. The Nation of Islam was becoming purely a nation of Islamic fellowship and not an organization for social change. Disheartened, Farrakhan explained the need for Elijah Muhammads mission to solve social problems: The effect of the mission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad directed the energies of the Muslim community toward the eradication of drunkenness, dope addiction, prostitution and crime, those energies were also directed toward strengthening the family life.10 Minister Farrakhans Excommunication from the World Community of Al-Islam in the West For many of you who do not understand the phenomena of change; to many of you who think that we should keep it (the Nation of Islam) the way the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had it. And dont do anything with it, because it was alright then. You just dont understand.11 These words were spoken by Farrakhan to the author and a group of college students and community residents at Virginia Union University during a public address in 1976. There is no way to determine exactly when he decided to detour from the ideological 10New York Amsterdam News, 12 January 1978. 11Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims, 105. path of W. D. Muhammad; however, in 1977, one year after the public address at Virginia Union University, Farrakhan left the World Community of Al-Islam in the West (the new name given by W. D. Muhammad to the Nation of Islam) to resurrect the Nation of Islam as the national representative of Elijah Muhammad. By 1978, the former Black Muslims were divided into separate ideological directions: W. D. Muhammads World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Farrakhans Nation of Islam, and a small faction of true believers following the Nation of Islam headed by a former official under Elijah Muhammad, Silas Muhammad, whose national headquarters is in Atlanta, Georgia. The changes that W. D. Muhammad introduced in the Nation of Islam were intended to make the organization and its members adhere to strict traditional Islamic principles and to exclude race, nationalism, and the racial images of God and prophets from theology and worship. Disagreeing with the changes, Farrakhan began to reassess Elijah Muhammads program and was led to believe that the ideological path taken by W. D. Muhammad was a fork in the road between two leaders. On 15 November 1977, at the Institute of Positive Education in Chicago, Farrakhan, in one of his first public addresses, explained his excommunication from the World Community of Al-Islam in the West: The effects of the changes within the World Community of Al Islam, in addition to the information I gained about our people in my travels abroad caused me to reassess the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. His teachings and programs for black people. My articulation of this caused Imam W. D. Muhammad to announce to the entire Muslim body that I was no longer a person with whom the Muslims (W.C.I.W.) should associate, listen to or even give the Muslims greeting. I naturally took this to mean that I was excommunicated from the WCIW.12 Farrakhans belief in the teachings of Elijah Muhammad cast him as the spiritual son while the biological son W. D. Muhammad 12Black Books Bulletin 6 (1978), 1:42. totally disagreed with his fathers teachings. W. D. Muhammad believed that both men, Farrakhan and Elijah Muhammad, were out of touch with the Islamic world. On 24 March 1978, in Chicago, W. D. Muhammad responded to Farrakhans resurrection of the Nation of Islam: As I have told you, if the information Im getting is correct, Minister Louis Farrakhan is asking people to go back to the same things exactly that were being taught in 1974. I am told that he is teaching the same kind of Black consciousness. If that is so, then hes not teaching Al-Islam. Wherever you go, Muslims believe as we believe here in Chicago and throughout this community. We believe as Muslims believe all over the Muslim world. 13 Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, so the reference to 1974 is to the teachings that were being propagated under the auspices of that religious leader. According to W. D. Muhammad, Fard Muhammad planned a stream of gradualism to introduce Islam to the African-American community. W. D. Muhammad believed the first stream was the Black Muslim phase under Elijah Muhammad and that the plan was for the Nation of Islam to be gradually transformed into a traditional, orthodox Islamic community. W. D. Muhammad claims that he was told by Fard Muhammad in person that such a transformation was the original plan. If, however, that is true, why did Elijah Muhammad excommunicate W. D. Muhammad several times for straying from the black nationalist doctrine of the Nation of Islam? In W. D. Muhammads view, Farrakhan had broken from the original plan: If his (Minister Farrakhans) is not that (Orthodox Islam) then he has broken from the program, the plan, the scheme of the Nation of Islam, as we were called, and has not understood and accepted the psychology and gradualism for the total religious transformation of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America.14 13Bilalian News, 28 April 1978. 14Ibid. Economic Development and Social Problem Solving Farrakhan believed that it was important to give blacks a message of uplift because, in every country he had visited, where there is a plurality of races, the black man, everywhere, is on the bottom. Hes on the bottom in Christianity; hes on the bottom in Islam; hes on the bottom in Capitalism; hes on the bottom in Socialism, and under Communism, America and the world.15 W. D. Muhammad believed that Farrakhans plan for economic development, social problem solving, and spiritual uplift was doomed by the black nationalist philosophy that the latter practiced and preached. Racial Images of God In 1978, through the Committee to Remove All Images of the Divine (CRAID), W. D. Muhammad began rigorously to attack all racial images of God. W. D. Muhammad explains the sociopsychological imperative of the campaign: As long as Caucasian people think that their physical white image is in the world as the image of God, and the Caucasian image of God, there will be no real coming together and no peaceful meeting of the minds of Caucasians. The strongest wedge between non-Caucasians and Caucasians is a Caucasian image of God on the cross.16 W. D. Muhammad believes that racial conflict can be resolved if the images of God and prophets have no color or race. The present system of placing racial identity on images of God adds to racial conflict and restricts efforts toward integration and equal opportunity in America. However, Farrakhan is in complete disagreement with W. D. Muhammad. Since there is de facto segregation, and since the United States is divided into two worlds, one black and one white, separate and unequal, black separatism 15Black Books Bulletin 6 (1978), 1:42. 16Bilalian News, 20 January 1978. could be used as an asset to uplift the race. In the following quote, Farrakhan spells out the color uplift perspective: Color is a reality in the world. There will come a time when men will not judge men by color, but since that is not the reality at present, since we live in a society that has put us in this position because of our color, then we ought to maximize what God has given us and lift ourselves up from under the foot of this oppressor.17 Farrakhan and W. D. Muhammad continued their ideological conflict throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Unlike the conflict between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, however, the FarrakhanW. D. Muhammad conflict was not a violent one. Both men were very cautious not to say anything provocative or anything that might ignite a flame of revolt among the members of the Nation of Islam or the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. In fact, W. D. Muhammad issued a warning and a challenge to his opponents and to Farrakhan in a public address: This leadership is going to provide more jobs. This leadership is going to have more business. This leadership is going to have more human dignity at home and abroad. Thats my challenge. This is not a challenge to him (Minister Farrakhan) as my enemy. This is my challenge to him as a friend. I want to show my friend I have a better way than he does. Now heres my word to my enemy and for Minister Farrakhans enemy: You bastard! You will never pull me out in the street to do one ounce of harm to Minister Farrakhan! You go to hell, you bastard!18 Conclusion The embryonic stages of the philosophical and ideological split between W. D. Muhammad and Farrakhan revealed numerous differences in theology as well. However, both the Nation of Islam and the World Community of Al-Islam continued to grow, develop, and move further away from each other. For several years 17Black Books Bulletin 6 (1978), 1:43. 18Bilalian News, 28 April 1978. after the excommunication of Farrakhan, the relationship between the two organizations remained distant and strained. Farrakhan and W. D. Muhammad settled on a verbal agreement. W. D. Muhammad said that he would not defame his father but that he should be left free to criticize the Nation of Islams beliefs. Farrakhan felt that the verbal agreement was necessary so as not to inflame the followers of the two organizations, which would cause conflict. For their restraint, both men should be complimented, for, together, they have successfully avoided the repetition of tragic and bloody mistakes of the past. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:49-56 The Shiah as a Minority Community in Pakistan and India David Pinault * This paper focuses on one aspect of the experience of the Shiah Muslim experience as a minority population in India and Pakistan: the use of lamentation rituals in relation to issues of communal identity. These rituals occur annually during the Islamic month of Muharram, when the Shiah throughout the world commemorate the battlefield death of the Prophet Muhammads grandson, Imam Husayn ibn Ali. Husayn died in the Iraqi desert at the site of Karbala in the year 680 while fighting against the caliph Yazid. The shuhada-i Karbala, or Karbala martyrs, are mourned especially on Ashura, the tenth of the month of Muharram, the day Husayn died. Muharram lamentation rituals are referred to collectively as matam. Matam rituals range in intensity of expression from hath ka matamthe most common form of lamentation ritual, involving repetitive tapping of the hand to the chest as a token of griefto zanjiri matam or zanjir-zani, a controversial, but nevertheless popular, practice in which mourners cut themselves in bloody displays of lamentation involving the use of razors, knives, and flails. Justification for Muharram lamentation can be found as early as the sixteenth century, in a Persian-language devotional text written by Husayn Waiz al-Kashifi entitled Rawzah-i Shuhada, or The Garden of Martyrs: Paradise is awarded to anyone who * David Pinault teaches in the Religious Studies Department of Santa Clara University. weeps for Husain, explains Kashifi, for the following reason, that every year, when the month of Muharram comes, jami az muhibban-i ahl-i bayt (a multitude of the lovers of the family of the Prophet) renew and make fresh the tragedy of the Martyrs.1 Salvation in paradise as a reward for Muharram lamentation is developed as a theological concept in the seventeenth-century work Bihar al-Anwar by Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, who articulated the concept of shafaah, or intercession, on behalf of sinners who weep for the Karbala martyrs. In volume 44 of the Bihar, Majlisi attributes to Muhammad a hadith that makes a prediction concerning the Prophets grandson: Husain . . . will have a Shiah, a band of followers, who will attach themselves to him in devotion, and who will therefore benefit from his intercession on their behalf.2 In my fieldwork with Shiah minority populations in India and Pakistan, ranging from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, to Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir, to Lahore, in Pakistans Punjab, and on to Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, I encountered justifications for matam involving both of the motifs described above: devotion to Husayn and the hope of intercession in paradise. At the popular level, Shiah self-definition, as I encountered it in South Asia, involves the assertion that Shiah Muslims excel all others in their love for the ahl-i bayt, the Prophets family. Matam, as Shiah frequently explained to me, is a way of expressing this love. And the concept of shafaah, or intercession, although not as prominent in recent years as in the older traditional devotional texts, still figured as a justification among the Shiah I interviewed in South Asia. I encountered a third factor linked to the practice of matam when I began work in 1989 in the Indian city of Hyderabad with the matami gurohs, or Shiah lamentation associations. There are at 1Husayn Waiz al-Kashifi, Rawzah-i Shuhada (Teheran: Kitab-firoshi-i Islamiyyah, 1979), 12. 2Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 44 (Teheran: al-Maktabah al- Islamiyyah, 1965), 225. least thirty-five or forty such clubs in Hyderabad alone, many of them organized by neighborhood. During Muharram in Hyderabad, as in Ladakh, Lahore, and other South Asian localities, the matami gurohs organize crowd-pleasing matam processions that fill the streets and draw thousands of onlookers and participants. The matami gurohs in Hyderabad take the lead in organizing and performing the most spectacular forms of matam, namely, zanjirzani. These zanjir processions, in which participants flagellate themselves and make the streets run with blood, generate the third important aspect of matam: the use of Shiah ritual to develop communal identity. To understand how this self-flagellation functions, it must be borne in mind that zanjiri matam is performed in public, not in private. It is communal, rather than individual, and coordinated, not sporadic, in its performance. Its tempo is dictated by the rhythm of the nawhahjat, or lamentation poems, in honor of the Karbala martyrs, that are chanted as accompaniment to the repetitive strokes of matam. Such ritual is ideal for the formation of group solidarity. This public self-flagellation functions as a communal marker precisely because other Muslims disapprove of such rituals. Anti-Shiah rhetoric claims that matam violates the Sunnah (exemplary conduct of the Prophet). Matam is said to involve a failure of decorum, a loss of self-control. Muslim critics that I met in Lahore and Hyderabadself-described Salafis, Deobandis, and Ahl-i Hadithmade sarcastic references to dance and rock and roll as they condemned matam and zanjir-zani as un-Islamic. In Lahore, militant Sunni groups, such as the Sipah-i Sahaba, have demonstrated their hostility to Shiah mourning practices by attacking Shiah congregations and processions during the Muharram lamentation season. In December 2002, I met, in the Pakistani Punjab, Shiah community leaders who described attacks by Sipah-i Sahaba on the so-called Dhu l-Janah processions. In these parades, a stallion is caparisoned to represent Dhu l-Janah, the Horse of Karbala, that is, the horse once ridden into battle by Husayn. In modern-day Muharram processions, the horse representing Dhu l-Janah becomes the focal point of lamentation: flagellants and other mourners cluster around the stallion as they perform matam. In Lahore, I was told of attacks by Sunni militants who disrupted such practices by flinging acid at the Dhu l-Janah stallion. The matami guroh members I interviewed, however, made clear to me that they allowed neither Muslim criticism nor the threat of violence to deter them from their practice of matam. In their view, the public performance of controversial rituals such as zanjir-zani constitutes a kind of loyalty test that determines whether one has the courage to stand in the street and be counted publicly as a Shii, to endure persecution as a member of a minority community, just as Husayn and his followers were persecuted and put to death by an unrighteous Muslim majority. It is important to note, however, that disapproval of zanjiri matam is voiced not only from outside, by the Sunni majority, but also from within, by members of the Shiah community itself. The political leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran has taken the lead in articulating such criticism. I learned in detail about this Iranian criticism when I visited the town of Kargil in 1997. Kargil is located in western Ladakh, within shooting distance of the Pakistani-Indian Line of Control. Kargil is home to the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust, which serves as a base for Ladakhi Shiah who have been trained as maulvis (religious scholars) in the madrasahs of Iranian cities such as Qom. Iran awards scholarship funding to Shiah from Ladakh and from elsewhere in South Asia. The Iranian-trained maulvis I met in Kargil expressed strong disapproval of zanjiri matam, even as they acknowledged that the practice is popular in Ladakh, as it is elsewhere in India and Pakistan. One Ladakhi maulvi showed me the Persian text of a fatwa (expert legal opinion) issued during the 1994 Muharram season by Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the supreme guide of Irans Islamic republic. The fatwa forbids the public performance of acts of matam involving the use of weapons to shed ones blood. Khameneis decree continued the policy of taqrib (Sunni-Shiah rapprochement) pursued by his predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Eager to forge tactical alliances with Sunni militant movements in the Arab Near East and elsewhere in the Islamic world, Khomeini had tried to discourage the performance of rituals, such as zanjiri matam, that tend to offend and alienate Sunni Muslims. Since 1994, Iran-trained maulvis have tried to educate the Shiah laity in South Asia concerning Khameneis decree. As far as I can tell, they have not met with much success in either India or Pakistan.3 I visited the Pakistani city of Lahore for the Muharram season in March 2002. There I witnessed numerous Dhu l-Janah processions, in which the presence of the stallion triggered demonstrations of grief among bystanders and performance of bloody zanjiri matam. Like other urban locations in India, Lahore has dozens of matami gurohs. The officers of one such group, the Anjuman-i Imamiah Lucknavi, accompanied me to these matam performances. The matami gurohs of Lahore, like those of Ladakh, were well aware of Khameneis 1994 fatwa. Like their Indian Shiah counterparts, Lahori Shiah tend to disregard the fatwa. As one Pakistani Shii said to me on the topic of zanjiri matam, Alls fair in love and war. And this is a matter of love. His words reflected the reasoning from Kashifis sixteenth-century The Garden of Martyrs, which describes a Muslim community as muhibban-i ahl-i bayt, lovers of the family of the Prophet. In Pakistan, there is, aside from love for the ahl-i bayt, another reason for the Shiah defiance of Khameneis ban on bloody matam. Militant Islamist groups continue to target Shiah prayer congregations with sporadic violence despite President Pervez Musharrafs banning of sectarian extremist organizations, such as 3For Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinis attempts at forming alliances with Sunni groups in the Arab Middle East, see Emmanuel Sivan, Sunni Radicalism in the Middle East and the Iranian Revolution, International Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1989), 1:1- 30. For a translation of relevant portions of Seyyed Ali Khameneis 1994 fatwa on matam and bloodshed, see David Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 149, 174-177, and 199. Sipah-i Sahaba, in January 2002. Members and officers of matami gurohs in Lahore told me that, in the face of such persecution, zanjiri matam is a way of asserting their identity as Shiah. I would add, by way of commentary, that it is precisely the offensive quality of zanjiri matam that makes it useful as a communal boundary marker. Spurting blood is normally viewed as najisritually polluting or impure. Self-flagellation and extravagant displays of emotion serve to polarize and distinguish publicly between sympathetic insiders and unsympathetic outsiders. As surely as the lambs blood that marked the doorposts of the righteous during the biblical Exodus from Egypt, the blood of zanjiri matam distinguishes the Shiah minority from a larger majoritarian community that is often perceived as hostile.4 In Pakistan, as in India, I saw evidence of ongoing controversies among Shiah over the significance of zanjir-zani for Islamic identity. The subject came up in December 2002 at a reception I attended for faculty members at the University of Peshawar. Present in large numbers were instructors from the Shaykh Zayed Islamic Studies Center, which is housed on the universitys campus. The Islamic Studies Center professors are conservative Sunnis, salafi in their orientation, and committed to tabligh (missionary dissemination of the faith). Several of them complained of what they called the ignorance prevalent among Pakistani Shiah, who, in their Muharram gatherings, persist in zanjiri matam despite the prohibition decreed by Khamenei. They directed their complaints, in particular, to Sayyid Abd al-Husayn Rais as-Sadat, the director of Peshawars Iranian Cultural Center. A Shiah lecturer from another department spoke up in defense of zanjiri matam. This lecturer (who asked me to preserve his anonymity) used an argument I had often heard previously among Shiah in India: the Shiahs love for the ahl-i bayt is so strong that they get carried away by their emotion, zanjiri matam, thus, being an expression of the 4For a discussion of the ritual status of blood in Islam and within the context of Shiah ritual, see Pinault, 29-55. intensity of their feelings. They should not be condemned, he concluded, for an action that stems from love. Of greater interest to me was the response offered by the director of the Iranian Cultural Center. Zanjiri matam, Rais as-Sadat said, is wrong because Islam forbids any action that involves deliberate harm to ones body. This was explained clearly, he added, in Sayyid Khameneis fatwa. In other words, the local representative of Iranian interests in Peshawar sided against his Shiah coreligionist and aligned himself with the salafi Sunni crowd, so as to promulgate the interests of Khomeinist internationalism. This encounter reflects the larger issue of Irans efforts to gain influence among Pakistani Shiah. Some Shiah in Pakistan do, in fact, regard Khamenei as their marja-i taqlid (spiritual guide), and some Pakistani Shiah regard Allamah Sajid Ali Naqvi as Khameneis representative in Pakistan. Sajid Naqvi is one of Pakistans most prominent Shiah leaders and the leader of the Shiah political party Tehrik-i Jafariah Pakistan, or TJP. (Some Sunni militants have justified their persecution of Pakistani Shiah by characterizing Allamah Naqvi and the TJP as proxies and cats-paw agents who are loyal to Iran rather than to Pakistan.) Many Pakistani Shiah, however, are totally unfamiliar with the concept of the marja. As Khaled Ahmed of The Friday Times told me in a conversation in Lahore, Here [in Pakistan], most Shiah tend to identify with individual favorite zakirs [preachers] rather than with a leader such as Naqvi.5 In Pakistan, the notion of the marja is of very limited importance. I noted another instance of Iranian religiopolitical influence in Pakistan when I visited the Shahid Arif al-Husayni Madrasah in Peshawars Faisal Colony neighborhood. The schools entrance archway is decorated with portraits of Khomeini and Arif al-Husayni, who, until his murder in 1988, was the head of the Tehrik-i Nafaz-i Fiqh-i Jafariah, the movement for the implementation of Shiah law. (This organization was the 5Khaled Ahmed, personal interview, Lahore, 20 December 2002. I thank Khaled Ahmed for his helpful observations. predecessor of the TJP). Husayni is credited with having aligned this Pakistani Shiah organization with the goals of Khomeinis Islamic revolution.6 The present director of Peshawars Arif al-Husayni Madrasah, Allamah Javad Hadi, is very much an apologist for religious policies originating from Tehran. In our conversation, Allamah Hadi emphasized that Shiah Islam is a religion of reason and logic. The only reasonable type of matam, he said, is hath ka matam. According to him, the various kinds of Muharram rituals that are so popular in Pakistan and Indiabloody zanjiri matam, Horse of Karbala processions, the display of taziahs (cenotaphs of the Karbala martyrs)are all bidah, that is, unwarranted innovations that take away from Islams original purity of practice. This comment by Allamah Hadi provoked a spirited response. Accompanying me on this madrasah visit was a young Lahori Shii, a member of one of Lahores many matami gurohs. These practices, he said to the maulvi, are certainly not bidah. The things you condemn, he argued, are essential parts of Shiism. When its a question of rozah [Ramadan fasting], namaz [daily prayer], hajj [pilgrimage] zakat [mandatory almsgiving], all Muslims, said my Lahori friend, do these things. Even the Wahhabis, he added, do that much. But without zanjiri matam, Dhu l-Janah, the taziahs, thered be nothing left of Shiism. Thered be nothing, he concluded, to differentiate us from the Sunnis. This young mans response confirmed the impression I had formed in recent years in my fieldwork with Shiah populations in South Asia. Khomeinist internationalism continues to meet considerable resistance as it encounters the on-the-ground realities of local ritual practice. For me, this confrontation between the Iran-influenced maulvi and the matami guroh member summarized the tensions characterizing Shiah self-understanding as a minority community today in Pakistan and India. 6See Afak Haydars study of this topic in Pakistan: 1992, ed. Charles H. Kennedy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:57-71 Shii Political Activism in Pakistan * Mumtaz Ahmad In India and Pakistan, Shiism has existed primarily as a religion of rituals, of devotionalism, and of a collective memory of suffering. This is not to say that Shii Muslims did not participate in political movements; their participation in the Pakistan movementa Muslim nationalist movement with solid Islamic religious mooringswas significant and substantial.1 But no political party or protest movement born of Shii particularism ever arose in Indian Islam.2 Even until the late 1970s, much of the Shii political activity in Pakistan lacked discernable signs of religious inspiration. Precise figures on Pakistans Shii population are not available, the estimates ranging from 2.5 percent (according to anti-Shii Sunni organizations) to 25 percent (according to the Shii organization, Tehrik-i-Jafariya).3 Most of the independent observers agree, * Mumtaz Ahmad teaches in the Department of Political Science and History at Hampton University. 1See, for example, Akbar Ibn-i-Hasan, Tehrik-i-Pakistan men Shian-i-Ali ka Kirdar [The Role of the Shiah in the Pakistan Movement] (Karachi: Rahmatullah Book Agency, n.d.). 2The only exception was the Shiah Political Conference, convened in Lahore in April 1940 to counter the Lahore (Pakistan) Resolution of 23 March 1940. But this was more of a show put on by the Indian National Congress to weaken the Muslim Leagues claim that it represented all Muslims of India. See Syed Nur Ahmad, From Martial Law to Martial Law: Politics in the Punjab, 1919-1958, ed. Craig Baxter, trans. Mahmud Ali (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 156. 3In the international conference it held in Islamabad in June 1991, the anti-Shii group Anjuman-i Sipah-i-Sahabah Pakistan declared that the Shiah constitute only 2.5 percent of the Muslim population of Pakistan (see the weekly Zindagi [Lahore], 8-14 June 1991, 10). Shahid Javed Burki, on the other hand, contends that one-quarter of Pakistans population is Shii (see Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan: Fifty Years of however, that the Shii population is between 12 to 15 percent of the countrys population.4 The Shii community in Pakistan, unlike its counterparts in Lebanon and the Gulf states, is not a homogeneous community. Also, it is dispersed all over Pakistan, with some pockets of concentration in the Punjab, in the tribal area of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), in the Hazara tribal settlements in Baluchistan, and in urban Sind. The geographical distribution of the Shii community has consequences for its socioeconomic diversity. The Shiah of Karachi and other urban centers of Sind are among the top business families of Pakistan and are prominent in education and cultural institutions, in the media, in the civil service and the professions, and in the private sector of the economy.5 In the Punjab, however, the majority of the Shiah are linked with agriculture-based rural interests, although there are a few prominent Shii industrialist families as well. Some of the most prominent landlords of Punjab, who have also been active in Punjab politics since the 1930s, come from well-known Shii families of Multan, Jhang, and central Punjab districts. Most of the Shiah in the NWFP and Baluchistan are tribal and are concentrated in Baltistan, in Parachinar in the Kurram Agency bordering Afghanistan, in the Hangu subdivision of the Kohat District, and in the adjoining Orakzai Tribal agency. The religious extremism and political radicalism of the NWFP Shiah are probably due to the fact that they live in isolated settlements surrounded by large Sunni populations that are influenced by persistent anti-Shii campaigns and propaganda of Deobandi Sunni ulama of the the Jamiyyat-i-Ulama-i-Islam (JUI). The Hazara Shiah of Baluchistan have been Nationhood (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 208. Stuart Auerbach in the Washington Post dispatch Sectarian Splits Thwart Pakistans Effort to Forge Islamic State, wrote that estimates of Shii population range from as low as 10 percent to as high as 30 percent (24 January 1982, A25). Asia Week (18 July 1980, 17) also contends that the Shiah make up 30 percent of Pakistans population. 4See, for example, Pakistan, in the Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom, ed. Catharine Cookson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 319-322. 5Washington Post, 24 January 1982, A25. less active in the pan-Shii movements, whether religious or political, and have prospered in trade, both legal and illegal, between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. In the Baluchi religiocultural environment, which is relatively uninfluenced by literalist, orthodox, or Deobandi particularism, the Hazara Shiah have been, until recently, spared by the onslaught of Sunni sectarians.6 The foregoing clearly shows that the Shiah in Pakistan do not constitute a homogenous community in terms of their socioeconomic interests. When Karachis Urdu-speaking Shii Muhajirs (in Pakistan, the name muhajirs is typically used for refugees who migrated from India at the partition of the subcontinent in 1947) complain about Punjabi domination in politics, the civil service, and the military, they do not differentiate between Punjabi Shiis and Sunnis. And when Karachis urban-based, educated middle-class Shiah, and also Shii businessmen and industrialists, demand imposition of agricultural income tax, their target includes prominent Shii landed interests of the Punjab. The social constituency of radical Shiism in Pakistan is as diverse as the countrys larger Shii community. In small towns of the Punjab, the more activist and radical Shii elements come from the upper echelons of the lower class and from the lower-income groups of the middle class. In Karachi and in other urban centers of Sind, commonly, the middle class constitutes the backbone of Shii political activism. In Karachi and Hyderabad, since 1985, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)the political organization of the Urdu-speaking population of urban Sindhas also been a major vehicle of Shii political acitivism. The majority of the sector chiefs of the MQM in Karachi are Shiis.7 Several of the Pashtun-Muhajir riots in Karachi during the 1980s and 1990s were, in fact, proxy Shii-Sunni riots. The coincidence of the rise of Muhajir ethnicity in 6Muslim Qureshi, Shiah-Sunni Ittihad ka Muzaharah [Demonstration of Shii-Sunni Unity], weekly Zindagi (Lahore), 2-8 March 1979, 22. 7MQM leaders, interview by Mumtaz Ahmad, Karachi, 12 August 2003. The monthly Herald (Karachi), March 1995, 36, also reports about the Muhajir-Shii nexus in Karachis violent politics in the 1990s. urban Sind, on the one hand, and of the upsurge of Shii political activism and the consequent Shii-Sunni violence, on the other, is indicative of the convergence of ethnicity and sectarianism within the MQM ranks. In the larger context of Pakistan, however, the picture is not as clear. Issues of class and ethnic division within the Shii community are still important. Has Shii identity in Pakistan become consolidated and strong enough to transcend the class differences among Punjabi feudal landlords (or landladies) such as Abida Hussain of Jhang, the Gardezis and Qizilbashs of Multan, and the Mahmuds of Bahawalpur, the business and industrial tycoons and the middle-class Urdu-speaking intellectuals and professionals of Karachi, and Balti-speaking Shii herdsmen from Baltistan? Have Shii organizations, such as the Tehrik-i Jafariyyah and Sipah-i Muhammad, through a successful religiopolitical mobilization of the Shii community, broken down the cultural, regional, class, and language barriers that exist within that community? Has a special and exclusive Shii communal identity been created by such developments as: (1) the 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran; (2) General Zia-ul-Haqs Sunni-oriented Islamization of the 1980s; and (3) violent anti-Shii activities, since the middle of the 1980s, of certain Sunni groups, such as the Sipah-i-Sahabah? While it is difficult to answer these questions in categorical terms, this paper will offer some tentative answers. First, a few general remarks about the situation of the Shiah in Pakistan. The Shiah of Pakistan, unlike the Shiah of the Persian Gulf states, are not the quintessential outsiders. Compared, on the one hand, with the Shii minorities in other Muslim countries especially the Arab Middle Eastand, on the other hand, with other minorities in Pakistan, the Shiah in Pakistan are not subjected to economic and social discrimination and are well-represented in the ruling arena. Hence, unlike the Shiah of Lebanon, Iraq (before March 2003), and other Gulf states, the Shiah of Pakistan have never complained of the lack of their representation in the political system. In fact, Sunni sectarian organizations point out that the Shiah are, and have been, overrepresented in the civil service and the military and in political office.8 They point out that the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, came from a Shii family and that some of the most prominent leaders and financiers of the Pakistan movement and the All-India Muslim LeagueRaja Sahib of Mahmudabad, Hussain Imam, Raja Ghazanfar Ali, M. M. Isfahaniwere Shiis. Two of Pakistans presidents, Iskandar Mirza and Yahya Khan, were Shiis, as were two chiefs of staff of the army and two chiefs of staff of the air force. Many of Pakistans prominent civil servants have been, and are, Shiis. Notably, Pakistans ruling institutions, including mainstream political parties, such as the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Muslim League, have been, by and large, nonsectarian. In civil and military services, professionalism, political considerations, and the corporate interests of the military and the higher civil service have always prevailed over sectarian affiliations. But while, in the past, the appointment of Shiis to senior-most civil and military positions did not provoke any negative reaction on the part of the Sunnis, in the highly charged sectarian situation created in recent years by the militant Sunni organization Anjuman-i Sipah-i-Sahabah and the equally militant Shii organization Sipah-i-Muhammad, Sunni militants are likely to react strongly against a prospective appointment of a Shii as chief of the staff of the army. Historically, Islam and the state in Pakistan have been regarded as interdependent, and, even during periods of conflict between the state and certain religious groups, this symbiotic relationship between the religious establishment and the state has remained intact.9 What is important is that not only the dominant Sunni orthodoxy, but also the Shii religious leadership was part of this overarching alliance between the state and the religious 8Khurshid Ahmad Nadeem, Shiah Sunni Ikhtilafat ki Haqiqat [The Truth about Shii-Sunni Differences], monthly Tazkir (Lahore), July 1991, 4-8. 9Mumtaz Ahmad, Islam and the State: The Case of Pakistan, in The Religious Challenge to the State, ed. Matthew C. Moen and Lowell S. Gustafson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 239-267. establishment. Both sects were considered equally important to national integration, social cohesion, the hierarchy of mutual obligations, and the religious capital needed by the state to establish its legitimacy. Given the radical posture of the major Shii organizations in Pakistan today, it is hard to believe that the Shii religious establishment until the late 1970s was proestablishment and stauchly promonarchy in Iranpolitically quietist, and ultraconservative in its sociocultural outlook. Such an orientation of the Shii religious establishment explains the general alienation of educated Shii youth from their religious leadership and the fact that the most intense ambitions of modern-educated Shiah for liberaland radicalalternatives were expressed through secular and left-wing ideologies rather than inside the ambit of the Shii religious tradition despite the rich, and easily accessible, revolutionary capital of this tradition. It is, therefore, not surprising to see that modern-educated Shii intellectuals were disproportionately represented in the pro-Marxist Progressive Writers Movement, left-wing trade unions, progressive students unions, and the Pakistan Communist Party. It explains why Pakistani Shii intellectuals did not produce an Ali Shariati to articulate a radical Islamic perspective from within Shiism. Sajjad Zahir, Sibt-i Hasan, Ihtisham Hussain, Mumtaz Hussain, Mubashshir Hasan, and other prominent Shii intellectuals did not derive their revolutionary inspiration from Imam Hussain but from Karl Marx. The only exception was Karrar Hussain, former vice-chancellor of Baluchistan University, whose commitment to social and economic justice and to left-wing politics, was firmly rooted in the radical tradition of Shii religiopolitical thought. Muhammad Qasim Zaman has argued that the rise of sectarianism and the religiopolitical mobilization of denominational groups in Pakistan has become a medium not only for a revival of the ulamas influence but also for its extension in areas where, previously, such influence was minimal.10 Zaman refers to the 10Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radicalization of Shii and Sunni Identities, Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998), 3:689-716. strengthening of bonds between the urban-based Shii clergy and the rural or recently urbanized Shii population as a result of Shii religiopolitical activism in recent years. We can extend his argument by contending that the emphasis put on an exclusive Shii identity in the wake of Shia religiopolitical activism has also bridged the intellectual and psychological gap between the modern-educated Shii youth and intellectuals and the Shii religious establishment. This process has been facilitated by two interrelated factors: the two groups common allegiance to, and fascination with, the Iranian Revolution and the Shii clergys own politico-ideological transformation from a quietist and conservative group to a radical one. The anti-American and anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Shii religious leadership inspired by Irans Islamic Revolution has brought the madrasah-educated and the college-educated Shiah closer to each other. The anti-American demonology, appropriated both from the revolutionary ideology of Islamic Iran and from the Marxist affiliation of bygone days, seems to resonate well among religious and secular Shiah alike. The Islamic Revolution of Iran was a watershed event that, for the first time, politicized Pakistani Shiism, powerfully relinking it to its antiestablishment political roots. Before that revolution, Shii politics had focused not on issues of political and socioeconomic reforms or of foreign policy (which became prominent in the rhetoric of Shii leaders only after the Iranian Revolution), but on defending practices and rituals that were considered central to Shii religious lifenamely, observance of Muharram rituals, separate Islamic studies curriculum for Shii students, and the integrity of Shii beliefs. The Iranian Revolution had important consequences for Shii politics in Pakistan. First, there was a sudden shift of loyalty from the Shah to Imam Khomeini. Second, this shift of loyalty meant transformation of the Shii stance of political quietism to one of political radicalism. Third, the center of religious guidance and inspiration shifted from Najaf in Iraq to Qom in Iran.11 This meant the eclipse of Ayatollah Khoi of Najaf, the marja-i-taqlid of the overwhelming majority of the Pakistani Shiah, and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini as the new religious and political marja-i-taqlid. Fourth, the Iranian Revolution marked the emergence of a Shiah International with a well-defined capitalTehranand a charismatic leaderImam Khomeini. The Iranians projected Ayatollah Khomeini as a leader of all Muslims and as a model for those who wanted to challenge existing political orders in their own societies. Fifth, the revolution not only gave Pakistans Shii minority a sense of power and self-confidence to confront the Sunni majority and the government, but also kindled, in a powerful way, the millennial hope that the fourteen-centuries-long period of Shii subjugation had finally come to an end and the stage set for Shii rise to power and glory; it was as if history were taking a new turn in anticipation of the reappearance of Imam Mahdi. Sixth, as a consequence of the Iranian Revolution and the resultant Shii religiopolitical activism, Shiism in Pakistan became more centralized, more clericalist, more Iranianized,12 and more integrated with the international Shii community. The revolution especially reinforced the emotional and religious bonds of Pakistani Shiah with Iran and its religiocultural centers. More important, the revolution helped to create a political environment conducive to the transfer of Shii religious leadership from the proestablishment, conservative old guard to the young militants fired by Khomeinis revolutionary ideology. Before the Iranian Revolution, the religiopolitical leadership of the Pakistani Shii community was 11In 1995, a prominent leader of the Sipah-i-Muhammad, Ghulam Raza Naqvi, reported that about two thousand Pakistani Shiis were studying in madrasahs of Qom, Iran, alone. Until the early 1980s, the number of Pakistani Shii students in Qom madrasahs did not exceed one hundred. See Naqvis interview in the weekly Zindagi (Lahore), 20 July 1995, 25-27. 12While Shii Islam was becoming more Iranianized as a result of the Iranian influence, Sunni Islam, during the same period, was becoming more Arabicized as a result of the mass migration of Pakistani labor to the Gulf states and the generous funding of Saudi Arabia to the Pakistani Sunni madrasahs and to the jihadi organizations involved in the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. mostly in the hands of the Shii clergy who had migrated from India. Until the 1970s, almost all prominent Shii leaders were Muhajirs, based mostly in Karachi, and were trained in famous Shii madrasahs of Lucknow in India.13 None of them were trained in Iran, although several of them had received advanced training in Najaf, Iraq. The majority of these Urdu-speaking (Muhajir) Shii leaders remained closely associated with various regimes, and even during the 1980s, when Zia-ul-Haq introduced Sunni-oriented Islamic laws, which were vehemently opposed by the Shiah and which occasioned the emergence of Shii political activism, senior Karachi-based Shii religious leaders cautioned Shii youth organizations against agitational politics.14 The qualitative change in Shii religious and political leadership came about in the early 1980s with the emergence of Allamah Arif Hussain al-Hussaini, a young Pashtun Shii leader from Parachinar in the NWFP, who had studied in Najaf with Imam Khomeini and, when expelled from Najaf by the Iraqi authorities for undesirable political activities, moved to Qom, where he remained until 1978. Arif al-Hussaini, who was assassinated in 1988, is the one person who could be identified as the architect of Shii radicalism in Pakistan.15 A charismatic leader in his own right, he was a true follower of the line of Imam Khomeini. It was mainly through his personal contacts that, during the 1980s, hundreds of Pakistani Shiis received scholarships for study at Iranian seminaries. The most important legacy of Arif al-Hussaini was that, despite the 13An overwhelming majority of the Urdu-speaking Shii ulama were trained in four prominent Shii madrasahs of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India: Sadarul Afzal, Sultanul Madaris, Nizamiyyah Arabi College, and Madrasatul Waizin. 14Allama Nasirul Ijtihadi of Karachi was closely associated with Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto during 1972-1977 and even blessed the Pakistan Peoples Party as the party closest to the ideology of Ahl-i-Bayt. During the Zia-ul-Haq era, Ijtihadi cautioned moderation to his Shii followers and asked them to seek solutions to their problems through peaceful negotiations rather than confrontation. Later, he even suggested that Zia-ul-Haq become president for life. See the weekly Shahid (Lahore), 12 March 1989. 15Rahimullah Yusufzai, Into the Mainstream, monthly Herald (Karachi), September 1988, 30-34. deep socioeconomic heterogeneity of the Shii population of Pakistan, he was able, in a relatively short period of time, to give most of the Shiah a solid sense of communal identity. Under his leadership, the Tehrik-i-Jafariyyah was able to mobilize Shiah from Parachinar to Karachi and transform many of the Pakistani Shiahs political orientation from quietism to radicalism. Probably single-handedly, Arif al-Hussaini internationalized Pakistans Shii clergy, making them aware of the significance of such issues as the revolution in Iran, the war in Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, the question of Palestine, the role of the United States in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and the role of Saudi Arabia in Southwest Asia.16 He raised and discussed these issues and developments from the perspective of their impact on and consequences for the interests of Shiah, both at the national and the international levels.17 Also, it was through him that Iran exercised considerable political influence in the countrys Shii community. It is helpful to identify four distinct tiers of Shii political activity in Pakistan since the emergence of the leadership of Arif al-Hussaini. The first and foremost has been protection of the integrity of Shii religious beliefs and the freedom to observe Shii religious rituals publicly. Negotiations with national political authorities and local administrative authorities sought to address issues of this type in a relatively nonconfrontational manner. The second tier involved negotiations with the government authorities to seek adequate Shii representation in state-sponsored Islamic institutions, such as the Islamic Ideology Council, the National Curriculum Committee, provincial textbook boards, and federal and provincial zakat councils. The third consisted of attempts to reach out to nonsectarian and moderate Sunni religious leaders and groups in order to isolate extremist Sunni groups, such as the Sipah-i-Sahabah, and to delegitimize their claim to represent the Sunni majority. Less than one year before his assassination in Peshawar, 16The Muslim (Islamabad), 3 July 1987. 17Ibid., 5 July 1987. Arif al-Hussaini had started de-emphasizing the sectarian character of the Tahrik-i-Nafaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafariyyah (TNFJ) by stating that it was neither sectarian nor narrowminded and that its appeal transcends religious sects and nationalities. The TNFJs objectives were rearticulated as pan-Islamism and establishment of an Islamicnot a Shii or Sunnistate in its pristine glory.18 The fourth tier was related to the Islamization measures introduced by the state authorities in law and education and to the broader issue of the future political role of the Shiah in Pakistans politics. Three major Shii organizations emerged to resist what they saw as the rising Sunni militancy and the growing trend toward Sunni-based Islamic legislation: the TNFJ, the mainstream Shii religiopolitical organization, which sought to operate within the political process and which later changed its name to Tehrik-i-Jafariyyah (TJ); the Imamiyyah Students Organization; and the Sipah-i-Muhammad, the last two being militant Shii groups that aimed to stem the tide of the militancy of the Sunni Sipah-i-Sahabah. The TNFJ was founded in 1979 at a convention of Shii Muslims in Bhakkar (Punjab) at the initiative of Allama Sayyid Jafar Hussain Mujtahid. Inspired by the Islamic Revolution of Iran and threatened by General Zia-ul-Haqs Sunni-oriented Islamic legislation, the Shii religious leadership decided to launch a religiopolitical movement of their own to assert their separate identity, to protect their religious rights, and to prevent the Sunni majority and the government from imposing on them an interpretation of the Shariah that did not conform to Jafari law. The TNFJ first tested its strength in July 1980 by challenging both the Sunni hierarchy and the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq: it launched a movement to resist the compulsory collection of zakat from the Shiah. Faced with a siege of the capital city of Islamabad by thousands of Shiah youth who had gathered from all over Pakistan, the government acceded to Shii demands and, amending the zakat legislation, exempted the Shiah from paying zakat. Encouraged by the success of its first political move and 18Ibid., 3 July 1987. emboldened by the moral and political (and financial) support it received from neighboring Iran, the TNFJ, in July 1987, transformed itself into a political party under the leadership of Arif al-Hussaini with a program to struggle for Shii rights, promote pan-Islamism, oppose US imperialism, and support Islamic revolution.19 The TJ has since emerged as the sole organization representing the political interests and religious concerns of Pakistans Shii minority. It has maintained close relations with Iranian authorities and has generally followed the Iranian line in all matters of foreign policy, such as the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, the Middle East peace process, and developments in Afghanistan. The political program of the TJ includes introduction of Jafari law for the Shiah, achievement of autonomy for Shii religious endowments and of complete freedom for the public observance of Shii religious rites, establishment of close relations with Iran, and putting an end to the American influence on Pakistans foreign policy.20 During the 1988 parliamentary elections, however, the TJ candidates failed to win even a single seat. Running for sixteen National Assembly seatsthirteen from the Punjab and one each from Sind, Baluchistan, and the NWFPthe TJ obtained less than 2 percent of the votes polled. Since there are few electoral constituencies in the country with a solid Shii minority, the TJ is unlikely to be able to win any parliamentary seats on its own platform. Furthermore, the majority of the Shiah consider it politically more expedient to work within the mainstream progressive, secular, and nationalist parties. In the past, the Shii vote had rallied large numbers to the Pakistan Peoples Party. In the 1997 elections, however, Shii voters were equally divided between the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Muslim League, with the latter enjoying a slight edge.21 19ManshurTehrik-i-Nafaz-i-Fiqh-e-Jaafriya (Lahore: Tehrik-i-Nifaz-e-Fiqh-i-Jaafariyah Pakistan), 15. 20Ibid., 2-18. 21Gallup Pakistan, Gallup Exit Poll, 1997 (Islamabad: Gallup Pakistan, 1997). While the TJ operates as an umbrella Shii religiopolitical organization, the Imamiyyah Students Organization and Sipah-i-Muhammad have emerged as the militant wings of Shii political activism.22 As the Shii counterpart of the Sunni Sipah-i-Sahabah, the Sipah-i-Muhammad believes in khun ka badlah khun (an eye for an eye; literally, blood for blood) and exhorts its activists to seek martyrdom by eliminating the dushmanan-i-Hussain [enemies of Hussain]. Well armed with sophisticated automatic weapons and remote-controlled bombs, the Sipah-i-Muhammad militants are swift to settle accounts with the militants of the Sipah-i-Sahabah. A bomb exploded in a Shii mosque means a bomb exploded in a Sunni mosque, and assassination of a Shii leader means assassination of a Sunni leader. To conclude: In its origins, Shii political activism in Pakistan was, primarily, a reaction against the rising Sunni militancy spearheaded by Sunni extremists and against Zia-ul-Haqs state-sponsored program of Islamizationboth Sunni militancy and the Islamization program having been perceived as threatening the integrity of Shii religious beliefs and jurisprudence. Irans Islamic Revolution only deepened the Pakistani Shiahs resolve to take independent political initiatives to safeguard their religious interests. The Iranian Revolution also gave the Pakistani Shiah a sense of pride and power and the confidence to face both Sunni sectarianism and the government with greater courage and boldness. In addition, the war against the Soviets in the 1980s and the civil war in the 1990s in Afghanistan provided a convenient alibi for the Sunni religious organizations in Pakistan to receive vast amounts of funds from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in the name of Afghan relief and jihad projects and then to use these funds, or part of them, for their sectarian activities. The Iranians did not lag far behind either; however, given the political and diplomatic sensitivities of their direct involvement in Pakistans religious 22For a report on the Imamiyyah Students Organizations activists storming into the federal secretariat in Islamabad in 1991, see The Frontier Post (Lahore), 6 August 1991, 1. politics, their moves had to be more cautious and subtle during Zia-ul-Haqs military regime. With the political instability in Pakistan increasing after Zia-ul-Haqs death, and with civilian regimes rapidly succeeding one another during the subsequent decade, the Iranians became bolder in challenging the Saudi influence in their neighboring region. For years now, in the mosques, madrasahs, and streets of Pakistan, both Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a proxy war for religiopolitical influence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in the newly independent Muslim republics of Central Asia. A segment of Shii political activism also became integrally related to, or entangled with, the clash between the two oil-rich Muslim countries for regional religious hegemony. Another factor that contributed to the rise of sectarian-and ethnic-based political identities and activism was the prolonged absence of channels of political participation through mainstream national political parties during the military-dominated rule of Zia-ul-Haq. As I have argued elsewhere, the eleven years of Zia-ul-Haqs military government gave rise to a situation in which political discontent was expressed in ethnic and sectarian protests and demands. The restrictions on national political parties and the suspension of the normal political process created a vacuum that was filled by the emergence of ethnic, sectarian, and biradari (kinship) organizations with their particularistic demands and agendas.23 In other words, identity politics became a surrogate for politics of empowerment and material interests. Shii political activism is seen as especially disturbing by the state authorities. First and foremost, it creates considerable diplomatic problems for the Pakistan-Iran relations. The problems become aggravated when Sunni militants extend their fight to target Iranian diplomats in Pakistan. Second, any religiously based opposition is seen as dangerous because it raises issues of political legitimacy and because it puts up demands that, lacking a basis in divine injunction, are not easily susceptible to compromise and 23Mumtaz Ahmad, Islamization and Sectarian Violence in Pakistan, Intellectual Discourse 6 (1998), 1:11-37. political bargaining. Third, at the same time that they present their demands, the religious groups deny the legitimacy of secular political authorities to decide issues of religious natureissues that, theoretically, can only be decided by the established religious authorities. And finally, a Shii political agitation is perceived as dangerous by Pakistani political authorities simply because it is Shii: to handle opposition by a religious minority requires both sensitivity and ingenuity, two qualities that Pakistani politicians often lack. The state authorities do not want to be accused of partiality and of discrimination against a minority sect. But one might also argue that Shii political activism is not as threatening to the stability of the state or of a given regime as is the religiopolitical mobilization of the Sunni ulama and Sunni religious organizations. Shii political agitation, howsoever strong, intense, or widespread, cannot alone dislodge a regime, howsoever weak. It may, on the contrary, help the regime in mobilizing, as a countermeasure, support of the Sunni establishment. When a regime is threatened by Shii political agitation, the Sunni establishment is very likely to rally round Sunni rulers as a show of sectarian solidarity, as happened during the Zia-ul-Haq period. The fundamental fact is that the Shiah in Pakistan are a minority. Shii political activism, as long as it remains an integral part of the activity of mainstream political parties, will not cause any ripples, as has been attested by the events until the 1970s. But Shii political activism qua Shii political activism will certainly provoke a Sunni backlash, as has happened since the middle 1980s. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:73-81 Pressures on the Muslim Minority in India * Theodore P. Wright, Jr. The Muslim minority in the Republic of India is the largest such in the world, 120 million, the fourth largest Muslim population after Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. But given the one billion total population of India, it is only 12 percent of the whole. This minority is widely scattered, being a majority in only one state, Jammu and Kashmir, and in a couple of districts within states.1 Legally, Indian Muslims are equal citizens of the country, entitled not only to the usual protections of the law, but to special rights. Along with other minorities, they enjoy constitutional guarantees (Articles 14, 21, 27, 28, and 30) of freedom of religious practice, management of their own institutions (including educational ones), and freedom from official discrimination.2 Supposedly temporarily, pending creation of a common civil code, the Muslim Personal Law (Shariah) remains in effect, just as, ironically, in Israel.3 In practice, the poor economic situation of most Indian Muslims has been steadily getting worse since the detachment of the * Theodore P. Wright, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, State University of New York, Albany. 1Syed Shahabuddin and Theodore P. Wright, Jr., India: Muslim Minority Politics and Society in Islam in Asia: Religion, Politics, and Society, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 152-176. 2Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), chapter 4, The Constitutional Framework. 3Martin Edelman, Courts, Politics and Culture in Israel (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994). Muslim majority areas of Pakistan at Partition in 1947 halved their proportion of the population from 24 percent. Emigration to Pakistan also drained off much of the communitys upper-and middle-class leadership. This is not enough to wield significant political influence although a class of Indian Muslim politicians has benefited from bargaining with political parties for the countrys Muslim vote bank. Lacking the reserved places in legislatures, universities, and the civil service that it had enjoyed under the British and that were granted in the constitution instead to the Scheduled castes and tribesand some now to the other Backward Castesthe bulk of the Muslim community has sunk into poverty in urban ghettos.4 A small number of businessmen and movie starslargely in the western and southern coastal citiessuch as Azim Premji, the tenth most powerful billionaire in the world, have flourished from trade and remittances from the Persian Gulf. But a disproportionate number of these merchants are Ismailis, a minority within a minority, who do not provide acceptable role models for the Sunnis. But even these merchants have been targeted in the Mumbai and Gujarat pogroms of 1992 and 2002, respectively. The predicament of Indian Muslims is of historical origin, reinforced by post-Partition enmity between India and Pakistan.5 Northern India and what is now Pakistan were invaded and ruled from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries by Muslim dynasties of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Mongol origin. A majority of the indigenous Buddhists and Hindus were converted to Islam in the northwest and northeast,6 but not in the political and cultural heartland of Hindustan, the Yamuna-Ganges valley. Therefore, the principal Muslim states in the north and the Deccan Plateau 4Omar Khalidi offers a somewhat more optimistic picture in chapter 3, Muslims in Indian Economy, of his Indian Muslims since Independence (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995), and in his forthcoming Indian Muslim Society and Economy, in Oriente Moderno, as does Syed Shahabuddin in his editorial in the final issue of Muslim India of 2002. 5Imtiaz Ahmed, Pakistan and the Indian Muslims, Quest 93 (1975), 1:39-47. 6Richard M. Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). constituted an alien military elite ruling over mass subjects, both low-status converts and unconverted Hindus. In practice, the Hindu institution of endogamous caste (jati) penetrated north Indian Islam and produced a stratified social structure of quasi castes: the Ashraf, or nobles, including Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet), Shaykhs (other Arab and Sufi descendants), Mughals, and Pathans, lording it over the vast majority of converts (ajlaf) in occupational biradaris, or subgroups.7 This situation is somewhat comparable to Muslim Spain (711-1492) and the Ottoman Balkans (1453-1912). It produced, even among the converts, what I call a former ruling elite mentality, a type of minority that is peculiarly demanding and unadaptable to the loss of political power and prestige and is, besides, provocative of majority backlash.8 This needs to be qualified for southern and coastal India, where Islam came through the peaceful settlement of Arab merchants who learned the local languages and married local women, producing the Moplahs, Rowthers, Marikayyars, and others. The repeated wars (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) between India and Pakistan over Kashmir have naturally exacerbated relations in India between the majority and minority communities, the latter community often suspected of disloyalty.9 By way of comparison, one can point to Slobodan Milosevics attempts to revive, in the late 1980s, memories of Serbian defeat and conquest by the Turks; his actions rebounded on the Bosnian Muslim minority in the 1990s. Regarding the Kashmir dispute, the hostility between the two British successor states, India and Pakistan, arises from their contradictory ideological bases: Pakistan regards itself as a haven for Muslims (just as Zionist Israel claims to be for Jews), and India is, or 7Ghaus Ansari, Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh, Eastern Anthropologist 13 (Special Number, 1960), 5-80. 8Theodore P. Wright, Jr., Identity Problems of Former Elite Minorities, Journal of Asian Affairs, 1 (1976), 2:58-63; Theodore P. Wright, Jr., and Omar Khalidi, Majority Hindu Images, Stereotypes and Demands of the Muslim Minority in India: The Backlash, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 12 (1991), 2:321-334. 9Theodore P. Wright, Jr., Hindu-Muslim Mutual Stereotypes in South Asia, Journal of Asian and African Affairs 3 (1991), 1:7-16. at least was until 1998, a supposedly secular state eager to retain a Muslim majority province as proof of its modernity. One would think that the coming to power in New Delhi of a coalition dominated by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), which is dedicated to replacing secularism with Hindutva as the basis of Indian nationality, would make the Kashmir dispute more readily resolvable, but then the BJP and its ideological core, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), do not recognize the legitimacy of Pakistan (any more than some Arabs accept the Zionist entity) but aim eventually to restore Akhil Bharat (undivided India).10 This brings us to the present existential crisis of the Muslim minority in India, parallel to, if not yet as disastrous as that of, the Palestinian subjects of Israel. India has experienced a crescendo of communal (i.e., Hindu-Muslim) riots since shortly before the death of its first prime minister and Congress Party leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964. There has been much controversy over the causes and cure for these deadly outbreaks,11 but the Hindutvadis have always claimed that all they wanted of Muslims is that they become good Indians and integrate into the mainstream.12 10Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Logic of Hindutva vs. the Logic of Secularism: Would Resolution of the Kashmir Dispute Solve Indo-Pakistan Conflict? (paper delivered at the 17th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Heidelberg, Germany, September 2002). 11Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence in Riots and Pogroms, ed. Paul R. Brass (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 12Balraj Madhok, Indianisation of Indian Muslims (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1970). Donald E. Smith, in India as a Secular State, p. 375, quotes N. C. Chatterjee, president of the Hindu Mahasabha, on cultural changes that Indian Muslims would have to undergo to become acceptable nationals of the Indian state: accept the Ramayana and Mahabharata as their epics and reject the Arabic and Persian classics; regard Ramachandra, Shivaji, and Hindu gods Rama and Krishna as their heroes and condemn Muslim historical figures as foreign invaders and traitors; discard their Arabic names in favor of Hindu names. He adds, If the Muslims of India would The post-Babri Masjid demolition riots in 1992-93, especially in Bombay,13 culminating in the organized pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat in February/March 2002, were a sign that the majoritys plans for the minority changed from forced assimilation to genocide or expulsion, not unlike the Israeli governments aim to transfer (read ethnically cleanse) the Palestinians during the second intifada.14 Other signs of this shift included the act of compiling, before the riots, lists of Muslims to be killed and Muslim businesses to be burnt down.15 In all this, the police were complicit. As recently as the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1997,16 I could chide Indian Muslims with a list of malign policies imposed by other states on their minorities, but not by the Indian state on Muslims: genocide, expulsion, denial of equal citizenship or franchise, residential segregation, forcible religious conversion, deprivation of mother tongue, official job discrimination, denial of educational opportunity, prohibition of land ownership, expropriation of businesses, and clothing restriction. The very next year, the dreaded transfer of power at the Centre to the BJP, the party of Hindutva, comparable to the accession of the Likud in Israel in 2000, sharpened the urgency of the fate of the two minorities, Indian Muslims and Palestinians, posed by the aforementioned policies. Both ruling parties were, for some time, accept the Hindu manner of dress, personal laws, and customs from birth to death, they could then retain their own religion! 13Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Muslim Minority Before and After Ayodhya in Hinduism and Secularism: After Ayodhya, ed. Arvind Sharma (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 1-25. 14Ran HaCohen Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future, Letter from Israel, Antiwar.com, 30 December 2002, http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h123002.html; Jonathan Cook, Finishing the Job, Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt), 14-21 November 2002. 15M. L. Sondhi and Apratim Mukarji, eds., The Black Book of Gujarat (New Delhi: Manak, 2002). For the reply of the Hindutvadis, see Ramesh Rao and Koenraad Elst, eds., Gujarat after Godhra: Real Violence, Selective Outrage (New Delhi: Har-Anand, 2003). 16Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Indian State and its Muslim Minority: Fr om Dependency to Self-Reliance? in India: Fifty Years of Democracy and Development, ed. Yogendra K. Malik and Ashok Kapur (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 1998). restrained by secular coalition partners,17 but the electoral victories of Ariel Sharons Likud in Israel in 2003 and Chief Minister Nirendra Modis BJP in Gujarat in 2002 have reduced this impediment to majority tyranny through democratic means. Transfer of the Palestinians out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is openly defended in Israel by some cabinet members just as Modis followers advocate application of the Gujarat formula (pogrom, followed by electoral victory) for other Indian states. In keeping with this plan, the VHP (United Hindu Committee) now demands the building of a Ram temple on the Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya,18 and a Hindu leader is handing out thousands of lethal trishuls (pitchforks) to his followers in Rajasthan. The issue of another mosque inside a Hindu temple is raised in Madhya Pradesh as well. What alternative prognoses can we sketch for the worlds largest Muslim minority? 1. The worst scenario is genocide like the Armenian and Jewish holocausts. Indian Muslim intellectuals have tended to dismiss this possibility either on grounds of sheer numbers or by expecting that Pakistan would intervene to protect Indian Muslims. This argument underestimates the technical and administrative capacity of the modern state. The weakness of another barrier to genocideworld public opinionwas exhibited in Rwanda and Kampuchea, and, in the case of India, this barrier would be further weakened by the widespread Islamophobia in the United States. If Pakistan attempted to protect Indian Muslims, it, too, would be exterminated by nuclear preemption by India.19 2. Another possibility is mass expulsion or induced emigration of Muslims, as happened in Catholic Spain in 1492 and 1607. The mass exodus of Indias Hindu and Muslim populationsa kind of 17Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Impact of Coalition Politics in India on Indian Minorities, Indian Journal of Secularism 5 (2001), 2:1-11. 18Despite VHP Assurance, Ayodhya Bomb is Ticking, Times of India, 2 March 2002. 19Indias External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha threatened to take preemptive action against Pakistan, citing the American precedent against Iraq. US Vetoes Indias Threat to Act Against Pakistan, Times of India, April 2003. unplanned exchangein the Punjab in 1947, of Palestinians from the British mandate in 1948, of East Germans in 1945, and of the Amerinds from the American South in 1833 shows what can happen during an internal tumult. 3. The Muslim minority may be reduced to second-class status or forcibly assimilated, with its culture lost. Some would say that this is already happening in Uttar Pradesh, where Urdu has been eliminated from elementary education.20 Forced assimilation would require a complete revision of the Indian constitution to substitute a Hindu rashtra (state) for the present secular document. Only a landslide electoral triumph of the BJP nationally would make this conceivable. Yet, even the Nazis won only 42 percent of the votes in Germany in 1932, but with his Nationalist allies, Hitler was able to push through the destruction of the Weimar republic.21 Instead, a Congress-led coalition won the 2004 election, giving the Muslims a reprieve. 4. A more benign scenario would be equal citizenship for Muslims, with their special protection stripped. This is the path of self-reliance for which I argued at the 1997 conference.22 The Gujarat pogrom, which targeted the very class of Muslim merchants whom I had presented as a model to North Indain Muslims, does not bode well for this course of action, but such a model may again become viable if Indian secularists and the residual Left were to succeed in reversing the trend to Hindutva in the new middle class. However, this presumes some settlement of the quasi war with Pakistan, which incites the Hindu middle class against the Muslim minority. 5. An even less painful long-term scenario would be a return to 20Syed Shahabuddin, Urdu in India, Education and MuslimsA Trinity without a Church, Annual of Urdu Studies 18 (2003), 2:567-578. 21See Paul Kennedys remarks on the immense popularity of the National Socialist regime after Hitler took power in Germany in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 304-306. 22Theodore P. Wright, Jr., Muslim Self-Reliance in India: The Model of the Business Communities, Indian Journal of Politics 21 (1997), 3-4:49-55. the vision of Nehru and the Marxists, the modernization of Indian Islam in the manner now championed by Asghar Ali Engineer, the Daudi Bohra reformist of Mumbai, his Center for Study of Society and Secularism, and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC. This ideal outcome from the modernist point of view would reduce Islam, a total way of life like orthodox Judaism, to a private matter of personal belief and practice, as religion has been in the West. Ahmad Yousif argues convincingly in that such a development would not constitute freedom of religion except in a biased Western liberal definition.23 The irreconcilable difference is also manifest in the current debates in India over whether the right to proselytize and convert Hindus (especially Dalits and tribals) to Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism is a part of that freedom guaranteed by the constitution. 6. For the sake of logical completeness, one must consider a possible outcome of ethnic status reversal, by means of which Muslims would become dominant, if not a majority, in India. That this change is not totally inconceivable is illustrated by such cases as the reversal of the Jewish-Arab ratio in Israel (1948-67), the Muslim-Christian ratio in Lebanon (1943-75), the Russian-Turkic power ratio in Central Asia (1991), and the white-black ratio in South Africa (1994). The ethnic numbers game may produce a power reversal in several ways, two being mass conversion to Islam and Pakistani military conquest, both exceedingly unlikely in contemporary South Asia. The status reversal in the case of Lebanon resulted from the Christians and Muslims differential birth rates and immigration-emigration rates. In India, the differential birth rates of Hindus and Muslims are much feared by the Hindutvadis despite the fact that Hindus make up 81 percent of Indias population.24 23Ahmad Yousif, Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20 (2000), 1:29-41. 24Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Ethnic Numbers Game in South Asia: Hindu-Muslim Conflicts over Family Planning, Conversion, Migration and Census, in Culture, Ethnicity and Identity, ed. William C. McCready (New York: The Academic Press, 1983), 405-427; Will Youmans, Understanding the Existential Threat: Israels Finally, what are the possible resolutions of the Indian Muslims dilemma? The advice one might have given to German Jews in 1932, Get out as quickly as you can with as many assets as you can transfer, has little relevance for Indias large and poverty-stricken Muslim minority. If the Indian Muslims were to arm themselves and join the various existing underground guerrilla resistance movements,25 the Muslim community would face the wrath of the Indian government. Short of these desperate measures, and as long as the BJP lacks an absolute majority in parliament and, therefore, depends on more secular regional allies, the obvious tactic for Muslims is to support in elections whatever candidate and party has the best chance of defeating the BJP and to promote whatever secular coalition can muster a majority. The short-run prospects are not good; in fact, they are extremely dangerous, except in South Indiaand even there violence is spreading.26 It is time for cool calculation, not rash adventures. Indian Muslims must decide what central issues need to be resolved and what essential demands must be made to preserve the core identity of Indias Muslims. These are the same questions that Muslims in the West are asking themselves. Demographic Obsession, Counterpunch, 7 December 2002, http://www. counterpunch.org/youmans1207.html. 25Naxalism Spreading its Clout in More Areas, Times of India, 16 April 2003; Theodore P. Wright, Jr., Does Democratic Political Participation Reduce Political Violence? The Contrary Case of the Muslim Minority in India (paper delivered at the conference on Democratization and Political Violence in Muslim Societies, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Arlington, VA, 6 April 2002). 26Theodore P. Wright, Jr., The Spread of Communal Violence to the South, Eastern Anthropologist, special edition on Muslims, 53 (2000), 3-4:367-373. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:83-106 Islam and Minorities: The Case of the BahՒs * Christopher Buck Of all religious minorities in the Middle East, BahՒs are typically the least able to practice their religion freely. With several notable exceptions, the current situation throughout the modern Middle East and in Muslim countries generally is that BahՒs cannot openly promote their faith. However, the governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh allow the BahՒs to hold public meetings, publicly teach the Faith, establish BahՒ centers, as well as elect BahՒ administrative councils (known as local and national spiritual assemblies). In Pakistan, moreover, government officials have occasionally attended events at BahՒ centers. And in Indonesia, after several decades of quiet growth, the Faith is now legally recognized and its adherents free to elect spiritual assemblies (BahՒ councils). In Turkey, the BahՒ Faith has been legal for decades. The BahՒ community enjoys legal status in Albania and in most Central Asian nations as well. Over the past few years, a groundswell of articles and dialogue on this subject has appeared. Persian-language media in the United States have begun to openly talk about the plight of the BahՒs in Iran, with some predicting that, in Irans future civil society, even the BahՒs must be given freedom of religion. Moreover, several non-BahՒ Iranian academics are beginning to speak out about the conspiracy of silence against the Faith. Evidence, in the form of listener feedback, indicates that a * Christopher Buck teaches in the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures, and the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. wide-ranging audience in Iran is listening to daily Persian-language BahՒ shortwave and satellite broadcasts.1 Speaking out on the state of affairs with respect to governments that have implemented anti-BahՒ measures, however, is sensitive and has to be approached with a certain degree of delicacy. To criticize an Islamic state in which a small BahՒ enclave exists could literally imperil that community. What freedom of religion they may enjoy is precarious. At best, BahՒs continue to lead a virtually clandestine existence. At worst, in those extreme cases in which its institutions were proscribed by law, BahՒs have simply dissolved their elected administrative councils in keeping with the BahՒ principles of loyalty to just governments and compliance with the rule of law. Since BahՒs are forbidden to act against their respective governments in any way, it is imprudent even dangerousto inventory the situation country by country. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a special case, however, because its anti-BahՒ policies are notorious and have been openly condemned by the international community for nearly a quarter of a century. This notoriety has, like the Salman Rushdie affair, resulted in much negative press for both Iran as a country and, more unfortunately, for Islam as a religion, even though Irans practice of Islam is peculiar to its own form of Shiism. This paper will argue that the BahՒ question raises serious questions in the West over just how tolerant Islam really is. One may say that popular perceptions of Islam will increasingly be shaped by how Muslim countries treat their minorities, especially religious minorities. The BahՒ case, with the possible exception of the Ahmadiyyah in Pakistan,2 is the premier test case of Islamic claims to religious tolerance. 1Payam-e-Doost is a BahՒ-sponsored radio program broadcast for a Farsi-speaking audience in Iran and abroad. Online: http://www.bahairadio.org/farsi/Enginfo.asp. 2Pakistans draconian laws against the Ahmadiyyah, who consider themselves pious Muslims, is a case in point, in which Mirza Ghulam Ahmads claim to revelation has precluded an Ahmadis right to openly practice Islam. See Antonio R. Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan (Montreal: Guernica, 1989), and Gualteri, The Ahmadis: Community, Gender, and Politics in a Muslim Society (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2004). The definitive study of the BahՒ question in Iran is Nazila 3 Ghaneas Human Rights, the U.N. and the BahՒs in Iran, written with special reference to international human rights law. In Iran, where the BahՒ Faith originated, BahՒs have historically been the target of persecution. This is all fully documented, of course. Much ink has been spilled over the bloodshed. Skipping over the history of their persecution to focus on the case of the BahՒ question in Islamic Iran, one may simply say that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran refocused the synergistic fusion of clerical and state intolerance of Irans largest religious minority, the BahՒs. Since the early days of the revolution, BahՒs have been subjected to systematic torture, execution, and economic deprivation until international pressure caused the regime to alter its plans to exterminate the BahՒ community. From 1982 to 2001, the UN International Commission on Human Rights had, for nearly each year for twenty consecutive years, adopted a resolution decrying the human rights situation in Iran. The oppression is now relatively quiescent, but still systemic. While the postrevolutionary persecution of BahՒs in Iran has attenuated, a subtle strangulation of the BahՒ community is now in effect, evidenced recently by unprovoked arrests and short-term detentions of BahՒs, confiscation of BahՒ properties, summary seizures of liquid assets, wrongful denial of rightful pensions, desecration or destruction of BahՒ cemeteries, official and public denunciations of the BahՒ religion, harassment of BahՒ teachers and students, the effective barring of qualified BahՒ students from higher education, and the barring of BahՒs from all government employment enforced as a matter of official policy and adroitly orchestrated. All attempts to obtain redress are procedurally frustrated or systematically denied, as BahՒs have no legal recourse under Irans constitution. Particularly egregious has been the recent 3Nazila Ghanea, Human Rights, the U.N. and the BahՒs in Iran (Oxford: George Ronald, 2002). See also Paul D. Allen, The BahՒs of Iran: A Proposal for Enforcement of International Human Rights Standards, Cornell International Law Journal 20, no. 337 (1987). destruction of BahՒ sacred sites in Iran, comparable to the Talibans demolition of two towering Buddha figures in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001.4 This might be more comprehensible, although no less justifiable, had BahՒs acted against Iran or Islam both of which they respect and honor. Paradoxically, BahՒs have a strong belief in the prophethood of Muhammad and in the authenticity and veracity of the Quran. The situation is even more peculiar for a BahՒ academic, like myself, teaching Islam5 in an effort to counteract the cultural Islamophobia that still predominates in the West, as the UN has rightly noted. 6 So why are BahՒs denied full freedom of religion throughout many states in the Muslim Middle East? There are two principal reasons for this: (1) BahՒs lack dhimmi (protected) status and are therefore excluded from Quranic protection, and (2) the BahՒ Faith is a post-Islamic religion7a theoretical impossibility considering Muhammads ontological status as the Seal of the Prophets (Quran 33:40). Apart from the Day of Judgment, Islam cannot conceive of a post-Islamic act of revelation, much less theologically tolerate a post-Islamic claim to revelation. Since the two founding figures of the BahՒ religion, known as the Bab (Sayyid Ali-Muhammad Shirazi, d. 1850) and Bahaullah (Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri, d. 1892), had each advanced theophanic claims,8 it is quite impossible, Islamically speaking, to accord BahՒs full 4BahՒs Decry Cultural Cleansing in Iran, BahՒ World News Service, 12 September 2004, http://news.bahai.org/story.cfm?storyid=323. 5See, for instance, Christopher Buck, Discovery, in The Blackwell Companion to the Quran, ed. Andrew Rippin (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). 6Abdelfattah Amor, United Nations Report on Religious Freedom in the U.S., http://www.religioustolerance.org/un_int02.htm. As special rapporteur in the field of religious freedom and tolerance, Amor has visited Australia, China, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and the United States. He visited the United States from 22 January to 6 February 1998. 7The former is the effect of the latter. 8For a first-order phenomenology of Bahullhs claims, see Christopher Buck, The Eschatology of Globalization: Bahullhs Multiple-Messiahship Revisited, in Studies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements and the Babi-BahՒ Faiths, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: Brill, 2004; Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions 104), 143 178. civil and religious rights. In Islamic countries where this religion is proscribed or highly regulated with oppressive effect, the BahՒ Faith should not exist, whether in theory or in practice. The problem is that it does. However, legal recognition of the BahՒ Faith is not without historical and legal precedent in the Middle East. In 1924, an Egyptian court ruled that the BahՒ Faith is a distinct religion; the same conclusion was reached in a landmark case in Turkey in 1959. Suffice it to say that prevailing Islamic theologies of pluralism are inclusivist at best, in which recognized religious minorities may enjoy Quranic protectionbut without parity, since such groups have a secondary status. Such legal recognition typically excludes BahՒ faith-communities throughout those countries in the Muslim Middle East that abide strictly by a conservatively interpreted Quranic and hadith-based legal code. Secularist models appear to afford more protection (in the form of legal recourse) for the BahՒs. Although the Islamic position is doctrinally understandable, sometimes it is morally wrong (by civil rights standards) to be doctrinally right. The theologically unacceptable prospect of a post-Islamic revelation has justified morally repugnant efforts to extirpate the BahՒ community in certain Muslim countries. This goes far to explain why BahՒs either have no constitutional rights (as under the Iranian constitution) or have restricted rights in certain other Islamic states. In this respect, the Iranian constitution contradicts the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, to which Iran is a signatory. These two documents stand in tension with each other, as will be explained. 9 Historically, of course, such policies and practices failed to contain the new religion. In fact, the BahՒ Faith is now a transplanted religion in the West, and, to make matters worse perhaps, the BahՒ community has established its administrative 9See Reza Afshari, An Essay on Scholarship, Human Rights, and State Legitimacy: The Case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Human Rights Quarterly 18 (1996), 3:544 593. capital, the BahՒ World Centre, on Mt. Carmel in Haifa, Israel, thereby exposing BahՒs to charges of Zionism and spying for Israel as popular pretexts for persecution. It should be noted that the BahՒ World Centre has its historical origins in what was once Ottoman Syria, then British Palestine, and now Israel. This dates back to August 1868, when Sultan Abdul-Aziz exiled Bahaullah to the fortress of St. Jean dAcre in Akka for lifetime incarceration in what was universally reputed to be the worst penal colony in the Ottoman Empire. Early in their history, the BahՒs, both gradually and, in some cases, suddenly, rejected their Islamic ethos in favor of a full symbolic10 and practical identification with a new religious movement seen as an independent religion. This has effectively distanced the BahՒ claim to revelation from its immediate Islamic context. Interestingly, the BahՒ Faith is the first and only religion in Canada to have been incorporated by an act of Parliament (1949). Obviously, such legal recognition and protection has not been afforded the BahՒs in a number of countries throughout the Muslim Middle East, especially in the turbulent aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Except for the 444-day hostage crisis, the revolution was relatively peaceful, but its consequences were often violent and continue to be repressive. In 1980, immediately after the revolution, Canada took the lead in sponsoring human rights legislation within the UN and mobilized other member states and nongovernmental agencies (NGOs) in successfully passing a series of UN resolutionson an almost yearly basisfor nearly a quarter of a century. These resolutions have pressured Iran to honor the several international human rights instruments to which it has freely subscribed as a signatory. The latest in this series of resolutions was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 21 November 2003.11 According to one 10On BahՒ symbolism, see Christopher Buck, Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the BahՒ Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 11Since the original writing of this paper, another U.N. resolution passed on 20 December 2004. Passed by a vote of seventy-one to fifty-four, the Canadian-sponsored report: By a vote of 73 to 49, with 50 abstentions, the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution today that expresses serious concern over continuing violations of human rights in Iranand mentions specifically continuing discrimination against BahՒs and other religious minorities.12 The resolution welcomes [. . .] reports that religion will no longer be requested in the registration of births, marriages, divorces or deaths (1[c]). The resolution also approves [t]he reestablishment of the Majlis [Iranian Parliaments] Human Rights Commission with the hope that this body would complement the efforts undertaken by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (1[f]). The Islamic Human Rights Commission was established in March 1995 by Ayatollah Yazdi, following the precedent set in 1994 when the Iranian Parliament established its committee of thirteen deputies. To the best of my knowledge, neither of these two Iranian commissions has dealt with the BahՒ question. Such Iranian governmental human rights organizations, according to Reza Afshari, are little more than smoke-and-mirrors.13 Resolution 56/171 acknowledged that Iran had committed itself to [t]he establishment of the National Committee for the Promotion resolution called on Iran to eliminate all forms of discrimination based on religious grounds. The resolution decries the continuing discrimination against persons belonging to minorities, including Christians, Jews, and Sunnis, and the increased discrimination against the BahՒs, including cases of arbitrary arrest and detention, the denial of free worship or of publicly carrying out communal affairs, the disregard of property rights, the destruction of sites of religious importance, the suspension of social, educational, and community-related activities, and the denial of access to higher education, employment, pensions, and other benefits. See UN Expresses Concern about Irans BahՒs, BahՒ World News Service, 22 December 2004, http://news.bahai.org/story.cfm?storyid=341. See also Robert McMahon, Iran: Country Faces New UN General Assembly Censure On Human Rights, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 18 November 2004, http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/ 2004/11/ad3018b7-a8f7-49ef-a363-954cc97e7c58.html. 12BahՒ International Community Lauds Passage of UN Resolution on Human Rights in Iran, BahՒ World News Service, 21 November 2003, news. bahaiworldnews.org/story.cfm?storyid=259. 13Reza Afshari, Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 279. of the Rights of Religious Minorities, but this committee has yet to be launched. Even if it were, the BahՒ Faith would probably not fall under its purview. The BahՒ question is not even a question. It is a foregone conclusionviz., that this religion should never be allowed to flourish under an Islamic system. But to give entrance to that policy vitiates any claim to equal protection, procedural or substantive due process, or any other democratic principle that Islamic states may wish to claim. Iran has consistently stated that the BahՒ Faith is not a religion, but a political community, notwithstanding the fact that BahՒs are studiously apolitical to the extent that they abstain entirely from partisan politics, which they see as adversarial and, therefore, divisive. The resolution decries the absence of due process of law and expresses its concern [over] the continuing discrimination against persons belonging to minorities, in particular against BahՒs, Christians, Jews, and Sunnis. The resolution calls upon the Islamic Republic of Iran to implement fully the conclusions and recommendations of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the question of religious intolerance relating to the BahՒs and other minority groups, until they are completely emancipated (4[d]). Emancipation is simply what the BahՒs are seeking. But, religiously, it seems too much to ask of an Islamic theocracy. What force of law will ultimately prevail in this situation? For all practical purposes, the immediate solution appears to be the supremacy and preemptory authority of international law over the laws of Islamic states on issues of human rights. Ideally, international law will eventually become Islamicized, culturally adapted to Muslim societies and states. But the reach and force of international law is itself hampered by the fact that freedom of religion has never been codified in international law. Although freedom of religion is enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, its full codification in international law has yet to be enacted. Adopted by the General Assembly (without vote) in 1981, the UN resolved to adopt all necessary measures for the speedy elimination of such intolerance in all its forms and manifestations and to prevent and combat discrimination on the ground of religion or belief. (I would hazard to say that this UN declaration was, in large part, actuated by the crisis affecting the BahՒs of Iran.) Yet, over two decades later, the UNs Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief has yet to be raised to the level of an international convention, even though UN declarations on the elimination of racial discrimination and discrimination against women have already been codified as international law. On 26 August 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the BahՒ International Community observed that the UN has not succeeded in its efforts to secure freedom of religion under international law: Unfortunately, the United Nations has been unable to move beyond its Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, to create a convention on freedom of religion and belief. The ability of the United Nations to transform General Assembly declarations on race and on women into conventions only highlights its lack of success in the area of religion and belief. At issue here is the difference between a declaration and a convention in the context of international law. The reason a convention takes the force of international law is that it operates as a multilateral treaty. International law expert Natan Lerner explains that this declaration, while obviously of great moral and political significance, is not positive international law.14 Another expert in the field, Mohamed Eltayeb, points out that, in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, a number of Muslim countries attempted to 14Natan Lerner, Religion, Beliefs, and International Human Rights (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 52. construct alternative Islamic human rights instruments, which, however, have fallen far below the international standards.15 Ironically, some of the UN human rights language has made its way into the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Outlining the General Principles of the constitution, Article 13 states: Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education.16 These three religions are considered by Iranian clerics to be people of the Book and are therefore accorded Quranic protection. The effect of this provision is to deny BahՒs their freedom of religion. BahՒs are simply considered apostates, and their blood may be shed with impunity, perhaps even with religious sanction. Note that the vocabulary of human rights, which has been used in the Iranian constitution, does not carry the universal application characteristic of international law. Elsewhere in the constitution, under the rubric, The Rights of the People, Article 20 adds: All citizens of the country, both men and women, equally enjoy the protection of the law and enjoy all human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, in conformity with Islamic criteria.17 Clearly, the BahՒs do not conform to these religious criteria. This provision neither adumbrates the BahՒs as citizens nor vests them with rights. They are a people within a state, yet legally without a state (in terms of state protection), while being the target of that state. BahՒs are deprived of fundamental human rights because they do not, according to Islamic criteria, qualify collectively as a religion or individually as human. In many cases, BahՒs have quite literally been dehumanized. Ironically, international pressures may be the 15Mohamed S. M. Eltayeb, A Human Rights Approach to Combating Religious Persecution: Cases from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2001), 19 and 22. 16Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Salam Iran, http://www.salamiran.org/IranInfo/State/Constitution/. 17Ibid. single greatest factor in realizing certain Islamic reforms, which, of course, will have to be read back into the Quran and backed by supporting hadith, if only at the level of principle. In the years immediately following the 1979 revolution, clerics ordered the arbitrary arrest of BahՒs and the torture and execution of over two hundred of them (particularly members of BahՒ administrative bodies, often with demands that their families pay for the bullets used to kill them). Other actions taken against BahՒs include confiscation of property, seizure of bank assets, expulsion from schools and universities, denial of employment, cancellation of pensions (with demands that the government be reimbursed for past pension payments), desecration and destruction of BahՒ cemeteries and holy places, criminalizing BahՒ activities and thus forcing the dissolution of BahՒ administration, and pronouncing BahՒ marriages as illegal acts of prostitution. In addition, there were relentless propaganda campaigns aimed at inflaming anti-BahՒ passions to instigate mob violence and crimes against BahՒs. There are many documented instances of this state-instigated incitement to violence. This phase of the anti-BahՒ campaign has aptly been described as civil death18a cultural cleansing that collectively affects a community estimated to be three hundred thousand to half a million Iranians. After 1985, with Iran having been scandalized and sanctioned for its violation of the rights of BahՒs and other religious minorities, the number of executions of BahՒs sharply dropped, and, in 1987 and 1988, most of the BahՒs being held in prison were released. In the early 1980s, a proportionally large number of BahՒ childrenprobably most, but not allhad been expelled from public and private schools in Iran. (Iran Rahimpour, my wifes maternal aunt, was executed in Dizfl on 12 May 1982 for teaching BahՒ childrens classes during this period.) But international pressure caused that policy to be rescinded, and, in the late 1980s, the Iranian regime adopted a new policy of concealment. This shift in anti-BahՒ tactics masked a new and insidious strategy, 18Ann Mayer, quoted by Afshari, Human Rights in Iran, 126. formalized in a secret 1991 memorandum from the Iranian Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council on the BahՒ question. This document surfaced in 1993, first appearing in the report by Special Representative Reynaldo Galindo Pohl to the UN Commission on Human Rights. The BahՒ International Community has reproduced a facsimile and translation as evidence of the systematic nature of Irans anti-BahՒ campaign.19 The policy recommendations of this document are still in force. Personally endorsed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on 25 February 1991 and written by Dr. Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, secretary of the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council, this document advises government officials, among other things, to expel BahՒs from universities, once it becomes known that they are BahՒs. It further states: Deny them employment if they identify themselves as BahՒs; Deny them any position of influence. The policy effectively denies BahՒs the right to higher education, a policy that had already been in effect since 1979.20 No BahՒ can, in practice, attend university in Iran. As a result, BahՒs have organized the BahՒ Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), popularly known as BahՒ Open University, which has also been the target of government attack, especially in September 1998, when thirty-six BIHE professors and staff were arrested, some five hundred homes were raided, and equipment was confiscated. In an effective variation on the policy of ethnic cleansing, Iranian columnist Iqbal Latif calls Irans denial of BahՒs access to a university education [i]ntellectual cleansing of their ethnic 19BahՒ International Community, The BahՒ Question: Irans Secret Blueprint for the Destruction of a Religious Community: An Examination of the Persecution of the BahՒs of Iran (New York: BahՒ International Community, 1999), 49 (facsimile) and 5051 (translation). For a translation and facsimile, see Irans Secret Blueprint for the Destruction of the BahՒ Community, The BahՒ World, 2002, http://www.bahai.org/article-1-8-3-14.html. 20See Tahirih Tahririha-Danesh, The Right to Education: The Case of the Bah's in Iran, in BahՒ-Inspired Perspectives on Human Rights, ed. Tahirih Tahririha-Danesh (Juxta Publishing, 2001), http://www.juxta.com/humanrights-electronic-section11-1.1.pdf. brothers by the clergy-dominated regime.21 The economic oppression of the BahՒs is yet another urgent problem. A far more sinister purpose than the denial of higher education is the attempted genocide of the entire Iranian BahՒ community. In its recent message to the Iranian BahՒ community, the Universal House of Justice (internationally elected governing council for the BahՒ world) characterized the post-1979 persecutions of BahՒs in Iran as the calculated attempt at genocide of these past 25 years.22 How would non-BahՒ observers evaluate this statement in light of an international definition of attempted genocide? In American common law, for instance, all attempt crimes have the element of specific intent that the prosecution has the burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That seems clear enough on the part of the postrevolutionary regime. I am assuming, of course, that the term genocide here refers to language found in the secret 1991 memorandum by the Iranian Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council on the BahՒ question. The question of what constitutes attempted genocide consensed in international law has already been addressed by the World Federalist Organizations Campaign to End Genocide: The United Nations, Amnesty International, and other activist organizations report on human right violations against BahՒ. Annually, the UN Commission on Human Rights includes them in its reports on Iran. Yet, if [whether] the treatment of Iranian BahՒ fits into the limited United Nations definition of genocide might be questioned. Clearly, the attack on the group is based on religious distinctions manipulated by the political elite. Although the number of deaths has not reached the horrific levels of other cases of 21Iqbal Latif, Medieval Ignorance: The Silence of Iranian Polity Towards BahՒ Persecution, The Iranian, 5 August 2002, http://www.iranian.com/IqbalLatif/ 2002/August/Bahai/. 22Universal House of Justice, Day of the Covenant 26 November 2003: To the Followers of Bahaullah in the Cradle of the Faith, BahՒ Library Online,4 December 2003, http://bahai-library.com/?file=uhj_day_covenant_2003.html. genocide, Iran seeks to eliminate them as a group through murder and social deprivation, thus meeting the UN Conventions definition of genocide. 23 The question of attempted genocide aside, the reality seems to be that secular events (which may be religiously inspired) have acted and will continue to act to intervene in order to protect religions from each other (intercommunal conflict) and even from themselves (intracommunal conflict). Specifically, international law has emerged as the most effective guarantor of religious freedom and ultimately provides the only viable resolution to the BahՒ problem. But an Islamic resolution to the BahՒ problem is preferable, as Muslim communities would find a natural ally in BahՒs as advocates against Islamophobia. If I may coin this neologism, allow me to say that the current BahՒ-phobia that prevails in many Muslim Middle East countries feeds Islamophobia in the West, and reducing the former will mollify the harsh criticism that Islam is a tolerant religion in principle, but intolerant in practice. But, with one or two recent exceptions, Muslim intellectuals have not come forward in support of the rights of BahՒs as an expression of an authentic Islamic regard for human rights. According to Afshari, author of Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism: The Shiite Muslims have a long way to go in accepting the right of BahՒs to assert their claim to a universal religion that, in their belief, transcends Islam. This blind spot in the Iranian consciousness, even among most iconoclastic intellectuals, has been an unexamined aspect of modern Iranian society . . . . Secular Iranian writers are almost legendary in expressing poetic solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the world. Sadly, they remained wordless, during both the monarchy and the theocracy, on the BahՒ sufferings.24 The Iranian regime has resisted accepting the fact that the BahՒ Faith is a religion. Under the current theocracy, Iranian President Muhammad Khatami denied human rights violations at a press 23World Federalist Organization, Campaign to End Genocide, BahՒ in Iran, http://www.endgenocide.org/genocide/bahai.html. 24Afshari, Human Rights in Iran, 128. conference in Paris on 29 October 1999 and dismissed such reports as the BahՒ organizations propaganda outside Iran. Khatamis reference to the BahՒ organization is instructive: He is careful to avoid using the term religion in connection with the BahՒs. For several years, the Islamic Republic of Iran had consistently demanded that human rights representatives should stop referring to BahՒs as a religious minority in Iran, insisting on this as a precondition to cooperation with the UN.25 Afshari comments: No savvy diplomat could have expected that the Commission on Human Rights would ever deny BahՒs the status of a religious minority. In fact, this issue has continued to be the real problem for the diplomats; their clerical mentors had been blinded by their hatred of the BahՒs.26 Iran has been reluctant even to say that the BahՒ Faith is a false religion or its adherents are infidels. To acknowledge that the BahՒ Faith is a religion would be tantamount to an admission of the fact that freedom of religion in Iran does not apply to all faith-communities. Yet the secret Golpaygani document refers twice to the religious activities of the BahՒs.27 If the BahՒs constitute the largest religious minority in Iran, then their exclusion from the Iranian constitution is perforce willful. Even the staunchest Iranian critics of the regime have scarcely been able to utter the word BahՒ without fear of withering criticism or a blighted career. One prominent example of this is Iranian human rights author and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who totally ignores the BahՒs as a minority religion in her monograph on human rights in Iran.28 However, according to the Norwegian Nobel 25Latif, Medieval Ignorance. 26Afshari, Human Rights in Iran, 156157. 27Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, A Translation of the 1991 Iranian Government Document on the BahՒ Question, The BahՒ World, 2002, http://www.bahai.org/ article-1-8-3-20.html. A facsimile of the document is provided at the end of the translation. 28Shirin Ebady, History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran, trans. Nazila Fathi (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000), chapter 20, Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion. Committee, As for religious freedom, it should be noted that Ebadi also includes the rights of members of the [B]ahai community, which has had problems in Iran ever since its foundation.29 Notable here is the designation of the BahՒs as a religious community, which the regime has strenuously rejected. However, no independent documentation exists attesting to Ebadis public advocacy of the rights of Iranian BahՒs. Among non-Iranian writers, Iqbal Latif is one exception to this conspiracy of silence by Muslim reformers and human rights advocates. In the 5 August 2002 issue of The Iranian, Latif states: Bahais are an enigma in Iran! The Iranian regime, which doesnt really give a damn about their basic civil rights, flagrantly denies their existence by collectively dismissing the 500,000 strong communities as a nameless forgotten page of Iranian history. . . . . . . Bahais claim that their supreme mission is none other but the achievement of organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations was and remains, in my opinion, one of the most groundbreaking ideas of the 19th century. For such an inspiration to arise in the backward and medieval society of Qajar Persia is astonishing. . . . . . . One can remain detached from the rituals of the Bahai faith but undoubtedly it is very thought-provoking and [a] roadmap of future global constitution. . . . . . . Iranians can be proud of the fact that such a global visionary as Bahaullah was born in Tehran. He will be considered as one of the greatest visionar[ies] of the 19th century and Iranians should definitely take pride in that.30 Perhaps the only internal solution is for the Islamic world to subordinate its Sunna-sourced precedents to clear principles anchored in the Quran and Hadith with the aid of a rehabilitated sense of reason and with a generous application of analogy until precedent and principle are harmonized and aligned in favor of universally recognized and egalitarian principles that would even 29Norwegian Nobel Committee, Biography: Shirin Ebadi, http://www.nobel.se/ peace/laureates/2003/ebadi-bio.html. 30Latif, Medieval Ignorance. survive secular scrutiny. As the BahՒs have said for the past thirty years, Human rights are God-given rights. This may be an incipient theology of secularism. At any rate, the age-old Islamic division of the World of Islam and the World of War must now be replaced by something else. For these are new historic times. But this is wishful thinking. According to Ghanea, official constitutional recognition of the BahՒs may be too much to ask: Neither the BahՒ International Community nor the Special Representative of the human rights situation of Iran has asked for the BahՒs of Iran to be recognized as one of the listed minorities in the Iranian Constitution. This is of enormous consequence for Iran, which may consider the primacy of Islam compromised by official constitutional recognition of a post-Islamic religion.31 Recognition of the Iranian BahՒ community as a religious minority has its own limitations in international law, as Ghanea elsewhere observes: This leads us to a further political dimension: that of the lack of agreed definitions for either religion or minority in human rights law.32 While Islamic sensitivities should be respected, they do not outweigh human rights considerations. Strangely, sometimes secular values can be more universal than religious ones. In a clash of religious value systems, international law may be the only practical arbiter until the conflict is resolved. Here, the conflict is one-sided, as BahՒs are strong supporters of the freedom of religion. In publicly saying, Human rights are God-given rights, the BahՒs appear to be sacralizing the secular, whereas secular notions of human rights probably had their genesis in religious values. In the case of Iranian Islam, there is a considerable distance between the constitutional rhetoric of respect for minority rights and the prevailing sociopolitical reality. As a consequence of Irans treatment of its BahՒ minority, the ultimate injury-in-fact is refractory damage to the reputation of Islam in the eyes of a critical public that uncritically tends to see Islam as monolithic. By the yardstick of minority rights, Irans efforts to preserve Islamic values 31Ghanea, 221. 32Ibid., 202. have arguably had the effect of perverting them. The majority of Muslims in Iran, however, have largely accepted the BahՒs, as the latter have earned their respect. The irony is that a powerful minority (the clerical hardliners) have infringed on the rights of another minority, the BahՒs, while the reformers, with some notable exceptions, have largely turned a blind eye to the BahՒ question. One positive development is the fact that, in 1998, the Central Bar Association in Iran had established a Legal Assistance Department to provide legal advice and assistance to various groups, including the BahՒs, in its effort to implement President Khatamis vision of a civil society.33 The 2003 Immigration and Nationality Directorates report on Iran further states: Over the past 2 years, the Government has taken some positive steps in recognizing the rights of BahՒs, as well as other religious minorities. In November 1999, President Khatami publicly stated that no one in the country should be persecuted because of his or her religious beliefs. He added that he would defend the civil rights of all citizens, regardless of their beliefs or religion. Subsequently the Expediency Council approved the Right of Citizenship bill, affirming the social and political rights of all citizens and their equality before the law. In February 2000, following approval of the bill, the head of the judiciary issued a circular letter to all registry offices throughout the country, which permits any couple to be registered as husband and wife without being required to state their religious affiliation. This measure effectively permits the registration of BahՒ marriages in the country. Previously BahՒ marriages were not recognized by the Government, leaving BahՒ women open to charges of prostitution. Consequently children of BahՒ marriages were not recognized as legitimate and therefore were denied inheritance rights.34 But the report corroborates the continuing denial of access of BahՒs to universities: They are, however, still not allowed to enroll in Universities, where the form has four boxes for different 33Country Information and Policy Unit, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Home Office, Country AssessmentIran 2003, 5.32, October 2003, http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/ppage.asp?section=178. 34Ibid., 6.81. religions, none of which is BahՒ.35 The policy reason is clear: In September 2001, the Ministry of Justice issued a report that reiterated that government policy continued to aim at the eventual elimination of the BahՒs as a community.36 Further exacerbating the situation is a series of articles against the Faith that are appearing in Jam-i Jam, the official newspaper of the hardline clerics. So far, three articles have been published, combining old and new accusations together with fanciful stories based on nonhistorical fictions.37 Counterbalancing such attacks are Iranians of conscience who defend the rights of BahՒs. The European Council has recently stated: The Council is moreover concerned at continued violations of the right to freedom of religion, particularly in relation to BahՒs, whose faith is not recognised by the Constitution and who face serious discrimination particularly in relation to education, property rights and employment.38 Current thinking in Iran reveals a bifurcation of the hardline and reformist clerics. Such notables as Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Abdollah Nouri, Akbar Ganji, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin are among the most outspoken of reformers, and some of them have discussed the plight of the BahՒs of Iran. Philosopher, theologian, and dissident Hojjatoleslam Mohsen Kadivar has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Tarbiat Modares University in Iran and was a visiting scholar of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School in 2002. He is currently president of the Iranian Association in Support of Freedom of the Press. In one interview, Kadivar said: First of all, human rights supersede religion. In other words, regardless of their religion or beliefs, people should have basic human rightsno one 35Ibid., 6.25. 36Ibid., 6.82. 37Dr. Fereydun Vahman, personal communication, 28 November 2003. 38Council of the European Union, General Affairs and External Relations Council 13/14 October 2003. Conclusions on Human RightsIran, press release, 17 October 2003, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0310/S00192.htm. should be forced to migrate, be killed or tortured. We dont have a thing called Islamic Human Rights.39 Notwithstanding, Kadivar later went on to say: In the United States, I was asked which Islamic country I thought most democratic. I answered, Iran. Despite being jailed during this regime, I still believe that Iran is the most democratic country in the Islamic world and in the Middle East.40 The perspective of a BahՒ whose life has directly felt the effects of Iranian repression, however, can be quite different. Recently, I conducted an interview with a BahՒ informant from Iran, who will remain unnamed as a security measure. The informants answers to the ten questions asked are given below in quotation marks: 1. How can you best describe the plight of the BahՒs in Iran today? A community which was under harsh, sudden attacks for the first 78 years and under more steady silent pressure, with worse effects (compared to what happened in the earlier years), from 17 years ago till the present time. 2. What has improved? What has remained the same? What has become worse? Improvement: In the past 56 years passports have been issued for BahՒs. Before that, for that [purpose] it was impossible for a BahՒ to get a passport when he applied for one (especially in the second year of the Revolution till 1819 years later). Very few passports were issued for Bahai applicant[s] during that time. Remained the same: No governmental employment, no permission to get into the universities, no recognition of other social rights of BahՒs. Got worse: The mere passage of time under this situation makes everything worse. Deprivation from higher education and from active presence in universities is a sad thing that 39Camelia Entekhabi-Fard, Once-Jailed Cleric Seeks Major Changes in Iran, EurasiaNet interview with Mohsen Kadivar, 10 April 2003, http://www.kadivar. com/Htm/Farsi/News/News-820506-1.htm. 40Ibid. gets worse and worse as [the] newer generation join[s] the older ones in this deprivation. 3. Since Iran still bans BahՒs from access to a university education, please describe the two universities that BahՒs have established. Bahai Open University: Was established some 17 years ago with the help of BahՒ university professors who were dismissed from the universities. There are different fields in this university: engineering (civil, computer), mathematics, pharmacology, languages (English, Arabic, Persian), psychology, sociology, law, etc. Interestingly, some of the graduates of this university have been accepted to Carleton University in Canada for their graduate studies. Institute for Advanced Bahai Studies: Established some seventeen years ago. A BA-level academic curriculum was developed. Half of the courses dealt with the BahՒ Writings and the other half with subject[s] such as: Arabic language, Persian literature, English language, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, logic, etc. Students are expected to write a thesis upon completion of their courses. Already one thousand people have been graduated from this Institute and one thousand are currently studying there. 4. Has Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi promised to help the BahՒs? If so, where does she state this? As we have already discussed, I do not know. Nobody seems to have seen the document. 5. Have any other Iranian intellectuals or leaders recently spoken out in support of the human rights of the beleaguered Iranian BahՒ community? Yes, someone named Tavakkoli41 did so in an article published in Iran Nameh, number 1-2, Winter 1379 and Spring 1380. In fact I think you will find this issue of Iran Nameh very 41The reference is to Mohamed Tavakkoli Targh, associate professor of history, Illinois State University. Tavakkoli has presented at least two conference papers on the current plight of the Iranian BahՒs: Islamism and Counter-BahՒsm (Society for Shaykhi, Babi and Bahai Studies panel discussion, Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, 16 November 2000) and, Oneself as Another: Iranian Subjectivity and the De/recognition of BahՒs (Society for Iranian Studies, Annual Meeting of Middle East Studies Association, Washington, DC, 21 November 1999). interesting and important to this question.42 BahՒ sitizi va Islamgarayi dar Iran [Anti-Bahaism and Islamism in Iran, 1941-1955].43 6. What is the most urgent need of the Iranian BahՒ community at present? In my understanding, the most urgent need of the Iranian BahՒ community is for the youth to have access to higher education in the regular official universities. (I need to emphasize again that this is my very personal judgment. Other friends might think totally different[ly].) 7. What can the international community do now to assist? (1) To bring into more and more attention of the people of the world, especially those in decision-making positions, the deprivations Iranian BahՒs are tolerating. (2) To assist the present institutes of higher education established within the BahՒ community of Iran. 8. How can scholars best use their influence to educate the public and generate support for the BahՒs in Iran? This is my favorite question to answer. I think, in fact, I have posed my answer to this in my answer to the above question. Scholars can do a lot through using the channels available to them (personal contacts with other academics, writing articles, doing interviews, etc.) to let the world, especially the academics, know that the BahՒ[s] of Iran have been denied higher education for the past 2223 years. 9. How can the American BahՒs best assist the Iranian BahՒ community? I believe the best way to assist would be through academic endeavors. BahՒ professors can help the Institute for Advanced Bahai Studies design courses. They can graciously teach the students in Iran through programs for distant e-learning. If in higher academic standings, they can help graduates from the Institute for Advanced BahՒ Studies or the BahՒ Open University to be accepted for the graduate studies in their departments, etc. 42Personal communication by e-mail, 15 December 2003. 43Mohamed Tavakkoli Targh, [On the BahՒs of Iran], Iran Nameh 19 (2001), 1 2:79124. Iran Nameh is published by the Foundation for Iranian Studies (Bethesda, MD). 10. Finally, does the Iranian BahՒ community have a message to send out to the international community? I am surely not in a position to convey the message of the Iranian BahՒs to their fellow believers all over the world. However, I can imagine such a message would be: Through the guidance from the [BahՒ] Writings, and the UHJ [Universal House of Justice], we know why all the experience of the past 25 years happened and we are doing our best to get the message Bahaullah is sending us through these events, and we would love to see the success of our sisters and brothers outside Iran in propagating the message of Bahaullah, in their building of the foundation of World Unity, and in their scientific and social progress. The more you achieve the happier and the more confident we are.44 This interview with a BahՒ correspondent in Iran is published here for the first time. It reflects an honest and fair appraisal of the current situation and largely authenticates and updates the information presented in this paper. As the respondent is careful to qualify, this interview is entirely informal and does not represent the official position of any BahՒ agency. The interview itself may be circumscribed, lacking a more comprehensive view of the current situation in which Iranian BahՒs are plighted. For instance, the interviewee may have emphasized the difficulties that BahՒ youth are experiencing in getting a higher educationas a new generation of the oppressedto the relative diminution of what are arguably more urgent matters facing the Iranian BahՒ community at large. Notwithstanding, the Universal House of Justice, on 26 November 2003, recognized the Iranian BahՒ communitys resourcefulness in establishing the BahՒ Open University and the Institute for Advanced BahՒ Studies by saying: Graduates of the institution you founded to meet the needs of university students, who are similarly denied education, are today distinguishing themselves in prestigious universities in other countries where their credentials have been gladly accepted. God willing, the day is not far distant 44Personal communication by e-mail, 21 December 2003. when opportunities for the development of their capacities will be opened for the thousands of other BahՒ youth still cruelly deprived.45 Thus, the BahՒ question has confronted the Islamic world (widely, but not entirely) with a test case by which Islams claims to religious tolerance will be vindicated, compromised, or reformed. The recent Declaration of Iranian Cultural and Political Activists Regarding Ways to Assist National Resistance Against Foreign Threats, posted on 19 May 2003,46 reflects the widespread discontent of Iranian intellectuals over the state of affairs in Iran, of which the BahՒ question is symptomatic. As Afshari notes: Experience shows that the mixing of Islam and the modern state has trapped its citizens in concentric, hermeneutic mazes.47 Practically speaking, it will probably be the force of international law that ultimately constrains the application of Islamic restrictions on BahՒs, as has partially happened in Iran. Whether it is possible for an Islamic state to grant full rights to a religion that it fundamentally opposes and, thus, has the greatest difficulty in tolerating, the BahՒ question invites further discussion in the context of Islam and minorities. 45Universal House of Justice, To the Followers of Bahullh. 46Declaration of Iranian Cultural and Political Activists Regarding Ways to Assist National Resistance Against Foreign Threats, 26 May 2003, http://www.payvand. com/news/03/may/1133.html. 47Afshari, Human Rights in Iran, 300. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:107-135 The Kurds and the Turkish National State: The Interaction of Nationalism, Secularism, and Islam Michael B. Bishku* Introduction Of all the countries in the Middle East where Kurds reside, Turkeys population of that ethnic group is the largest, and, with the possible exception of Iraq, the Kurdish population there constitutes the greatest percentage of national population. Since the establishment of the republic in 1923, Turkey has developed a unitary state. Kurdish ethnicity was ignored for many years by the Turkish government, as Kurds were referred to as Mountain Turks, despite their Indo-European linguistic background. In addition, during the 1920s and 1930s, the Turkish armed forces quashed periodic local insurrections of the Kurds, but these events received little attention abroad. In 1984, the most recent insurrection began, andeven though Abdullah calan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has been imprisoned since 1999the rights of the Kurds to ethnic expression has remained an important issue both domestically and internationally. This paper will examine how, historically, Turkeys leadership under the republic has regarded Kurds within the framework of a mixed territorial and ethnicor, some might say, culture-based * Michael B. Bishku teaches in the Department of History, Anthropology and Philosophy at Augusta State University. Turkish nationalism,1 which has also included an emphasis on secularism and an affinity with European civilization. The Kurds, on the other hand, in their attempts to promote ethnic nationalism and/or political expression, have employed various means at different times: appeals to Islamic religion, Marxist ideology, and, most recently, respect for human rights. During the last couple of decades, besides employing military action, Turkey has tried to use the Southeast Anatolia Project (known by its Turkish acronym, GAP) as a means to elevate economic conditions in the predominantly Kurd-populated provinces of the east as well as to supplement the energy needs of the rest of the country with hydroelectric power. However, the outcome of Turkeys quest to join the European Union (EU) will depend in part on its treatment of the Kurdish population. Despite the lifting of the state of emergency in southeastern Anatolia in December 2002, the Kurds are still denied rights to express their cultural identity. The Kurds and the Ottoman Empire: The Beginnings of Kurdish and Turkish Nationalism In 1996, in A Modern History of the Kurds, David McDowall estimated that there were 24 to 27 million Kurdssome 75 percent were Sunni of the Shafii school of jurisprudencein the Middle East, with at least 13 million living in Turkey, constituting about 23 percent of that countrys population,2 making them the second 1Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1997), 97. Poulton uses the word ethnic rather than the word culture, based on the categorizations of Anthony Smith, and states that Kemal Atatrk saw Christians as unsuitable material for becoming Turkish, and the greater part of them were expelled. 2David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 3-4. According to McDowall, the Kurds constitute about 23 percent of Iraqs population and 10 percent of Irans population; however, Irans population of Kurds is greater than that of Iraq. largest of about fifty identifiable ethnic groups in Turkey.3 (The Turks are also predominantly Sunni, but of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, which always emphasized the duty of obedience to the state.4) The rest of the Kurds in the region are found in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, while those in Europe live mostly in Germany. Also, the Kurds speak different dialects; the two major ones are Kurmanji, spoken by most northern Kurds, and Surani, spoken by most southern Kurds. According to McDowall, Grammatically, they differ as much as English and German, although vocabulary differences are probably of the same order as those of Dutch and German.5 In Turkey, in addition to Kurmanji, Kurds speak Zaza, part of a different group of Iranian languages. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kurdish population was not only divided between the Ottoman Empire and Iran under the Shii Qajars, but along tribal lines. Beginning with the reign of Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839), the Ottoman government suppressed semi-independent Kurdish principalities in an attempt to centralize control. Beneficiaries of this development, as they gained a more dominant position in Kurdish society, were the shaykhs (in Turkish, sehs, leaders of the tariqahs or tarikatsi.e., religious ordersSufi darwish or dervis), who would later foment rebellions against Ottoman and Turkish authorities;6 as for the aghas, the vast majority of them saw themselves as Sunni Muslim subjects of a fundamentally Islamic empire and had no interest in an unpredictable Kurdish entity in which their own status may change for the worse.7 Indeed, within the Ottoman Empireat least until 3See Peter A. Andrews, ed., Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1989); and Servet Mutlu, Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996), 4:517-541. 4McDowall, Modern History, 432. 5Ibid., 9. 6Robert W. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 4-5. 7David McDowall, The Kurdish Question: A Historical Overview, in The Kurds: A Contemporary Review, ed. Philip G. Kreyenbrock and Stefan Sperl (London: the nineteenth century, when Christians in the Balkans developed ethnic nationalismall segments of its population identified themselves and exercised a degree of autonomy under the millet (the Turkish word for nation) system based on religious affiliation; Muslim or predominantly Muslim groups of people within the empire were the last to identify themselves by ethnicity based on language and/or culture. McDowall contends that the Kurds only really began to think and act as an ethnic community from 1918 onwards.8 However, Robert Olson, in his book The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925, asserts that Kurdish nationalism emerged with the revolt of Naqshbandi (Naksibendi) Shaykh Ubaydallah of Nehri against Ottoman authorities in 1880 when that leader publicly stated [his] goal of establishing an independent Kurdistan.9 (Olson bases his claim on a letter sent to a British vice-consul named Clayton.) Martin van Bruinessen, in his book Agha, Shaikh and State, explains that [a]t least until the 1920s, popular support for movements of a more or less nationalistic character was motivated by loyalty toward their leaders rather than by nationalist sentiment.10 Following the revolt of Shaykh Ubaydallah, Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) attempted to promote pan-Islamism as well as centralization by creating the Hamidiye Light Cavalry Regiments, which consisted of recruits from Sunni Kurdish tribes. The force was used to protect the eastern frontier against the Russians and the Armenian nationalists and continued to operate under the Young Turks (who deposed Abdulhamid), although under a different name, the Tribal Regiments;11 later, some of its officers helped Mustafa Kemal (Atatrk) against the Europeans during the Turkish War for Routledge, 1992), 17, as quoted in Henri J. Barkey and Graham E. Fuller, Turkeys Kurdish Question (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 7. 8McDowall, Modern History, 4. 9Olson, Sheikh Said Rebellion, 2. 10Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992), 267-268. 11Olson, 8-11. Independence (1919-1922) following the First World War, while others from these units joined Azadi (Freedom), the clandestine Kurdish political organization founded in 1923 that supported the rebellion of the Naqshbandi Shaykh Said in 1925.12 However, the creation of the Hamidiye/Tribal Regiments also caused tension between Sunni and Shii and/or Alevia sect that is a mixture of pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian, Turkoman shaman, and Shii ideastribes into the 1920s. In 1908, the Young Turks, through their organization, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), attempted to force Abdulhamid to abide by the 1876 constitution; when the sultan resisted, he was deposed the following year. The CUP rejected pan-Islamism, continued to profess Ottomanismwhich emphasized a multiethnic civic identityand embraced Turkism, while migrs from Russia began to promote the idea of pan-Turkism (or pan-Turanism). Sociologist and philosopher Ziya Gkalp (1876-1924), the leading ideologue of Turkish nationalism, who also accepted the idea of pan-Turkism,13 grew up in the predominantly Kurdish area of Diyarbakr (then Diyarbekir) and spoke both Kurdish and Turkish. He asserted that nations went through three stages: (1) a tribal community, which emphasizes language and race; (2) a religious community, which is unified by faith; and (3) a nation, which consists of culture (its own, based on folk tradition and feeling) and civilization (an international idea). A nation could pass from one civilization to another, but culture is its identity and its inspiration for further development.14 Thus, Gkalp emphasized common culture and education over ethnicity when he remarked, [b]efore [1908], there were Turks, but there was no thought of we are the Turkish nation in the collective consciousness of that 12M. Hakan Yavuz, Five Stages of the Construction of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7 (2001), 3:5; and van Bruinessen, 280. 13Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 351. 14Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 301-304. people; in other words, there was no Turkish nation at that time.15 According to Poulton, Gkalp proposed keeping the caliphate as a nonpolitical spiritual body for all Muslims akin to the papacy.16 Meanwhile, under the Young Turks, Turkish became the official language and was used in instruction in middle and high schools.17 Van Bruinessen points out, It seems that the nationalism of the other Muslim nationalities emerged largely as a response and reaction to the increasing prominence of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turk aspirations.18 While there were revolts of Arabs and Albanians before and/or during the First World War, most of the Kurds responded to the Caliphs [i.e., Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Vs] religious arguments and his call to arms.19 They engaged in military actions against the Russians and Armenians, who were evacuated from eastern Anatolia and/or killed in large numbers; while regarded as an act of genocide by most Westerners and by Armenians, who claim that over a million lost their lives, this accusation continues to be denied by the Republic of Turkey. Meanwhile, scholars debate the numbers killed and the intentions of the Ottoman Empire. Stanford Shaw contends that only 200,000 Armenians lost their lives.20 As for the Kurds, Olson estimates that over 500,000 died in Turkey proper during the war, while he points out that a Kurdish source claims that 700,000 civilians were forcibly removed by Ottoman authorities, ostensibly to deny the Russian and Armenian forces food or shelter.21 McDowall asserts that, by 15Ziya Gkalp, Historical Materialism and Sociological Idealism, in Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Niyazi Berkes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 62, as quoted in Kemal Kirisci and Gareth M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of Trans-state Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 90. 16Poulton, 91. 17Ibid., 80. 18Van Bruinessen, 270. 19Kandal [Nezan], The Kurds under the Ottoman Empire, in A People without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan, ed. Gerard Chaliand, trans. Michael Pallis (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993), 29. 20Shaw and Shaw, 2:315-316. 21Olson, 21. 1917, the CUP had made it crystal clear that the specific intention was to eliminate Kurdish identity by dispersing Kurds in small groups.22 When the war came to an end in October 1918 with the armistice agreement of Mudros between the Ottomans and British, there was a resurgence of Kurdish interest in either autonomy or independence. In fact, there was some cooperation between Armenians and Kurds, who brought their cases to the Paris Peace Conference, to which both parties agreed to leave the settlement of boundaries.23 The Treaty of Svres imposed on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious Entente (Allied) states in August 1920 included three articles (62-64) dealing with Kurdistan. The treaty called for within six months [of its] . . . coming into force . . . a scheme [to be drawn up by a commission composed of British, French, and Italian officials] of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia [i.e., Iraq. And] . . . within one year [of its] . . . coming into force . . . the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and titles over these areas.24 The Kurdish author Kendal Nezan states that the Treaty of Svres was not only profoundly unjust and humiliating for the Turkish people, it was also an affront to the Kurds . . . as the independent 22McDowall, Modern History, 105. 23Olson, 22; and Nader Entessar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), 82-83. 24The text of Part III of the Treaty of Svres, entitled Political Clauses, is reproduced in The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. J. C. Hurewitz, vol. 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914-1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 220-225; the quotation is from pp. 220-221. Kurdistan envisaged . . . was in fact . . . a country from which two-thirds of its territory had been lopped off, including its fertile areas and its traditional grazing grounds, not to mention Persian Kurdistan.25 The Treaty of Svres, which was accepted by the defeated Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VIs government, but not by the Turkish nationalists under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatrk) based in Ankara, was never implemented; it was challenged under the provisions of the Turkish National Pact.26 That agreement, approved by the nationalist-dominated Ottoman Chamber of Deputies in Istanbul in January 1920, was actually formulated as early as the Erzurum Conference of July-August 1919 when all the groups that wanted to resist any attempt by the Entente (Allied) states to partition Turkey proper had been unified as the Association for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia. (The latter area refers to European territories more commonly called eastern Thrace.) Article 1 of the National Pact states that those territories inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority, united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and wholly respectful of each others racial and social rights and surrounding conditions, form a whole which does not admit of division for any reason in truth or in ordinance.27 However, in the words of Andrew Mango, the Kurdish delegates who attended the Erzurum Conference were small fry: retired Ottoman officials, clerics, etc.28 Yet, twenty-two of the fifty-six delegates in attendance were Kurdish.29 Besides the Kurdistan provisions mentioned above and the detachment of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, which 25Kandal [Nezan], 35. 26The text of the Turkish National Pact is reproduced in Hurewitz, 210-211. 27Ibid., 210. 28Andrew Mango, Atatrk and the Kurds, Middle Eastern Studies 35 (1999), 4:8. 29Kirisci and Winrow, 79. aside from the province of Hataypart of the French mandate in Syria until it was annexed by Turkey in July 1939and the predominantly Kurdish Mosul provincewhich had a substantial Turkoman (Turkish-speaking) minority and officially became part of the British mandate in Iraq in June 1926 when Turkey surrendered its rights in return for 10 percent of the areas oil revenues for twenty-five years30the Turkish nationalists had no interest, and the Treaty of Svres called for the partition of Turkey proper (eastern Thrace and Anatolia). In addition to the Aegean Islands, except for Rhodes and the Dodecanese (which were ceded to Italy), Greece received territory in eastern Thrace, including the city of Edirne as well as territory in western Anatolia, including the city of Izmir. While Istanbul would remain the capital of the truncated Ottoman state, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits were placed under international control with adjacent areas demilitarized. Furthermore, Armenia was to be recognized as an independent state, the boundaries of which would be determined through arbitration by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. The Turkish nationalists dealt with the Armenians and Greeks militarily; the formers forces were expelled from Turkey proper during 1920 and signed a peace treaty that was never ratified but was superseded by the Turkish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in March 1921. The Greeks, who occupied parts of western Anatolia in 1919, were forced to retreat from these territories by the Turkish nationalist army by September 1922 and to withdraw from eastern Thrace. The Britishwho were occupying the Straits region and had no support from the French or Italians, who themselves had given up claims to spheres of influence in southeastern and southwestern Anatoliasigned an armistice with the Turkish nationalists at Mudanya in October 1922 and finally evacuated the area a year later. Before then, Sultan Mehmed VI left Istanbul on a 30Later, Great Britain paid Turkey one lump sum of 500,000-700,000 in return for relinquishing its right to oil royalties. William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774-2000 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 76, n. 33, mentions the lower figure, while Erik J. Zrcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 210, mentions the higher figure. British destroyer in November 1922, first to Malta and then to permanent exile in San Remo, Italy; earlier in the month, the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara had passed legislation separating the caliphate and the sultanate and abolishing the latter, on the premise that Sultan Mehmed VI had been a traitor cooperating with the British occupation forces. Abdulmejid II became caliph (successor to Muhammad the Prophet) until the Grand National Assembly abolished that office in March 1924; Atatrk asserted that this position meant nothing without the sultans temporal authority.31 The Kurds and the Turkish Republic during the Atatrk Era: A Clash of Nationalisms and the Imposition of a Unitary State During the Turkish War for Independence (1919-1922), many Kurdish tribal leaders supported the military efforts of the Turkish nationalists under Atatrk. Van Bruinessen writes: Even apart from the confidence that Mustafa Kemal inspired, it is not surprising that many Kurdish chieftains turned to him: he had power that he might delegate to them, whereas the nationalist organizations did not. The latter might count on the Allies good-will and on the provisions of Svres, but most chieftains correctly perceived that the Allies were in the first place the Armenians friends, not the Kurds. Mustafa Kemal was the most likely person to protect Kurdish lands from Armenian claims.32 In addition, the Turkish National Pact as well as statements issued by the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, established in April 1920, less than two weeks after the dissolution by Sultan Mehmed VI of the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, appealed to Islamic solidarity in the face of European imperialism. Out of 437 deputies in the first Grand National Assembly, 74 represented southeastern Anatolia and, according to Mango, were genuine Kurdish 31Michael B. Bishku, Atatrks Legacy versus Religious Reassertion: Secularism and Islam in Modern Turkey, Mediterranean Quarterly 3 (1992), 4:82. 32Van Bruinessen, 279. members.33 Mustafa Kemal, upon whom the Grand Assembly (in 1934) conferred the title Atatrk, meaning Father Turkopened the third session of that legislative body in March 1922 with a speech in which he said, The people of Turkey is a social entity united in race, religion and culture . . . sharing the same destiny and interests. (Mango contends that it is significant that Atatrk used the words people of Turkey rather than Turkish people.)34 Almost a year later, in January 1923, in a briefing to journalists in Izmit, Atatrk made it known that he continued to think of Kurdish autonomy in the framework of local government.35 It is important to note that the negotiations that had begun in Lausanne, Switzerland, in November 1922 between the Turkish government in Ankara and the Entente (Allied) statesGreat Britain, France, Italy, and Greecewere in recess; however, Mango asserts that Atatrks position was not designed to gain leverage in its dispute with Great Britain over the predominantly Kurdish Mosul area, yet McDowall notes that, in the following months, Atatrk no longer discussed the issue of Kurdish autonomy.36 In any event, because of a deadlock, that issue was excluded temporarily from the agenda of the peace conference of February 1923.37 While the European Allies saw the negotiations as a means to revise the Treaty of Svres given the changed political situation, the Turks felt that the treaty should be regarded as a dead letter, and they held firm, knowing that the Europeans would no longer resort to force. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, recognized the territorial integrity of Turkey as called for in the National Pact, with the exception of the predominantly Kurdish Mosul province. While the Straits were placed under the control of an international commission, that administrative body was headed by a Turk, and Turkey was able to garrison up to twelve thousand men in Istanbul 33Mango, 12; and Kirisci and Winrow, 80 and 87, n. 59. 34Mango, 12. 35Ibid., 15. 36Ibid., 16; and McDowall, Modern History, 190-191. 37Othman Ali, The Kurds and the Lausanne Peace Negotiations, 1922-23, Middle Eastern Studies 33 (1997), 3:524. as well as have an arsenal and naval base there. In addition, Turkey was obligated to assure full and complete protection of life and liberty [of] . . . all [its] inhabitants . . . without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion38; however, unfortunately for the Kurds, there was no mechanism to insure that Turkey would protect these rights. Great Britain withdrew its support of Kurdish nationalism as part of its policy of trying to isolate Soviet Russia; it thus sought to improve relations with Turkey and enhance the territorial integrity of that country and Iran as well as Iraq, where it had oil interests in the Mosul province.39 The Republic of Turkey was established officially in October 1923, with Atatrk as president and Ismet (Inn), who had negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, as prime minister. The Association for the Defense of Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia became, first, the Peoples Party that same month and, later, the Republican Peoples Party in December; over the next two-and-a-half decades, it was an instrument of Atatrks and, after his death in 1938, his successor, President Inns, authoritarian rule. Also, in 1923, the clandestine political organization Azadi was founded40 and gave support to the rebellion of the Naqshbandi Shaykh Said in 1925. As mentioned earlier, Atatrks government abolished the caliphate in 1924, what van Bruinessen refers to as the most important symbol of Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood. Van Bruinessen continues, in his assessment of the religious (and other) factors behind Shaykh Saids revolt: 38The text of the Treaty of Lausanne is reproduced in Hurewitz, 326-337. The quote is from Article 38 on p. 330. 39Ali, 521 and 531. 40Entessar puts the date of Azadis founding as sometime between 1921 and 1924 (83). Olson points out the reason for this discrepancy: There is virtually no information on the Azadi, since it was an organization begun in Anatolia and very secretive. Van Bruinessen is the first scholar to stress its importance (41). Van Bruinessen provides the date as 1923 (280). However, Olson mentions that Kurdish officers in the Turkish army involved in the Beyt Sebab mutiny in 1924 told British intelligence that Azadi was founded in Erzurum in 1921. It became possible to condemn the Ankara government as irreligious.. . . This argument carried more weight than any other with many of the Kurds, who were strongly committed to Islam. There were other grievances as well. If Kurdish accusations are correct, the fear of Kurdish nationalism led the Ankara government to take measures that could only make Kurdish nationalist sentiments more general.. . . Azadis propagandists took up the grievances resulting from this, and found many willing ears. 41 By 1924, the use of the Kurdish language was forbidden in public placesa hardship, considering that only 3-4 percent of the Kurds spoke any Turkish at all42making education among the Kurds virtually nonexistent. Moreover, senior government officials in Kurdistana geographical term no longer usedwere Turks, Turkish soldiers often took animals and food supplies from Kurdish villages without payment, and the Turkish government was exploiting the mineral resources in Kurdistan while the Kurds received no benefits from the government relative to the taxes paid.43 (Two years later, the Turkish Ministry of Education decreed that ethnic names such as Kurd, Laz or Circassian should not be used as they harmed Turkish identity.44) The Shaykh Said rebellion failed (its leaders were subsequently hanged) after a couple of months becausebesides Turkeys military superiority in numbers and equipment, which included aircraftits support came primarily from Zaza-speaking, mountain-dwelling tribesmen; also, the urban Kurds did not join the rebellion, while Alevi tribes and the aghas of the Diyarbakr plains either did not join the rebellion or supported the Turkish government. As for the Alevis, Olson states that they thought they would be better off in a secular Turkey, nominally Sunni, than in a self-declared Sunni Kurdistan in which the Naksbandi (Sunni) tarikat would assume a major role.45 The aghas also came to support the 41Van Bruinessen, 281. 42Kandal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, in A People without a Country, ed. Chaliand, 73. 43Ibid., 281-283. 44Andrew Mango, Atatrk (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), 428. 45Olson, 94. modernization program of the Turkish republic in return for being allowed to keep their lands, status, and local influence, as evidenced in the conspicuous absence of any real land reform.46 While the Shaykh Said rebellion, whose primary goal was an independent Kurdistan, used religious phraseology such as jihad (holy war) to describe its actions against the republic and the Shaykh took the title amir al-mujahidin (commander of the warriors of the faith), [t]he revolt was neither a purely religious nor a purely nationalist one.47 However, the Kemalists, as the bureaucracy and supporters of Mustafa Kemals government and his program of modernization were called, regarded the Shaykh Said rebellion as a reactionary religious revolt, as its goals also included restoring the caliphate as well as the Shariah (in Turkish, Seriat, Islamic religious law.) It should be noted that, during the Turkish War for Independence, Atatrk also used religious phraseology48 and was conferred the title ghazi (in Turkish, gazi, fighter for the faith against the infidel) in 1921 by the Grand National Assembly; indeed, he liked to use that title until 1934, when that same legislative body conferred on him his surname.49 The Shaykh Said rebellion offered Mustafa Kemal the chance to take greater authoritarian measures. In March 1925, within one month of the beginning of the revolt, the Law for the Maintenance of Order was passed by the Grand National Assembly, which set up Independence Tribunals that not only prosecuted those engaged in armed rebellion, but also stifled all political opposition to government policies, including criticism in the press. In September, Prime Minister Inn implemented the Eastern Reform Plan, which allowed for Kurdish areas to be placed under an inspector general, the settlement of fifty thousand Turks in homes that had earlier belonged to Armenians, the exile of dangerous Kurdish 46Ergun zbudun, Social Change and Political Participation in Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 44, as quoted in Olson, 210, n. 5. 47Van Bruinessen, 298. 48Kandal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, 53. 49Metin Tamko, The Warrior Diplomats: Guardians of the National Security and Modernization of Turkey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1976), 7, note 1. families, and the exclusion of ethnic Kurds from government service in their home areas.50 While there were some sixteen Kurdish uprisings in eastern Anatolia between 1924 and 1938, which were suppressed by the Turkish military,51 besides the Shaykh Said rebellion, two other revolts are the most noteworthy: Mount Ararat (1930) and Dersim (now known as Tunceli, 19371938); both were tribal revolts against state authorityalthough the former had the support of intellectualswhere nationalism was undiluted since religious phraseology was not employed.52 McDowall sums up: Shaykh Saids revolt marked the beginning of implacable Kemalism. Systematic deportation and razing of villages, brutality and killing of innocents, martial law or special regimes in Kurdistan now became the commonplace experience of Kurds whenever they defied the state. The army, deployed in strength for the first time since Lausanne, now found control of 53 Kurdistan to be its prime function and raison dՐtre. As for Kemalism (Atatrklk), it is the term used to describe the principles upon which Atatrks reforms were based. This set of ideas, the origins of which may be found in the era of the Young Turks (or even before), was formalized by 1931 in a manifesto published by Atatrk and adopted the following month by his Republican Peoples Party (CHP). Six years later, it was incorporated into Article 2 of the Turkish constitution. The six basic principles of Kemalism were republicanism, etatism, revolutionism (or reformism), populism, secularism, and nationalism. The first is simply the type of government that Turkey had since 1923, a republic. Etatism refers to state intervention in the economy, and revolutionism implies change. Populism is described by one writer as a Turkish version of the solidarist ideas outlined 50Mango, Atatrk, 428. 51Kirisci and Winrow, 100. 52Van Bruinessen, 299; and Paul White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000), 76-83. 53McDowall, Modern History, 198. by the French radical politician Lon Bourgeois and the sociologist mile Durkheim.54 Secularism and nationalism were the most important principles; the former went beyond simply removing Islamic influence from the affairs of state, as Atatrk either abolished Islamic institutions altogether or placed them under government control. Following the Shaykh Said rebellion in 1925, Atatrk abolished the Naqshbandi and other religious orders. The following year, Turkish law was totally secularized with the adoption of the Swiss civil code and Italian criminal code; under Article 163 of the latter, it was unlawful to incite the people to actions which could endanger the security of the state by misusing religion, religious sentiments, or things considered holy by religion.55 In 1928, Arabic script was replaced with Latin for writing Turkish. However, it was not until 1930 that Article 2 of Turkeys 1924 constitution, which said that the religion of the Turkish state is Islam, was deleted. As for nationalism, it was devoid of any religious character; A nation [millet], stated the program of Atatrks CHP, is a social and political formation comprising citizens linked together by the community of language, culture and ideal.56 The 1924 Turkish constitution reads, Without religious and ethnic difference, every person of the people of Turkey who is a citizen is regarded as a Turk.57 At the same time, Atatrk was concerned about the use of what he regarded as divisive terms to describe ones identity; in 1930, he wrote: Within the political and social unity of todays Turkish nation, there are citizens and co-nationals who have been incited to think of themselves as Kurds, Circassians, Laz or Bosnians. But these erroneous appellationsthe 54Paul Dumont, The Origins of Kemalist Ideology, in Atatrk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 31. 55Quoted in Dankwart A. Rustow, Politics and Islam in Turkey, in Islam and the West: Proceedings of the Harvard Summer School Conference on the Middle East, July 25- 27, 1955, ed. Richard N. Frye (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 87. 56Quoted in Dumont, 29. 57Quoted in Yavuz, 9. product of past periods of tyrannyhave brought nothing but sorrow to individual members of the nation, with the exception of a few brainless reactionaries, who became the enemys instruments.58 Because of past experiences with the European states, which encouraged and supported the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and later tried to do the same with Turkey proper, Turkish nationalists would not tolerate any expressions of ethnic diversity. Inn, who would serve as president from 1938 to 1950, was even more nationalistic than Atatrk; also, in 1930, when he was prime minister, he said, Only the Turkish nation is entitled to claim ethnic and national rights in this country. No other element has any such right.59 Finally, in 1934, the Law of Resettlement, states Mango, made assimilation (temsil) of all the countrys citizens to Turkish culture . . . official government policy; thus, he continues, The government of the Turkish republic was determined not to repeat the mistake deplored the previous century by [Young Ottoman writer and journalist] Namk Kemal [1840-1888] when programmesfor education in Turkishwere not carried out.60 While Kemalist reforms did not have as much impact in rural areas as it did it urban centers, the Turkish government gave the greatest attention to the Turkification of the Kurds, a name they never used in public, instead preferring the term Mountain Turks. Although the situation of the Kurds received little attention abroad, Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru had this to say regarding the situation of the Kurds in 1935: the Turks, who had only recently had to fight for their own independence, crushed the Kurds who were seeking theirs. How strange that a defensive nationalism should turn into an aggressive one, and that a struggle for freedom should become struggle to dominate others.61 58Quoted in Mango, Atatrk and the Kurds, 20. 59Quoted in Poulton, 120. 60Mango, Atatrk and the Kurds, 20-21. 61Jawaharlal L. Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People, vol. The Kurds and the Turkish Republic in the Era of Multiparty Politics: National Territorial Integrity versus Autonomy Following the Kurdish Dersim revolt, which was crushed around the same time as Atatrks death, Kurdistan entered what Kendal Nezan calls the Quiet Years,62 which lasted until right after the 1960 Turkish military coup, when younger Kurds started gravitating toward leftist movements.63 With the introduction of multiparty politics and democratic elections in 1946 and 1950, respectively, Islam became one of a number of issues in electoral politics, but the economy was of primary concern to the electorate. Besides the political consideration of competition for votes, concessions regarding Islam during the Cold War environment of the 1950sand even laterwere also granted as a counterweight to the threat of communism.64 The Democratic Party (DP), whose leadership was composed of prominent ex-CHP members, won the 1950 elections not only because it sought a relaxation from earlier policies of militant secularism, but also because of the electorates desire to end the one-party rule of the CHP and to get the government to address the problems of the agricultural segment of the economy. Initially, in reaction to their suppression by Kemalist policies, the Kurds voted largely for the DP.65 Such support continued during most of the 1950s, and tribal and religious leaders and landlords in eastern Anatolia, who had been co-opted by the government in Ankara, supplied votes in return for receiving spoils to distribute among their followers.66 (While the DP government allowed religious 2 (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1935), 1 and 108, as quoted in Kendal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, 54. 62Kendal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, 62-68. 63Martin van Bruinessen, The Kurds in Turkey, Merip Reports, no. 121, State Terror in Turkey (February 1984), 8. 64Metin Heper, Islam, Polity and Society in Turkey: A Middle Eastern Perspective, Middle East Journal 35 (1981), 3:353. 65Entessar, 87. 66Van Bruinessen, Kurds in Turkey, 8. broadcasts to be on state radio and made religious education in primary schools a regular part of the curriculumunless parents requested exemption for their childrenit did pass the Law to Protect Freedom of Conscience in the Turkish legislature in July 1953 to prevent the politicisation of religion.67) By the end of the decade, the Kurds were becoming disappointed with the growing economic problems within Turkey, especially in the neglected provinces of eastern Anatolia.68 The return of Mulla Mustafa Barzania leader of the short-lived Mahabad Republic in Iran (1945-1946)to Iraq following the July 1958 coup by Abd al-Karim Qasim as part of a power-sharing arrangement (that fell apart in 1961) gave encouragement to Kurdish intellectuals, who were beginning to express themselves in a movement designed to bring economic development to Kurdistan. Kendal Nezan explains: Many tribal chieftains . . . moved to towns where they became entrepreneurs, wholesalers, city landlords and shareholders. Their children, who were educated in Turkish schools or American colleges, were later to provide the first wave of campaigners for what was to be known as Eastism. 69 Although the promoters of Eastism were careful not to use the words Kurd or Kurdistan, a number were arrested in 1959 for peacefully demonstrating against the anti-Kurdish backlash following the massacre of Turkomans in Kirkuk, Iraq, and for publishing a newspaper.70 Initially, feelings against Kurds would grow with the 1960 Turkish military coup, the stated purpose of which was to bring an end to the political excesses of the DP and to restore Kemalist values. However, with the new more liberal constitution in 1961, the Kurds were once again able to express their desires, albeit through Turkish associations and 67Poulton, 172. 68Henri J. Barkey and Graham E. Fuller, Turkeys Kurdish Question: Critical Turning Points and Missed Opportunities, The Middle East Journal 51 (1997), 1:66. 69Kendal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, 64. 70McDowall, Modern History, 403. publications.71 While the constitution granted much wider civil liberties in Turkeywhich was described in Article 2 as a national, democratic, secular and social statethan previously allowed, it continued to deny Kurdish identity by stating that every citizen is accepted as [a] Turk regardless of ethnic or religious identity.72 McDowall notes that racism against the Kurds in the 1960s was still overt: While the state denied that Kurds were anything but Turks, many Turks denied even this fiction by repudiating them. To be Kurdish was, as being Turkish had been a century earlier, to be a primitive rustic or, worse, a Caliban [a savage and deformed slave in Shakespeares The Tempest].73 One place where Kurds and Alevis, who sought political and economic change, were accepted was the Turkish Workers Party, a socialist party with representatives in parliament. This party became the first political organization in Turkey to publicly challenge the Kemalist policy of assimilation; in October 1970, a resolution was adopted at the partys fourth congressfor which the organization was banned following the 1971 Turkish military coup that, because of political instability, put technocrats temporarily in powerstating that There is a Kurdish people in the East of Turkey [my italics].. . . The fascist authorities representing the ruling classes have subjected the Kurdish people to a policy of assimilation and intimidation which has often become a bloody repression.. . . To consider the Eastern Question as merely a matter of regional development is, therefore, nothing but an extension of the nationalistic, and chauvinistic approach adopted by the ruling classes. 74 Other Turkish political parties, including the Republican Peoples Party led by Blent Ecevit during the 1970s, welcomed Kurdish support,75 but they basically regarded the problems of the East 71Entessar, 88. 72Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 119; and Yavuz, 9. 73McDowall, Modern History, 407. 74Quoted in Kendal [Nezan], Kurdistan in Turkey, 87. 75Michael M. Gunter, The Kurdish Problem in Turkey, Middle East Journal 42 (1988), 3:393. strictly in terms of regional inequalities. By 1970, there were many Kurds outside eastern Anatolia, as they constituted about 5 percent of the population throughout the other regions of Turkey combined; however, at least half of those Kurds spoke only Turkish.76 In 1969, the first legal Kurdish organization, the Revolutionary Cultural Society of the East (or DDKO, its Turkish acronym), was founded in Ankara; it subsequently established, in other major cities and throughout Kurdistan, a network to promote, initially, national awareness of the economic problems in eastern Anatolia and, eventually, of the brutal and violent behavior of Turkish army units in Kurdish villages.77 The DDKOin which Abdullah calan, who would later found and organize the PKK, participated in the Istanbul branch78was banned following the 1971 military coup, while both the Turkish constitution and penal code were amended to make it easier to prosecute Kurds engaged in nationalist activities. However, with the return of parliamentary democracy in 1974, Turkey had a series of weak coalition governmentsthat included the Islamic National Salvation Party of Necmettin Erbakan, a Naqshbandi himselfwhich competed for Kurdish voters. Meanwhile, the ultranationalist Grey Wolves, the militant youth group of the Nationalist Action Party, whose leader Alparslan Trkes was in coalition governments with Sleyman Demirels Justice Party (the successor to the Democratic Party), and left-wing groups, including Kurds, engaged in terrorism and violence against one another in Turkeys major cities as well as in eastern Anatolia. It was in this environment that the PKK was organized in 1978 and, during the following year, martial law was declared in the Kurdish-populated provinces of the east. Van Bruinessen attributes the radicalization of the Kurdish movement in the 1970s to the large migration of Kurds from the 76John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 174. 77Van Bruinessen, Kurds in Turkey, 8. 78Mehmet Ali Birand, Apo ve PKK [Apo and the PKK] (Istanbul: Milliyet Yaynlar, 1992), 83, as cited in Yavuz, 10. Apo is calans nickname. eastern provinces of Turkey to cities in western Anatolia. The Kurds, given the poor state of the Turkish economy, could no longer be assimilated as earlier generations had been. At the same time, the younger generation attended secondary schools and universities where they engaged in political discussions on imperialism, underdevelopment, class struggle and the national problem, discussions that had rapidly spread outside intellectual circles.79 calan, who came from a family of farmers in the Urfa province in eastern Anatolia, had been a member of the Dev Gen (from Devrimci Genlik, Revolutionary Youth)a leftist group involved in the terrorism and violence of the 1970s; he studied political science at the University of Ankara but did not graduate. calan fled to Syria in 1979. The PKK did not begin effective guerrilla operations in eastern Anatolia, from bases in northern Iraq, until August 1984, following a bitter struggle with other Kurdish organizations.80 (Meanwhile, there was another Turkish military coup in 1980which targeted Kurdish nationalists, Turkish ultranationalists, leftists, and Islamistsand civilian rule was not restored until 1983.) The PKKs aim was to establish an independent Kurdish Marxist-Leninist state in southeastern Turkeywhich would eventually be united with Kurd-populated areas in neighboring statesthrough armed struggle against collaborators (conservative Kurdish tribal leaders and landlords) and colonizers (the Turkish government and military).81 The PKK generally recruited younger Kurds, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, from the poorest groups of society and had its chief political figures leading guerrilla operations.82 The PKKs insurrection would last until just after calans capture in Kenya in February 1999 and resulted in the death of more than thirty-one thousand people, in the destruction of about three thousand villages, and in the displacement of some three million people; it 79Van Bruinessen, Kurds in Turkey, 9. 80Michael M. Gunter, The Kurds and the Future of Turkey (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), 25-27; and Barkey and Fuller, Turkeys Kurdish Question, 22. 81Entessar, 94; and van Bruinessen, Kurds in Turkey, 11. 82Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, 186-187. was also estimated to have cost the Turkish government $8 billion annually.83 The 1982 constitution called for a parliamentary system in which political parties need 10 percent of the vote to ensure representation in a unicameral legislature. (The 1961 constitution had provided for a bicameral arrangement as well as proportional representation for parties that had created political factionalism.) The 1982 constitution also gave stronger powers to the president; for the next seven years, that political position would be held by General Kenan Evren, the chief military figure in the 1980 coup. The 1982 constitution also increased the power of the National Security Council, which had been given constitutional status in 1961. That political body is composed of Turkeys president, prime minister, and ministers of foreign affairs, defense, and interior as well as the commanders of the army, navy, air force, and gendarmerie, with the latter group acting as a bloc.84 Thus, the military, through its use of the National Security Council, would determine security policy, including that dealing with the Kurdish insurrection. Article 2 of the 1982 constitution declared Turkey to be a democratic, secular, social state . . . loyal to the nationalism of Atatrk while Article 24 stated that religious culture and moral education should be a compulsory part of the curricula in primary and secondary schools. (Religious education controlled by the state was seen as a counterweight to agitation by Marxist groups.) The constitution also guarantees religious freedom and protects from judicial review the same essential secularist legislation, enacted under Atatrk, that had been shielded by the 1961 constitution.85 83Michael M. Gunter, The Continuing Kurdish Problem in Turkey after calans Capture, Third World Quarterly 21 (2000), 5:849; and Gunter, Kurds and the Future of Turkey, 127. 84Gencer zcan, The Military and the Making of Foreign Policy in Turkey, in Turkey in World Politics: An Emerging Multiregional Power, ed. Barry Rubin and Kemal Kirisci (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 17-18. 85Among the laws exempted from judicial review were (1) the unification of education; (2) the principle of civil marriage; (3) the adoption of international numerals (i.e., 1, 2, 3, etc.) and the Latin alphabet; and (4) the prohibition of religious dress outside mosques. These are cited in Serif Mardin, Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey, With the return of civilian government, Turgut zal, a technocrat in charge of running the economy since 1979, was elected prime minister; he proved to be a pragmatist politician whoafter the ban that, following the 1980 coup, had been imposed on former politicians was lifted in 1987not only challenged the Islamic Welfare (Refah) Party, the successor to the banned National Salvation Party, for religious voters, but also would attempt later, from the time of the Gulf War of 1991 to just before his death in 1993, to promote an open discussion of the Kurdish issue.86 (Before then, his administration had implemented and supported some very repressive policies toward the Kurds, which will be discussed a little later.) However, neither zal nor any other Turkish politician ever supported negotiations with the PKK.87 Meanwhile, Turkey formally began the Southeast Anatolia Project (for Gneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or GAP), which, if and when fully completed, will cost more than $32 billion and will consist of twenty-two dams and nineteen hydroelectric plants on the Euphrates and Tigris river basin; it is designed to provide irrigation for farmland and new businesses that will raise the living standard of the poorest part of the country as well as electricity, largely to the most populated areas in the western part of Turkey. Because of this last aspect and since the project has resulted in the relocation of thousands of individuals, GAP has caused a certain degree of resentment among the Kurds.88 That, however, was not the only matter that disturbed them during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, when zal was prime minister, Turkey established the village guard militia system by hiring pro-Turkish Kurdish civilians, in Islam in the Political Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 147- 148. Also see C. H. Dodd, The Crisis of Turkish Democracy (North Humberside, UK: Eothen Press, 1983), 96-130, for excerpts from the 1982 constitution. 86McDowall, Modern History, 437. 87Nicole and Hugh Pope, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1997), 266. 88See Michael B. Bishku, Turkeys Water Usage in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin and its Impact on its Downstream Neighbors, Journal of Development Alternatives and Area Studies 20 (2001), 3:429-442; and Servet Mutlu, The Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) of Turkey: Its Context, Objectives and Prospects, Orient 37 (1996), 1:59-86. at wages well above southeastern Anatolias standard, to supplement the militarys actions in the region. (By the late 1990s, its members numbered some sixty thousand.)89 In 1987, also in the Kurd-populated region, a number of provinces, where, previously, martial law had been imposed, were placed under the Regional State of Emergency Government (known by its Turkish acronym OHAL). Under this rule, which was implemented by a supergovernor, those suspected of advocating Kurdish nationalism were arrested, publishing houses were closed down, and villages and pasturelands were evacuated.90 However, during and following the Gulf War of 1991, the political situation was changing as the plight of the Kurds came to the worlds attention; first, there was the mass exodus of Iraqi Kurds across the Turkish border fleeing from Saddam Husseins army after a failed uprising and the subsequent establishment of safe havens in northern Iraq, which, shortly afterward, resulted in the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish state protected by American and British air power. At this time, Turkey formally established ties with both Iraqi Kurdish political organizations, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) of Masud Barzania son of Mulla Mustafaand the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talibani; the former party, whose power base was adjacent to Turkey, assisted the Turkish military against the PKK. (By the late 1990s, Turkish troops had crossed the border into northern Iraq in operations against the PKK almost sixty times in two decades.)91 Also, in the midst of the Gulf War, zal got the Turkish cabinet to propose the repeal of Law 2932, which the military government had approved in 1983 to reinforce the ban on the use of the Kurdish language in public places; however, the Turkish parliament, in which zals Motherland Party had a majority, rejected the prime ministers proposed bill even though it 89Gunter, Kurds and the Future of Turkey, 61. 90Yavuz, 13; and H. Ayla Kl, Democratization, Human Rights and Ethnic Policies in Turkey, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 18 (1998), 1:91-110, http://search. epnet.com/direct.asp?an=608392&db=aph, p. 8 in HTML full-text format. 91Michael M. Gunter, The Kurdish Predicament in Iraq: A Political Analysis (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 126. only applied to the use of Kurdish in street conversation and, thus, still kept restrictions on broadcasting, on publishing newspapers and books in Kurdish, and on teaching Kurdish in schools.92 Several months before the Gulf War and as the Cold War was coming to an end, calan began modifying the political aims and operations of his organization. In an interview with the Turkish newspaper Hrriyet, published on 1 April 1990, the PKK leader stated that there is no question of separating from Turkey. My people need Turkey [and] we cant split for at least another forty years.93 Also, in the fourth party congress held in Syria in December, the PKK announced that it would cease village raids that resulted in civilian deaths and offered village guards (and their families) amnesty if they quit the program by the end of 1991.94 Furthermore, during 1990, calan went on record . . . as being possibly supportive of a legal Kurdish political party.95 The PKK also changed its attitude toward religion from being dismissive of it to understanding its power as a social force and trying to co-opt Islam to serve its purpose; quotes from the Quran were used in propaganda while religious leaders were, like tribal leaders, divided into progressive and reactionary camps in the PKK worldview.96 (Indeed, Poulton contends that the PKKs use of Islam parallels the use of the religion by both the state lites in the so-called Turkish Islamic Synthesis of the 1980s and the radical pan-Turkist right.)97 Moreover, at its fifth party congress in 1995, the PKK dropped the hammer and sickle from its flag and renounced Marxism-Leninism, which calan had been turning away from as early as 1991.98 92Entessar, 101-103; and Gunter, Kurds and the Future of Turkey, 62-65. 93Quoted in Pope and Pope, 266. 94Gunter, Kurds and the Future of Turkey, 49. 95White, 167. 96Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (Washington, DC: Crane Russak, 1992), 216. 97Poulton, 235, n. 89. 98Ibid., 235-237. In 1990, the Peoples Labor Party (HEP) was organized, and, in the following year, it became, with its twenty-two members, the first legal openly nationalist Kurdish party to be represented in the Turkish Parliament since it was in alliance with the Social Democratic Peoples Party of Erdal Inn, Ismets elder son. However, in the swearing-in ceremony, two HEP parliamentarians wore Kurdish national colors99 and/or spoke in Kurdish. Inn and many other politicians denounced the actions of these individuals. HEP was banned in 1993, but it was succeeded the following year by the Democracy Party (DEP), which, faced with closure, was succeeded the following year by the Peoples Democracy Party (HADEP). The last party, though it, too, had strong support in southeastern Anatolia, was unable to gather enough votes to be represented in parliament in 1995as Kurds residing in the major cities of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir voted for mainstream parties, especially the Islamic Welfare (Refah) Party100and many HADEP members were subsequently arrested for their activities. All three parties wanted to resolve peacefully the conflict between the military and the PKK and, in the process, get rid of the state of emergency in the southeast and secure respect for the human rights and cultural identity of the Kurds. As Henri Barkey points out in an article published in 1998: The one issue that has bedeviled the legal Kurdish parties has been their links to the PKK. . . . [T]he absence of overt criticisms of the PKK and its actions was sufficient to doom all these parties in the eyes of the Turkish public and media.. . . It was also difficult for any of these parties to distance themselves too much from the PKK given the extensive support for the organization within the politicized Kurdish population of Turkey. Especially in 1993 when the PKK still appeared to be ascendant, calan could wield a great deal of influence on these parties directly and indirectly. However, these parties never developed, contrary to the governments claims, the kind of organic 99The Kurdish representatives wore a handkerchief and headband, respectively, of gold, green, and red, the colors of a banned Kurdish flag in Turkey. (Christopher Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State [Oxford: Berg, 2001], 75, n. 9). 100Henri Barkey, Turkey, Islamic Politics, and the Kurdish Question, World Policy Journal 13 (1996), 1:51. relationship which exists between the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, where the latter does not hide the fact that it is the political arm of the armed militants.101 (During the 1990s, the military regarded Kurdish nationalism and political Islam as the two greatest threats to the security of the Turkish national state.) By the November 2002 parliamentary elections, HADEP had been succeeded by the Democratic Peoples Party (DEHAP), which also failed to gain seats in the Turkish parliament. Meanwhile, calan had been expelled from Syria (October 1998)as he had become a political liability for the Damascus regimecaptured in Kenya (February 1999), and tried (May-June 1999) and imprisoned in Turkey; these actions practically put an end to the PKK insurrection, but not to the continuing Kurdish struggle for recognition of cultural rights and respect for human rights, despite the lifting of the state of emergency in southeastern Anatolia in 2002. Conclusion In November 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a moderate Islamic party established in 2001, won a clear majority in the Turkish parliamentary elections. (At the same time, the Felicity [Saadet] Party, which is more of a successor to the conservative Islamist Welfare and [later] Virtue [Fazilet], parties, banned in 1998 and 2001, respectively, failed to gain any representation.) The AKP has been compared to Christian Democratic political parties in Europe, and unlike the other Islamic political parties, it emphasizes cultural Islamas do other mainstream parties in Turkeyrather than political Islam. However, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister since March 2003, was a protg of Erbakan, who was dismissed by the military in the so-called silent coup of 1997 for 101Henri J. Barkey, The Peoples Democracy Party (HADEP): The Travails of a Legal Kurdish Party in Turkey, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 18 (1998), 1:129-138, http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=608395&db=aph, p. 2 in HTML full-text format. emphasizing political Islam; Erdogan himself, when mayor of Istanbul, was temporarily jailed and banned from politics for reciting a nationalist poem with religious overtones. Yet Erdogan, unlike his mentor, and the AKP are very supportive of Turkeys attempts to join the European Union (EU) and hope to begin accession talks in 2004. That goal will necessitate further reforms than those passed by the Turkish parliament in August 2002 under the previous coalition governmentnone of the parties from that government is now represented in the legislatureincluding the protection of human rights for Kurds and others living in Turkey. (The aforementioned reforms included abolition of the death penalty, permitting private television and radio stations to broadcast in Kurdish, and allowing for the teaching of Kurdish in private language institutes.) Several months earlier in the year, at its eighth party congress in northern Iraq, the PKK changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK); however, it is still regarded as a terrorist organization in Turkey. At this time (May 2003), Erdogans government is preoccupied with the events connected with the U.S. military intervention in Iraq and has gone on record, as have previous Turkish governments as saying, that it might act militarily if Kurds were to administer Kirkuk, where a sizable minority of Turkomans reside. Having a clear majority in the Turkish parliament, the AKP is in a good position to approve and implement the necessary reforms. Only time will tell how things play out both for Turkeys quest to join the EU and for the search to find an acceptable accommodation between Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms within Turkey. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:137-160 Israeli-Druze Relations: An Appraisal * Jacob Abadi Introduction One of the most striking features of the Druze community in the Middle Eastparticularly in Israelis its ability to adapt to existing conditions. Since the early eleventh century, the Druzes of Palestine and their brethren in Syria and Lebanon have managed to maintain their unique identity despite persecution and suppression. But it was only in the State of Israel that they managed to obtain significant social and political rights. The Druze community operated with skill unmatched by other ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East. The integration of Druzes into Israeli society was, however, a long and arduous process, and many Druzes remain dissatisfied with what they have achieved so far. This essay examines the relationship between the State of Israel and the Druze community since the days of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel). Its main argument is that accommodating the Druze community was a challenge, which successive Israeli governments were only partially successful in meeting. Mutual suspicion persisted, and the Druze community was far from being satisfied with the privileges it gained. Faced with the need to establish a Jewish state in the midst of a hostile Arab world, the founders of the State of Israel sought to encourage minorities that did not share the customs and beliefs of the Muslim Arabs. Thus, contacts were * Jacob Abadi teaches Middle Eastern history at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. made between Jewish officials and Maronite Christians in Lebanon.1 Similarly, Circassians and Bedouins who resided in Palestine were encouraged to cooperate, and many served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) following the establishment of the State of Israel. Contacts were made with the leaders of the Druze community in Palestine long before the Jewish state was established. However, Israels attempt to capitalize on the differences between the Druzes and the Muslims was far from being a total success. The main problem was that there was not much in common between Jews and Druzes, and the argument regarding the so-called Covenant of Blood remained inherently weak. Nevertheless, the Druze community took the opportunity to improve its relations with Israel in order to gain acceptance among the Jews and, despite intense criticism from the Arab Muslims throughout the Middle East, young Druze men joined the ranks of the IDF. Throughout the entire period since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Druze community remained pragmatic, and its religious doctrine had little impact on its attitude toward Israel and the Arabs. Unlike the Palestinian Arabs, the Druzes did not abandon their land and, thereby, prevented it from being taken over by the Jews who immigrated to the country in large numbers prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. Even more remarkable was the fact that the Druze community was far from indifferent to Israeli politics. The Druzes were involved in Israeli politics since the establishment of the state. Generally, they tended to side with the left and the left-of-center political parties, which promoted socialist principles and were generous with benefits and social welfare. However, the political affiliation of the Druzes was far from stagnant. Their leaders tended to lend their support to political parties that promised them the most, and they did not hesitate to change allegiance in order to gain greater material benefits. While achieving considerable concessions in Israeli society, 1See Eliahu Elath, Through the Mist of Time: Reminiscences (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 1989), 193-205. the Druzes maintained strong links with their brethren in Syria and Lebanon and provided them aid when necessary. Although much more remains to be achieved, and many Druzes still hold grievances against the Israeli government, their position in Israeli society is favorable compared to that of the Druzes in Syria and Lebanon. Background The Druze sect originated in the Middle East from the Ismaili sect of Shiite Islam nearly a thousand years ago. The Druze religion maintained some elements of the Ismaili doctrine, mainly that God appears in human form and that divine principles manifest themselves in human action. According to Druze tradition, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (he who rules by Gods command) was the final incarnation of God and the divine unity. After Al-Hakims death in 1021, his followers argued that he had not been murdered but went into concealment (ghayba) and would reappear in the future. Two of his followers, Hamza ibn Ali and Al-Darazi, were the ones who helped spread the faith, which stressed the importance of speaking the truth over a strict regime of worship and rituals. Fearing that the sects teaching would undermine its legitimacy, the ruling Fatimid dynasty in Egypt could not tolerate its existence. Consequently, the persecuted Druzes fled to the mountainous terrain of Lebanon, where they found refuge. More settlements were later established in Syria and Palestine. The sect attracted followers until 1050, when its missionary activities came to an end and it no longer accepted new converts. Although the Druze doctrine attracted followers by virtue of its simplicity, it was by no means egalitarian. According to its teachings, the believers are divided into two groups, the ignorant masses, and the clever ones who gradually learn about the faith and take part in the religious ceremonies of the Druze community. There are striking similarities between Muslims and Druzes. Both are similar in terms of language, culture, and religion. The holiday of sacrifice (Id al-Adha) is sacred to both, and they have common traditions in matters relating to marriage, birth, circumcision, divorce, and burial. Scholars of Al-Azhar University argued that the Druzes are Muslims because they recite the testimony saying that there is no deity but Allah and that Mohammad is his messenger (shahada) and because they believe in the Quran. However, there is no consensus among Islamic scholars that the Druzes are Muslims since their pillars of faith are quite different. Unlike Muslims, the Druzes do not regard Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets. They are not required to pray five times a day or fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Nor are they required to give alms to the poor (zakah) or go on a pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). Instead, they must obey seven commandments: guard your tongue; guard your siblings; abandon frivolity and vanity; shun evil and the Devil; promote the concept of Gods unity (tawhid); and accept whatever comes from God.2 Following initial attempts to spread their doctrine, the Druzes became secretive. The Jewish writer Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Lebanon in 1170, referred to them as paganos (pagans) who resided in the mountains and were not subject to a monarch. He was critical of their customs, saying that they were odd and that they were involved in wife-swapping and marrying their sisters or daughters. He mentioned, however, that they love the Jews.3 Similar evidence was provided by Moise Cassuto, who visited Lebanon around 1735.4 These testimonies provided the proponents of the Covenant of Blood argument the evidence needed to substantiate their claim that there was a natural alliance between the two peoples. The accounts of travelers who came to the Holy Land added little information about the Druzes because most travelers knew little about them and often tended to be biased for or against 2Nissim Dana et al., The Druzes (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Graphit, 1998), 49-50, 40. 3Abraham Yaari, ed., Travels to Palestine (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Massada, 1976), 36. 4Shakib Saleh, Jewish-Druze Relations Between the Two World Wars, in The Druze in the Middle East (Hebrew), ed. Salman Falah, (Jerusalem: Keter, 2000), 176. them.5 Nevertheless, some of their accounts shed light on important aspects of Druze customs and habits. Writing in the early nineteenth century, John Lewis Burckhardt, who was far from being complimentary to the Druzes, said: There is no truth in the assertion that the Druzes go one day to the mosque, and the next to the church. They all profess Islamism, and whenever they mix with Mohammedans they perform the rites prescribed by their religion. In private, however, they break the fast of the Ramadhan, curse Mohammed, indulge in wine, and eat food forbidden by the Koran. They bear an inveterate hatred to all religions except their own. . . . This is the most remarkable feature of the national character: in public a Druze may appear honourable; but he is easily tempted to a contrary behavior when he has reason to think that his conduct will remain undiscovered. The ties of blood and friendship have no power among them; the son no sooner attains the years of maturity than he begins to plot against his father. Examples are not wanting of their assailing the chastity of their mothers, and towards their sisters such conduct is so frequent, that a father never allows a full grown son to remain alone with any of the females of his family.6 According to Eliezer Halevy, who arrived in Palestine in the late 1830s, the Druzes rebelled against their ruler, took control of the northern city of Safad, and began their plundering campaign, during which they hurt and beat Halevy in an effort to take his belongings.7 The description of the Druzes in R. Pacockes travel log is somewhat more positive. According to his account, the Druzes were Christian by origin. He described them as more honest than the other inhabitants of the Orient and as protectors of Christians.8 The conquest of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in the sixteenth century brought the Druzes under Ottoman control. However, 5Nissim Dana, The Druze: A Religious Community in Transition (Jerusalem: Turtledove Publishing, 1980), 136-137. 6John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London: John Murray, 1822), 201. 7Judah David Eisenstein, ed., Otsar Masaoth: A Collection of Itineraries by Jewish Travelers to Palestine, Syria, Egypt (Hebrew), 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv, 1969), 228. 8Dana, 136-137. when Ottoman power began to disintegrate in the eighteenth century, they began reasserting themselves. It was during the Ottoman period, under the emirs of the Maan and Shihab ruling families, that the Druzes managed to obtain a greater degree of independence. However, despite the fact that they managed to foil Ottoman attempts to control them, the Druzes failed to achieve total independence. The Ottoman regime allowed them a certain measure of independence by nominating a local Druze as a governor and a tax collector who often felt secure enough to assert his independence and refused to forward the taxes to Constantinople. The fact that the Ottoman Empire was in a state of decay during the nineteenth century allowed the Druzes to play a greater role in the regions politics. Their influence increased considerably when the great powers used their connections with the regions minorities to interfere in Middle Eastern affairs. For example, Britain, which sought hegemony in the region and was bent on thwarting French and Russian influence in the Middle East, relied increasingly on Druze support. It was largely due to British support that the Druzes played a significant role in the disturbances of the 1860s, which led to the establishment of Lebanon as an autonomous region in the Ottoman Empire. Like the Druzes of Palestine, those in Syria arrived from the Lebanon region so as to live according to their tradition in a state of freedom. They inhabited the area, which became known as Jabal el-Druze. Attempts by the Ottomans to suppress their desire for self-determination failed, and the Druzes later enjoyed autonomy when the Ottoman regime underwent a period of Westernization and reform. Following World War I, the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, its dominions coming under the European powers control. France gained control over Syria and Lebanon and, thus, controlled the majority of the Druzes. The Druzes of Syria capitalized on the fact that the French Mandatory regime tended to encourage separatism, and their leader, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, and the French high commissioner signed a treaty that granted them autonomy in 1921. The agreement provided the Druzes a national government under the direction and assistance of French advisors.9 However, when the French authorities imposed restrictions on their freedom, they rose in rebellion in 1925 but failed to gain independence. The autonomy of the Druzes in Syria was restricted even further following the French withdrawal in 1946. Nevertheless, they continued to play an important part in that country, and it was largely due to their support that the Bath Party came to power in Syria. However, leaders of the Bath Party showed little gratitude to their Druze supporters. Druzes were persecuted, and some were executed by the Bath regime. For example, Colonel Salim Hatum, a Druze who supported the Bath regime, was one of its victims in the subsequent purges.10 In 1954, the Druzes lost their autonomy status and rose in rebellion against the Syrian authorities. The rebellion was suppressed with the utmost cruelty by the Syrian armed forces. The 120,000 Druzes who lived in Syrias remote areas had virtually no influence in the countrys political and cultural life and did not constitute a danger to the regime.11 Nevertheless, the Syrian government regarded them with suspicion and suppressed their quest for autonomy. The Atrash family wielded considerable influence until Syrias independence. However, its power eroded considerably thereafter, and a new class of Druzes from humble origins managed to rise within the army and the Bath Party. The Druzes of Syria maintained reasonable relations with the Alawis, who opposed the Sunni Muslims, but, for the most part, the Druzes remained docile, refraining from actions that might antagonize the Bath regime. Nevertheless, they remained in the margins of Syrian society. There were hardly any Druzes in the government bureaucracy, particularly in sensitive positions. Although the Druzes of Syria 9Albert H. Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 86. 10Marie Dupont, Fils dAbraham: Les Druzes (Belgique: S.A. Brepols, 1994), 72. 11Yehuda Ben Ari, Minorities in the Arab World, Haumma (Hebrew), Vol. 2/14 (46) (May 1976), 158-159. demonstrated their support for the regime, particularly when Hafez al-Assad was in power, they were accused of sympathizing with Israel. However, in an effort to regain the Golan Heights, which Syria lost after the Six-Day War of 1967, Assads regime sought the support of the Druzes who inhabited the region and discouraged the critics who lashed out at them for collaborating with Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This was probably one of the reasons for the hostile attitude the Druzes of the Golan Heights had demonstrated toward Israel.12 Nevertheless, many Druzes remained suspicious of the Bath Party and resentful of its oppressive policies during the 1950s. Their suspicion of Syria explains why many of them, especially those residing in Israel, tended to regard the Israeli authorities as the lesser evil. Following its establishment in 1948, Israel sought to encourage the Druze community and to prevent its leaders from identifying with the Arab regimes of Syria and Lebanon. Both the Druzes of Syria and those in Lebanon were discontented and felt that the regimes did not provide them with the opportunity to rise in their hierarchies. Two families acquired prominence in the Druze community in Lebanon, the Arslans and the Junbalats, which were ancient rival factions known as the Yazbakis and Junbalatis. However, when the two families intermarried, the rivalry between them weakened considerably. Among the most prominent Druzes in Lebanon was Kamal Junbalat, who established the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP). Many Druzes moved to the Shouf Mountains after evicting the Maronites, who occupied the region. Some became merchants and businessmen while others remained poor farmers. Although the Druzes in Lebanon managed to preserve their identity, there was no movement to secede from Lebanon. But they continued to feel disadvantaged in comparison with other groups and, therefore, sought to establish a senior religious post, shaikh al-aql, as an equivalent of the Maronite patriarchate. The Druze community in Lebanon received much encouragement from their 12Shakib Saleh, History of the Druzes (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Daf-Noy, 1989), 249. coreligionists in Israel, and this connection intensified considerably after Israels involvement in Lebanon.13 Early Contacts Between Druzes and Jews Claims that the Covenant of Blood was a by-product of common destiny were made by many writers. It has been said, for example, that both peoples suffered persecution; that the practice of accepting the religious manners of the ruling majority (taqiyyah), adopted by the Druzes in order to avoid persecution, was similar to the Jewish method of assimilation in the Diaspora; and that both peoples are close because the Druzes venerate Jethro, priest of the Midianites and Moses son-in-law. Such arguments were hardly convincing to the pragmatic Druzes, who cooperated with the Israelis mainly to gain material benefits. The Jews were no less pragmatic. They sought the cooperation of any ethnic group that harbored resentment against the Muslim majority in Palestine. David Ben Gurion, Israels first prime minister, believed that the Druzes in Palestine could be used as a bridge to their brethren in Syria and, therefore, made contacts with Druze leaders. The fact that the Druzes had a rural outlook and did not develop close connections with the urban elites made them easier to approach. This approach, used by Ben Gurion in the early days of the Jewish states existence, was continued by successive Israeli governments. Israels involvement in Lebanon in support of the Christians was another manifestation of this policy. Surrounded by hostile Arab states, Israel found it essential to enlist the support of dissident minorities in the region. The Druze community was far from being unanimous on the issue of supporting Israel. However, its leaders had no alternative to adopting a pragmatic approach. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, they waited until the hostilities began and then joined the side that appeared victorious. The Druzes weak position led them to 13Samy S. Swayd, Communal Solidarity vs. National Loyalty, Institute of Druze Studies: ActivitiesMESA 1999, http://www.druzestudies.org/mesapanel.html. join the Israelis, their decision to do so resulting neither from ideological considerations nor from a feeling of affinity with the Jews.14 Initially, the Druze community in Palestine regarded itself as a closed social and religious entity and had disdain for politics. For the Druzes, religion has two dimensions: on the domestic level, they regard religion as an ideal universe of unity (tawhid) in which politics is seen as the realm of divisiveness (fitnah); on the external front, religion allows them to remain closed and to keep a distance from the authorities in order to preserve their separate identity.15 However, the social and economic needs of the Druze community in the newly established State of Israel compelled Druze leaders to adopt a pragmatic approach and to become involved in politics. The Israeli political parties penetrated the villages and encouraged Druze participation by making promises that tempted them to take part in election campaigns. The fact that parties in Israel cannot form a government without forming a coalition with other parties increases the importance of small parties and their votes are eagerly sought after. This explains the intense penetration of political parties from all sides of the Israeli political spectrum into Druze villages. Given the opportunity to improve their lot in Israeli society, the Druzes could hardly remain indifferent. The Druzes were not a recognized community during the Mandatory period, and, unless they declared that they were not Muslims, they had to depend on Muslim institutions in religious matters. In such cases, they had to appeal to civil courts. When the State of Israel was established, it became customary to recognize three representatives of the notables who constituted a spiritual authority within the Druze community. The most outstanding within this group was Shaikh Amin Tarif, who reached a position of uncontested leadership in the community. He was assisted by 14Laila Parsons, The Druze between Palestine and Israel, 1947-49 (Houndmills, Basingstoke Hampshire, UK: Macmillan in association with St. Antonys College, Oxford, 2000), 143-144. 15Isabelle Rivoal, Les voies religieuses de lidentit communautaire, Les Cahiers de lOrient 61 (2001), 1:108. Taif Salman, who served as the judge (qadi) of the Druze community and aspired to a position of power. The fact that Amin Tarif used all means to reach uncontested leadership within the community intensified the dissension in it.16 The Jewish community in Palestine sought to encourage connections with the Druzes in order to prevent them from identifying with the hostile Arab states. Jewish leaders operated in several directions in order to benefit from the differences and the distrust between Druzes and Arabs. Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later Israels first president, was one of the pioneers of the idea of establishing connections with the Druzes. In July 1938, he raised the possibility of a meeting between Jewish representatives and those of the Druze community, stating that he was willing to participate in it. Reuven Shiloh, who attended the meeting with Ben Zvi and Moshe Sharett, informed them that contacts with the Druzes were being maintained by Abba Houshi, who later became Haifas mayor, and that his representatives were in contact with Druze leaders to explore the possibility of a meeting with the Jews.17 While seeking to improve relations with the Druzes, the Yishuvs leaders were concerned that the future Jewish state would be inhabited by Arabs and other minorities and that the Jews would remain a minority in the country. Therefore, they explored the possibility of convincing the Druzes who resided in Palestine to leave for Syria. However, this matter proved to be extremely complicated. Not only the French Mandatory regime, which ruled Syria at that time, but also Sultan Atrash, the Druze leader, had to be convinced. On 4 June 1939, Sharett wrote in his diary: In one of my conversations with Weizmann in London I told him that the issue could not be resolved at all even if we obtained French consent. The matter depends not on the French but on the Druzes. The question is whether the Druzes would be willing to leave their settlements in Palestine and to 16Yekutieli to Foreign Ministry, Israel State Archives (hereafter, ISA), Jerusalem, 2402/28, 23 October 1953. 17Making of Policy: The Diaries of Moshe Sharett (Hebrew; Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974), 3:178 (entry for 13 July 1938). migrate to Syria. Weizmanns response was that according to what he was told in Palestine the Druzes were waiting for an invitation from Sultan Al-Atrash and the latter could not invite them unless he wa s sure that the French were in agreement.18 Not surprisingly, the Druzes showed no enthusiasm for this plan. Unlike the Palestinian Arabs, they preferred to stay on their land and to try to obtain equal rights with the Jews. This pragmatic attitude on the part of the Druzes earned them significant political rights and also control over parts of their land, but it turned many Arabs against them. Nor were the Druzes trusted completely by the Jews, who suspected them of collaborating with the Arabs. The idea of transferring the Druzes to the neighboring Arab countries soon vanished, and the Jews sought ways to benefit from their presence in Palestine. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the Haganah (the main Jewish paramilitary group) sought to establish connections with the Druzes in order to benefit from their intelligence services. Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander-in-chief and the builder of the IDF whose role in the Haganah as an officer in charge of Arab affairs was to search for agents who could provide information about Arab military activities, established contacts with Druzes in Haifa and northern Palestine.19 Dayan lost his brother in a battle against a Druze battalion under the Syrian commander Shaikh Shekib Wahab in April 1948. Dayan stated that his military goal was to convince the Druzes to transfer their allegiance to Israel and that his brothers death was a personal issue, which he was unwilling to mix with his professional objectives.20 18Ibid., 4:310 (entry for 4 June 1939). 19Moshe Dayan, Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Edanim Publishers; Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing House, 1976), 57. 20Avner Falk, Moshe Dayan, The Man and the Myth: A Psychological Biography (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Cana Publishing Ltd., 1985), 154-156. The Druzes and the State of Israel In December 1947, the leaders of the Yishuv contacted officials close to King Abdallah regarding the possibility of including Jordan in an alliance with the Druzes and the Jews. King Abdallah agreed to discuss the proposal.21 But, concerned that the implementation of this plan would antagonize the Arab states, he remained indifferent, and the plan did not materialize. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the older generation of the Druze community sought to cooperate with Israel. However, many young Druzes were attracted by the Palestinian commander Fausi al-Kaukjis call to join the Arab armies, destroy the State of Israel, and benefit from Jewish booty. On one occasion, the Druzes encountered a Jewish force in the kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, where some of them were killed, the rest retreating to Jabal el-Druze.22 Anxious to encourage Druze participation in Israels war effort, Ben Gurion deemed it necessary to show greater concern for their welfare. For example, when three Druze soldiers were assassinated by Jordanian soldiers in the village Ofarim, Ben Gurion informed the Knesset of the incident and demanded that Jordan release the assassins and bring them to justice.23 Druzes have served in the IDF since the early days of the State of Israel. The part they took in the countrys defense prompted them to demand equality with all Israeli citizens.24 Druzes were recruited to the Unit of the Minorities, which became not only a military force but also a tool in the hands of the leaders of the 21Gedalia Yogev et al., eds., Political and Diplomatic Documents, December 1947-May 1948 (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1979-1980), Document No. 31, Y. Shimoni to G. Meyerson, 45-46. 22Joachim Schwartz, Israels War of Independence (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mass, 1956), 63- 64. 23Yemima Rosenthal et al., eds., David Ben Gurion, The First Prime Minister: Selected Documents 1947-1963 (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1996), 318-319. 24Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Hebrew; Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 75. Druze community to secure benefits from the Israeli government.25 Although Druze achievements were impressive in comparison with those of the Palestinian Arabs, there was much more to be done to acquire greater benefits. The overburdened Israeli society had few means and could hardly afford to meet the demands of the Druze population. During the early 1950s, the country was flooded with immigrants from Arab countries who needed housing, employment, medical care, and social security benefits. Much effort was invested in those days in creating a national economy, absorbing immigrants, and improving Israels defense capabilities. Little wonder, then, that the Druze community was left behind. The Druzes, however, voiced their disenchantment with the system, which they regarded as discriminative. For example, in a 10 July 1952 letter to Ben Gurion, a group of eight Druzes recently discharged from the IDF demanded full membership in the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor), with full social security and medical benefits, employment opportunities, and housing accommodations. On most occasions, the Israeli government responded according to the pressure of the moment, but there was no long-range plan to deal with the Druze population. Ben Gurion responded to the demands of the eight Druze veterans by stating that all their demands would be met if they had served in the IDF.26 In his letter to Beer Shevas mayor, Ben Gurion instructed him to fulfill their demands: The Druze community is generally loyal to Israel. Likewise, the Druze community in Syria and Lebanon has no interest in our failure. They are serving in the army loyally, and we have to compensate them for their deeds and tie them to ourselves. I know that this would serve as a precedent and every Druze who served in the IDF has to have all rights in the Histadrut as if he was a Jew. This matter is significant both morally and politically, and I am certain that it would be done.27 25Gabriel Ben-Dor, The Druzes in Israel: A Political Study: Political Innovation and Integration in Middle Eastern Minority (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), 134. 26Almadin and Mezid to Ben Gurion, ISA 2402/28, 10 July 1952; Ben Gurion to Almadin, ISA 2402/28, 29 July 1952. 27Ben Gurion to Tuviahu, ISA 2402/28, 29 July 1952. Ben Gurions pragmatic attitude stemmed from his awareness that a failure to respond to their demands would alienate the entire Druze community and strengthen those who advocated better relations with the Arab states. One must bear in mind that there was no unanimity among the Druzes on the issue of serving in the IDF. The issue tore the Druze community into two campsthose who saw benefit in absolute loyalty to the Jewish state and those who feared Arab criticism and, therefore, were in favor of maintaining distance from Israel.28 The two approaches had already manifested themselves during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Knesset members Salah Hanifas and Shaikh Labib Abu Rukkan, who advocated cooperation with Israel, were among the Druze faction that volunteered to the IDF. On the other side were Shaikh Amin Tarif and his followers, who had strong reservations about the new state, before it became clear whether or not Israel would emerge victorious. The followers of this approach either did not identify with Israel or remained neutral in order to maintain their connection with the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. Those who objected to recruitment into the IDF came from this section. This issue was aggravated by the fact that the Druze community was divided and that the struggle for power remained intense. Escaping persecution and economic hardship caused by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the Druzes migrated throughout the region. Some went to Lebanon to join their brethren in Jabal el-Druze while others went to Syria to join the Druze community there. Several hundred migrated to Israel after its establishment. Their knowledge of the terrain proved to be extremely valuable to the IDF. However, there was much suspicion in Israel regarding the loyalty of the Druzes, who lost some of their privileges as a result. The restrictions affected the freedom of movement of the Druze population in areas under military administration.29 In a letter to Anthony Eden, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv writes: 28Yanai Amnon to the Prime Ministers Office, ISA 2402/28, 15 October 1953. 29Ezard to British Consulate General in Haifa, Public Record Office, London (hereafter, PRO), FO/371, ER1019/1, 98791, 26 March 1952. Up to now the Israel authorities have made special efforts to cultivate the Druzes who, unlike the 175,000 Arabs in Israel, are allowed to serve in the Israeli armed forces and police force and whose position is still fairly comfortable. Mr Ezard concludes, however, that though still considered as more reliable and loyal members of the population than the Arabs, the Druzes are beginning to lose their privileged status and to suffer from some of the disabilities, which affect the Arab population. 30 In 1954, the Syrian government imposed restrictions on the Druzes. Consequently, many of them left the village of Majd al-Shams in the Golan Heights and migrated to Israel. This step intensified the hostility of the Syrian government toward them. Druzes were blamed for encouraging dissension among the Muslims. There was some truth in this argument, as the chief instructor of the Middle East Center for Arab Studies remarked: Many of them, in fact, like members of the Christian groups in Lebanon, tend to see safety in a weakening rather than strengthening of Muslim Arab influence in Western Syria and Lebanon, and to favor the maintenance of the patchwork strip of minorities, Jews included, along the Levant coast, where Moslem Arab power can never dominate.31 On the other hand, the Druzes tended to be submissive because their religion encourages submission to whatever authority prevails in the region.32 This attitude underscores the pragmatism of the Druze community, which was of considerable benefit to Israel. Israeli leaders of the right-wing Herut Party, which stood in opposition to the Labor Party for nearly thirty years, tended to attach greater importance to the recruitment of the Druzes and often argued that they regarded military service as the first step in their incorporation into Israeli society. For example, Moshe Arens, one of the Likuds prominent leaders, once boasted, We have started by widening the circles of opportunity for minorities such as 30Evans to Eden, PRO FO/371, ER1019/1, 98791, 9 April 1952. 31The Druze Attitude to Israel, PR O FO/371, ER1019/2, 98791, 27 August 1952. 32Chapman-Andrews to Ross, PRO FO/371, ER1019/3, 98791, 10 October 1952. the Druzes in the army.33 The irony was that the Druzes were recruited into the Frontier Guard and were not incorporated into the IDFs main body. The Israeli governments unwillingness to allow the Druzes to join the IDFs main body kept them resentful during the early years. Concerned about losing the support of the Druze community, the Israeli government found it necessary to address the issue. In April 1957, there were press reports that the Druzes would be able to join all branches of the IDF. It was also reported that they would have equality with Jews in employment and that they would be eligible for housing. However, while they were admitted as full members of the trade unions, they did not have the right to vote in the elections to the Histadrut. The new measures approved by the Israeli government provided greater freedom to the Druzes. Their leaders were informed that those who served in the IDF would no longer be required to show military passes when entering 34 military zones.The new regulations announced by the Israeli government addressed other matters that had wider implications for the Druze community. The Druzes had been officially recognized as a separate religious community with religious and cultural institutions capable of dealing with internal affairs, which included questions of personal status, jurisdiction, and administration of religious trust funds and holy places. This came after negotiations with various factions of the Druze community, which numbered about twenty thousand at that time and whose members resided in seventeen villages in Galilee and on Mount Carmel.35 According to press reports, Israel had made twelve concessions to the Druzes and the Arabs in Israel: (1) abolition of the requirement to obtain permits to travel to Acre, Nazareth, and Afula 33Cited in Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 344. 34British Embassy in Tel Aviv to Foreign Office, PRO FO/371, VR1822/2, 11 April 1957. 35British Embassy in Tel Aviv to Foreign Office, PRO FO/371, VR1822/3, 25 April 1957. (2) easing of the night curfew in the Triangle (3) opening of the Tira-Ramat Hakovesh-Tel Aviv Road (4) granting of long-term agricultural loans (5) provision for drinking water to more villages (6) aid in paving roads to villages (7) improvement of plantations, including olives, fruit trees, etc. (8) expansion of agricultural and technical education (9) improvement in tobacco growing and manufacturing (10)formation of advisory committees for income tax matters (11)appointment of an official in the Ministry of Defense to deal with matters regarding discharged soldiers (12)encouragement of cooperation in joint industrial projects36 The Six-Day War and After The Six-Day War brought about six thousand more Druzes under Israeli control, and some others moved into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights following the Yom Kippur War of 1973. By 1976, the number of Jews in Israel reached nearly forty thousand, spread over eighteen villages. By 1992, the number of the Druzes increased to approximately seventy thousand. The number of Druzes in the entire Middle East at that time was about 750,000.37 Until the Six-Day War, the fifteen thousand Druzes in the Golan Heights remained committed to Syria despite harsh Bath treatment of them. At the same time, the Druzes of Galilee remained landless peasants who worked for Sunni landlords in scattered areas. Their economic exploitation alienated the Druzes from the Palestinian Arabs, and, consequently, they became more 36British Embassy in Tel Aviv to Foreign Office, PRO FO/371, VR1822/4, 10 July 1957. 37Of the 750,000 Druzes, 400,000 lived in Syria, 250,000 in Lebanon, and 70,000 in Israel. In addition, there were approximately 150,000 Druzes living in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Richard Tapper, ed., Some Minorities in the Middle East, Occasional Paper 9 (London: Centre of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, June 1992), 33. receptive to Israels appeal for assistance. Israel admitted many Druzes into its army in 1956, and, in 1961, it granted them community status. However, the pace at which they were granted rights was slower than expected, and Druzes occasionally complained to the Israeli government. It was only in 1976 that a separate department for Druze education was established in Israel. The Druzes remained dissatisfied, and the argument regarding the Covenant of Blood often made by Israeli officials left many of them unmoved.38 This argument sounded inherently weak to the Druzes because the Israelis tended to measure the Druzes status in comparison with that of the Israeli Arabs, whereas the Druzes aspired to a status equal to that of the Jewish majority. Unlike their brethren in Syria and Lebanon, the Druzes in Israel remained outside the political system and were not involved in the decision-making process, especially on the national level. Consequently, their sense of being an integral part of Israel weakened considerably. In fact, the status of Druzes did not improve but regressed in comparison with other ethnic groups. According to Zeidan Atash, the Covenant of Blood remained marred by several problems: (1) the failure of the Israeli government to build enough houses for Druzes; (2) the size of government aid to Druze villages, which remained smaller than the aid given to Israeli settlers; (3) the fact that Druzes were still barred from positions of power; and (4) the fact that the number of Druzes employed in government agencies remained small despite the Druzes contributions to Israels defense.39 Nevertheless, the Druze community was not discouraged, and its leaders continued to pursue its goals relentlessly. Taking 38Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was one of the Israeli leaders who were fond of referring to the Israeli-Druze association as a Covenant of Blood. Yitzhak Shamir, A Jewish-Druze Alliance: A Speech to the Druze Community in Julis, on the Occasion of Israels 40th Anniversary, April 18, 1988, in The Prime Minister Speaks: Addresses by Yitzhak Shamir 1983-1990 (Hebrew; Tel Aviv: Yair Publications, 1990), 63 68. 39Zeidan Atashe, Druze and Jews in Israel: A Shared Destiny? (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1995), 187. advantage of the privileges granted by the Israeli government, they became involved in Israeli politics. They showed clear pragmatic tendencies and gained considerable benefit in return for their political affiliation. Generally, the Druzes tended to side with leftist and left-of-center political parties. But they were flexible enough to change their loyalty to the Mapai (Israels Labor Party) when their demands were not met. In his study of the penetration of the Israeli parties in Daliat el-Carmel, the largest of all Druze villages, Ron Linenberg shows how the political leaders of the village switched loyalties after 1959, when they left the Mapai to join the right-wing Gahal (Herut-Liberal Block), and then returned to the Mapai some ten years later when promised greater material benefits. In a letter explaining his decision to return to the Mapai, one of the Druze leaders of that village admitted that his followers, though they supported the Mapai in principle, were compelled to switch their allegiance to the Gahal. He explained that they returned to the Mapai following negotiations with Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, who expressed his willingness to respond to their needs.40 Despite their enlistment in the IDF, the Druzes did not move up in the Israeli bureaucracy as quickly as they had hoped. Part of the reason was that new Jewish immigrants continued to arrive from the United States, the Soviet Union, the Republic of South Africa, and other countries in which educational standards were high. Upon their arrival in Israel, many of these immigrants were placed in bureaucratic positions with little or no competition from the Druzes, who were normally hired to fulfill positions that directly served their own community. But even in these cases, the progress was rather slow. It was only by the early 1990s that Druzes began to occupy high positions in key ministries. For example, in June 1992, Salman Falah of Kafr Sumaya in western Galilee was the first Druze to be nominated to the post of director-general of the 40Ron Linenberg, Electoral Processes in Minorities Village, State and Government (Hebrew) 1 (1971), 1:130-132. education ministry with responsibility for the educational system in Gaza and the West Bank.41 Druze discontent was fueled by the clashes Israel occasionally had with the Druzes residing in the Golan Heights, some of whom had, at times, demonstrated their opposition to Israel, openly advocated incorporation into Syria, and called on Israel to evacuate the Golan Heights. The presence of strong pro-Syrian sentiments among the Druzes became evident in March 1993, after an incident in which a Druze resident of the village Buqata in the Golan Heights was shot by an Israeli resident of the Qatzrin settlement. More than one thousand Druzes demonstrated against Israel. They sang nationalistic songs and waved Syrian flags while shouting that the Golan Heights was part of Syria.42 Druze participation in the IDF became a thorny issue with the start of Israels involvement in Lebanon in 1982. The problem was aggravated during Israels subsequent occupation of that country. The Druzes increasingly complained that they were put in a position in which they had to fight Arabs, incurring their wrath. Some Israeli Arabs openly defended those Druzes who objected to military service. For example, in March 1995, Arab Knesset member Ahmad al-Tibi said that the Druzes should be released from service in the IDF because it was difficult for them to fight the Arabs in Lebanon and in the Israeli-occupied territories. The comment triggered an angry response from Ori Or, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, who blamed Tibi for sowing discord among Israels ethnic groups. Interestingly, members of the Committee of Druze Local Councils said that Tibis remark constituted interference in Druze affairs. Their spokesman said that the Druzes believe in equal duties and equal rights, and that the Druzes regard themselves as part of the Israeli people who carry the burden of national defense. National 41Jerusalem Post, 16 June 1992. 42Over 1,000 Golan Druze Hold Pro-Syrian Demonstration, Tel Aviv IDF Radio in Hebrew, 16 March 1993. Foreign Broadcast Information ServiceNear East (henceforth FBIS-NES)-93-050, 17 March 1993. Religious Party Chairman Zvulun Hammer condemned the remark, and Knesset member Moshe Peled of the ultraright-wing Tzomet Party called on the attorney general to press charges against Tibi for inciting rebellion. Although most Druze officials acted as if they were in complete support of military service, they had done so for pragmatic reasons. They were obviously aware that military service provided them a powerful weapon to demand greater benefits for the Druzes. Yet, some Druzes, like Jamal Muaddi, the head of the Druze Initiative Committee, openly expressed support for ending the Druzes military service.43 Conclusion This essay has provided an analysis of Israeli-Druze relations from the early days of the Jewish state to the present. Its main argument is that the Druze community managed to live in relative harmony in the Jewish state. However, the price of accommodation was high indeed. Despised by many Arabs, and by the Palestinians in particular, the Druze community endured incessant insults and condemnations. The Druzes of Israel faced a major identity problem during the IDFs invasion of Lebanon, when they witnessed the predicament of their brethren in Lebanon, who had to fight for survival against the Christian Maronites. During that time, many Druzes defected or took an unauthorized leave from the IDF in order to join their Druze brethren. The Druzes of Palestine had endured long periods of struggle for survival under several governments since the eleventh century. They lived under Muslim and Ottoman regimes, which did not recognize their right to autonomy. Under these conditions, they were receptive to offers of friendship and cooperation with the Jews. The contacts between the communities continued, and the leaders of the Jewish community regarded them as valuable allies 43Stormy Reaction to al-Tibi Comment on Druze IDF, Jerusalem Qol Yisrael in Hebrew, 17 March 1995, FBIS-NES-95-053, 20 March 1995. and endeavored to establish cordial relations with them. Most of the Druzes continued to reside in Israel following its establishment, and, for the most part, they were able to retain much of their land. The Druzes offered effective resistance to any attempt by Israel to expropriate their land. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the Druzes adopted a realistic approach and accepted service in the IDF as a way to improve their status. It was only in 1957 that the Druzes managed to obtain an autonomous status and an independent judicial system. By 1967, the Druzes obtained the right to appeal directly to the government without the need to rely on intermediaries. The defection of Druze troops during Israels invasion of Lebanon alerted the Israeli government to the need to improve its relations with the Druzes in Lebanon in order to keep the Druzes in Israel content.44 It was precisely for that reason that the Druze villages were left intact by the invading Israeli troops. As Robert Fisk noted, Somehow, the word had got around that the Israelis would spare these Druze locations. We later learned that the Israeli Druze soldiers had already established that the Lebanese Druze had no intention of fighting the invading army.45 Though many Druzes still complain about what they regard as discriminatory policies by the Israeli government, Druze achievements have by no means been negligible. The Druzes desire to maintain their separate identity poses no real problem on the social level. They seek political and economic advantages, and although the road to absolute equality with Israeli citizens is long, their achievements in both areas are quite impressive. Under the Labor coalition, Druzes began serving in important positions, such as presidential advisor on minority affairs and, at one time, Israeli consul in New York. They managed to obtain the right to vote, and a Druze from the Likud Party became a Knesset member in 1977. Currently, there are two Knesset members representing slightly 44Najib Alamuddin, Turmoil: The Druzes, Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Quartet Books, 1993), 208. 45Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Atheneum, 1990), 213; Dilip Hiro, Lebanon Fire and Embers: A History of the Lebanese Civil War (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993), 101. more than 100,000 Druzes, who reside mostly in the Carmel and Galilee regions of northern Israel. Whether a bright future awaits the Druze community in Israel is open to speculation. Writing in 1999, when the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was still vibrant, sociologist Sammy Smooha argued that the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the growth of globalism would adversely affect the status of minorities in Israel. In his view, the mass immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union would also have an adverse effect on the status of groups like Druzes, Arabs, Sephardim, and Haredim (ultraorthodox Jews). Middle East historian Kais Firo argued that the process of modernization in Israel caused the Druzes to lose their traditional occupations and their self-sufficiency and to depend more on the services of the Jewish state.46 While it is possible to argue that the Druze community stood to lose from the peace process, the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 increased the Druzes value in Israeli eyes but turned them into an object of scorn by the Palestinian Arabs. In light of the rapid technological development in Israel, the Druzes are likely to face major problems unless they manage to make the necessary adjustments that would enable them to obtain a meaningful role in modern Israel. 46Sociologist: Status of Israels Minorities to Worsen, University of Haifa Focus, winter 1999-2000, http://research.haifa.ac.il/~focus. Studies in Contemporary Islam 5 (2003), 1-2:161-182 The Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman Empire Faika elik* In the year 1564, an imperial decree was issued from the seat of the Memalik-i Mahruse-i Mamure-i Osmaniye (the divinely protected and well-flourishing domain of the House of Osman) to all Ottoman provincial and subprovincial governors and judges, informing and commanding them as follows: Currently, in your dominions some groups of wanderers and Gypsies (kurbet ve ingan tayifesi) have emerged and they have been engaging in various unlawful activities (enva- muharremat ve esnaf- mnkerat) and behaving immorally (fsk [u] fcur). They have been wandering in the cities, towns and villages. With their prostitutes and their entertainment and musical instruments, they have been going to social gatherings and bazaars where there are huge crowds, misleading whomever they meet and disturbing the public peace. While passing through neighboring cities, in the scarcely populated areas, they have been murdering and plundering those upon whom they can prevail and various travelers and they have constantly been causing disorder and not refraining from such abominable acts (dayima fesad senaatden hali olmayub). Since the removal of the harms that they have caused is necessary and indispensable, I have ordered that. . . .1 * Faika elik is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. 1To a large extent, this study relies on the Mhimme registers (the records of the Imperial Assembly) of the second half of the sixteenth century. These include: 3 Numaral Mhimme Defteri (966-968/1558-1560), 2 vols. (vol. 1: zet ve Transkripsiyon; vol. 2: Tpkbasm), ed. Ismet Binark, Necati Aktas, and Necati Gltepe (Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlk, Devlet Arsivleri Genel Mdrlg, 1993); 5 Numaral Mhimme Defteri (973/1565-1566), 2 vols. (vol. 1: zet ve Index; vol. 2: Tpkbasm), ed. Ismet Binark, Necati Aktas, and Necati Gltepe (Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlk, Devlet Arsivleri Genel Mdrlg, 1994); 6 Numaral Mhimme Defteri This decree is one of many examples that can be found in the Mhimme registers for the years 1558-1569 concerning the Gypsies (Roma)2 and their deviant acts, as defined by the Ottoman central government and the provincial authorities. According to the registers, murder, theft, vagrancy, and prostitutionas illustrated in the above quotewere the most common forms of Gypsy deviancy.3 Apparently, counterfeiting was another: According to a case from 1565, a counterfeiter named ilingir Sinan was caught by the Ottoman authorities and forced under interrogation to reveal the names of his partners. Not surprisingly, one of these was a (972/1564-1565), 3 vols. (vol. 1-2: zet, Transkripsiyon ve Index; vol. 3: Tpkbasm), ed. Ismet Binark, Necati Aktas, Necati Gltepe (Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlk, Devlet Arsivleri Genel Mdrlg, 1995); 7 Numaral Mhimme Defteri (975-976/1567-1569), 6 vols. (vols. 1-4: T zet, Transkripsiyon ve Index; vols. 5-6: Tpkbasm), ed. Murat Sener, Nurullah Isler, and H. Osman Yldrm (Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlk, Devlet Arsivleri Genel Mdrlg, 1997); 12 Numaral Mhimme Defteri (978-979/1570-1572), 3 vols. (vols. 1-2: zet, Transkripsiyon ve Index; vol. 3: Tpkbasm), ed. Ismet Binark, Necati Aktas, and Necati Gltepe (Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlk, Devlet Arsivleri Genel Mdrlg, 1996). Although I have referred to the facsimiles of these documents, I have used their transliterated versions throughout the study. In subsequent citations, they will be referred to as MD. The numbers following represent the volume of the Mhimme Defteri, the volume of its transliterated version (in parentheses), then the page and series numbers. Thus, the reference for this first decree is MD 6 (1), 114.206. 2Since the term Gypsy (a rendered form of Egyptian) and its derivatives have derogatory connotations, Gypsies generally prefer to be identified as Roman (Roma), which means men in the Romani language. The singular of the word is Rom and the adjective is Romani. However, there are some who would rather be called Gypsies in the official language of their country of residence. See Zoltan Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1; David M. Crowe, Roma: The Gypsies, in Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350-2000, ed. Peter N. Stearns, 6 vols. (New York: Scribner, 2000), 1:449. In modern Turkey, most Gypsies identify themselves as Roma because ingene, the most common word used to designate them, has pejorative implications. However, some would rather be identified as ingene. See for instance Nazm Alpman, Baska Dnyann Insanlar ingeneler (Istanbul: Ozan Yaynclk, 1997), 53-56; Ali Arayc, lkesiz Bir Halk: ingeneler (Istanbul: Ceylan Yaynlar, 1999), 172-174. In the Ottoman texts, they are referred to as ingene (Gypsy) or Kpti (Copt in native Egyptian). Thus, in accordance with my sources, both primary and secondary, I generally use Gypsies rather than Roma. 3See for instance MD 5 (1), 35.186; MD 5 (1), 58.311; MD 5 (1), 231.1438; MD 7 (1), 110. 216; MD 12 (1), 228.344. Gypsy named Elsz ingene (Gypsy without a hand). However, Elsz ingene was not alone: his sons were also involved in the 4 case.According to another imperial order that was dispatched to the judges of Rumelia in 1567, we are informed that some Gypsies were involved not only in counterfeiting, theft, and vagrancy, but also in swindling villagers with fake silver coins (kalb aka) in order to rob villagers of their provisions.5 The focus of this study, however, is not merely to describe the Gypsies marginality or their non-conformity to legal or social norms.6 It intends, first and foremost, to explore the Ottoman states and the societys attitudes toward this marginal group through sources that were mostly recorded by the governing elite and mainstream society. How the Gypsiesboth men and women, settled and nomadic Muslims and non-Muslims,were legally and socially marginalized is the main question addressed throughout this work. As will be shown, the marginalization of the Gypsies was achieved through different mechanisms, such as segregation, expulsion, and stigmatization.7 The history of peoples who were marginal and voiceless in their societies is important not only for its own sake, but also for what it reveals about the nature of the societies in which they operated.8 Thus, study of the Gypsies in the 4MD 6 (2), 213.1196. Suraiya Faroqhi presents a similar case in which a Gypsy was accused of being a counterfeiter in her Coping with the State: Political Conflict and Crime in the Ottoman Empire 1550-1720 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1995), 133-143. 5MD 7 (1), 111.216. 6This study adapts the flexible working definition of marginality offered by Eugene Rogan, Introduction, in Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 3. 7Mindful of the different mechanisms of the Ottoman state and society, my approach to how the state and society took part in marginalizing the Gypsies relies considerably upon the work of Robert Jtte, who has studied poverty and deviance in early modern Europe. Following his approach, different modes of marginalization have been used as a methodological tool to analyze the central question of this study. Robert Jtte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 159-177. 8For a concise and sophisticated historiographical discussion on this point, see Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, Introduction, in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Ottoman Empire not only sheds light on one of the most obscure phases of Gypsy history, but also opens new horizons for further discussion on the functioning of a plural society in the Ottoman Empire. In examining the subject of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, this study limits itself to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period during which the major laws pertaining to the Gypsies were promulgated. However, later developments that influenced the civic status of the Gypsies have also been touched upon in order to offer glimpses into the extent to which political and social attitudes toward the Gypsies underwent changes during the different periods of Ottoman history. The geographical area under consideration consists of Istanbul and the province of Rumelia (Rumili), which included much of present-day Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, European Turkey, and northern Greece.9 As already noted, this study relies to a large extent upon the Mhimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century, these registers including drafts and copies of the decrees that were decided upon in the Imperial Assembly.10 In addition to the Mhimme registers, reference is made to kanunnames, or sultanic legislations, concerning the Gypsies issued in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.11 The kanunnames consist of: (1) Rumeli Etrakinun Koyun Adeti Hukmi (The Decree on the Number of Sheep of the Turks in Society: Selections from the Annales, vol. 4, ed. R. Forster and O. Ranum (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7-12. 9In fact, the choice of Rumelia and Istanbul as the focus of this study is dictated by the availability and accessibility of the sources. Since the Gypsies had a strong presence in these areas during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there are more sources pertaining to them relative to other areas of the empire. 10For further details on the Mhimme registers, see Uriel Heyd, Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 1552-1615: A Study of the Firman According to the Mhimme Defteri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); Halil Inalck, Ottoman Archival Materials on Millets, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 438-449. 11For further information on the kanunname, see Halil Inalck, Kanunname, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960-), 4:562-566. Rumelia), promulgated during the reign of Mehmed II (1451-1481); (2) Kanunname-i Cizye-i Cingenehan (The Law of the Poll Tax for the Gypsies), issued in 1497 during the time of Bayezid II (14811512); (3) Kanunname-i Kiptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli (The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia), enacted in 1530; and (4) Cingane Yazmak In Tayin Olunan Emine ve Katibine Hkm (An Order to the Steward and his Scribe Appointed to Inscribe the Gypsies), endorsed in 1537 during the reign of Sleyman I (1520-1566).12 Travelers accounts and Turkish oral traditions were also consulted for information on the Gypsies in Ottoman society and their image in Ottoman-Turkish popular culture. The Ottoman State and the Gypsies The legal status of the Gypsies in Ottoman society was atypical considering the principles on which Ottoman social structure was based.13 Its diverse sources included Old Turkic traditions and local 12For facsimiles, transliterations, and concise interpretations of these laws, seein the following orderAhmed Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, 8 vols. (Istanbul: Fey Vakf Yaynlar, 1990-), vol. 1, 397-400; 2, 383-386; 6 (2), 511-514 and 520-523; for the transliteration of Rumeli Etrakinun Koyun Adeti Hukmi (The Decree on the Number of Sheep of the Turks in Rumelia), see also Robert Anhegger and Halil Inalck, Kanunname-i Sultan-i Ber Muceb-i rf-i Osmani: II. Mehmed ve II. Bayezd Devirlerine Ait Yasakname ve Kanunnameler (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu Basmevi, 1956), 39-40; for the transliteration of Kanunname-i Kiptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli (The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia), see, for example, mer Ltfi Barkan, XV. ve XVI. Asrlarda Osmanl Imparatorlugunda Zirai Ekonominin Hukuki ve Mali Esaslar: Kanunlar, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Istanbul niversitesi Edebiyat Fakltesi Yaynlar, 1945), 249-250. English translations of these laws with their facsimiles and transliterations are also available in Faika elik, Gypsies in the Orbit of Islam: The Ottoman Experience (1450-1600) (masters thesis, McGill University, 2003), 94-120. In subsequent citations of these laws, I will quote only from Akgndz. 13For this view, see Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), 22; Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire: A Contribution to the History of the Balkans, ed. Donald Kenrick, trans. Olga Apostolova (Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press; Paris: Centre de Recherches Tsiganes, 2001), 33-34; Eyal Ginio, Exploring the Other: Margaret Hasluck and the Ottoman Gypsies (paper presented at the conference Anthropology, Archaeology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia or practices. Nevertheless, Ottoman social organization was based to an even larger extent on Islamic principles. The state essentially identified itself as Islamic and devoted itself to the promotion of the faith.14 However, in practical terms, the concept of religious community was especially promoted as the basic unit of administrative organization when large non-Turkic and non-Muslim groups were drawn into the growing empire.15 By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Sultans subjects were 16 grouped into religiously based communities called millets. Thus, The Life and Times of F. W. Hasluck [1878-1920], organized by the Center for the Study of South Eastern Europe at the University of Wales, Gregynong, 3-6 November 2001). I owe special thanks to Dr. Eyal Ginio for allowing me to use this unpublished study of his. Without this study, my paper would have taken a different direction. 14 In this vein, Mehmed the Conquerors poem might be a good example. This poem is translated by Bernard Lewis in An Anthology of Turkish Literature, ed. Kemal Silay (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1996), 92: My purpose is to obey Gods command to wage Jihad My Zeal is for the faith of Islam alone. By the Grace of God and the brave men of Gods army My purpose is to conquer the infidels entirely. My trust is in the prophets and the saints, My hope of victory and conquest is in Gods bounty. What if I wage Jihad with life and fortune? Praise to be God, my desire for battle grows many thousandfold. O Muhammad, by your own miracles Let my power triumph over the enemies of the faith. 15Kemal Karpat, The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the Middle East, in Ethnicity, Pluralism and the State in the Middle East, ed. Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 39-40. 16 The term millet is derived from the Arabic millah, a word used in the Quran in the sense of religion. In the medieval Islamic period, it also came to mean the religious community of the Muslims. In the Ottoman context, millet was used to designate not only the religious community of Muslims but also the religious community of non- Muslims. Despite these earlier references, millet in the sense of nation began to be employed commonly in the nineteenth century. Micheal Ursinus, Millet, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 7:61-64; H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and after the conquest of Constantinople, the Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Armenians were granted millet status,17that is to say, they were allowed to function as autonomous but dependent communities with their own religious, educational, and legal institutions under the jurisdiction of recognized religious authorities based in Istanbul.18 In return, however, the leaders of these communities, or millet bass, were responsible to the sultan for the actions and allegiance of their community members and the payment of tax and other obligations to the state.19 Hence, membership in a given confessional community or millet was a fundamental factor in determining a subjects rights and obligations despite the existence of other overlapping parameters, such as occupation or place of residence.20 Thus, religion, rather than ethnic and linguistic solidarity, was the basis of communal identity in Ottoman society.21 By contrast, the administrative status of the Gypsies was based on ethnicity rather than on religious affiliation.22 For the Gypsies of the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century, part 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 112; Sugar, 144. 17Many of the commonly accepted models used for describing the organization of the religious communities in the Ottoman Empire have recently come under severe criticism from revisionist historians. The argument rests on the central question of whether an institutionalized policy toward the non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire existed before the nineteenth century throughout the empire. For different opinions on this point, see Benjamin Braude, Foundation Myths of the Millet System, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 69-88; Ursinus; Aron Rodrigue, Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds, Stanford Humanities Review 5 (1996), 1:81-90; Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1-15. 18Sugar, 43-50; Stanford Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1, Empire of The Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 151-155. 19Shaw, 151. 20Ibid., 150-151. 21Karpat, 37. 22Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria, 22; Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 47; Ginio, Exploring the Other. Rumelia in the sixteenth century, this arrangement can be seen through examination of the administrative unit known as the liva-i ingane. In Ottoman provincial administration, the liva or sancak was used to designate a district encompassing, at rough estimate, an area of several thousand square miles and population perhaps a hundred thousand on the average.23 On the other hand, despite their fragmentary nature, the sources on the subject suggest that the liva- ingane or ingane sancag (subprovince of Gypsies) was not a geographical entity; rather, it was a political and administrative division formed for the purpose of regulating the Gypsies in Edirne, Istanbul, and the rest of Rumelia, likely at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.24 The sources on the historical geography of the Ottoman Empire provide further evidence that the liva- ingane or ingane sancag was not geographically confined to the province of Rumelia.25 As the Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia (Kanunname-i Kiptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli) indicates, Gypsieswhether Muslim or non-Muslim, settled or nomadicwere attached to this administrative subprovince based purely upon their ethnicity.26 The head of the subprovince, called the mir-i kibtiyan, ingene sancag begi, or ingene begi, like a confessional community leader, was made 23I. Metin Kunt, The Sultans Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 14. 24On this question, compare, for instance, M. Tayyib Gkbilgin, ҂ingeneler, in Islm Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Milli Egitim Basmevi, 1945), 3:423; Mithat Sertoglu, Resimli Osmanl Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbaas, 1958), 68-69; E. M. Serifgil, XVI. Yzylda Rumeli Eyaletindeki ingeneler, Trk Dnyasi Arastrmalar Dergisi 3 (1981), 15:129-135; Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 1, 397-400; vol. 2, 383-386; vol. 6 (2), 511-514 and 520-523; Ismail Hasim Altnz, Osmanl Toplumunda ingeneler, Tarih ve Toplum 23 (1995), 137:27; Altnz, Osmanl Toplum Yaps Iinde ingeneler, in Trkler, vol. 10 (Ankara: Yeni Trkiye Yaynlar, 2002), 429-430; Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 35. 25Donald Edgar Pitcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire: From Earliest Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 136-138 and map 27; I. Metin Kunt, Sancaktan Eyalete: 1550-1650 Arasinda Osmanl meras ve Il Idaresi (Istanbul: Bogazii niversitesi Yaynlar, 1978), 16 and 18. 26Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 6 (2), 512-513. responsible for collecting the taxes from his Gypsy community and the organization of its relations with the state.27 Whether this leader was appointed from among the Gypsies is not clear. Even though Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies were attached to the same administrative unit, their obligations to the statethe most important being that of paying taxeswere different. Concerning this, the Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia commands that Muslim Gypsies (mslman inganeler) of Istanbul, Edirne and other places in Rumeli pay twenty-two akes tax for each household and for each bachelor. Infidel Gypsies (kafir ingeneler) pay twenty-five akes poll tax (ispen) for each household and for each bachelor. As for their widows the y give six akes tax.28 However, Muslim Gypsies were obliged to pay a lesser amount of tax than the non-Muslim Gypsies provided that they did not intermingle and migrate with the latter. Otherwise, they were required to pay cizye (poll tax) as well as being subject to punishment.29 Indeed, the basis of this regulation can be found in The Decree on the Number of Sheep of the Turks in Rumelia (Rumeli Etrakinun Koyun Adeti Hukmi) of Mehmet the Conqueror, which commands that [a] Muslim Gypsy should not reside with an infidel Gypsy, but should intermingle with the Muslim Gypsies. However, if he continues to reside [with infidel Gypsies] and does not intermingle with the Muslims, then detain him and collect his poll tax.30 Recent research on the Ottoman Gypsies has demonstrated that the Muslim Gypsies were obliged to pay poll tax in the eighteenth century.31 However, a fetva (religious opinion) submitted to the 27Ibid. See also Sertoglu, 68-69. 28Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 6 (2), 512. 29Ibid., 513. 30Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 1, 398. 31Relying mainly upon the sicills or the seriat court records of eighteenth-century Ottoman Salonica, Eyal Ginio has unearthed this very unusual practice in the Ottoman Empire. See his Exploring the Other; Ginio, Marginal People in the seriat court as evidence might indicate that Gypsies, regardless of their religion, paid poll tax as early as the seventeenth century.32 The story behind the fetva tells of how a Muslim man called Mustafa was recorded in the tahrir register as a ingene (Gypsy). Consequently, he was asked to pay poll tax (cizye). However, Mustafa did not accept this and went to Seyhlislam Yahya Efendi (d. 1644) for a fetva. He stated that, as a good and practicing Muslim, he should not be obliged to pay poll tax simply because he was recorded in the register as a ingene. Yahya Efendi considered the case and issued a fetva stating that Mustafa was a good Muslim fulfilling all the requirements of Islam and that the people around him had confirmed this fact. Therefore, he was not to pay poll tax. With this fetva, Mustafa went to the court and received a certificate (hccet) stating that he was a Muslim, not a ingene, and so was not obliged to pay cizye. The second indication that the Ottoman state classified Gypsies according to their ethnicity and segregated them from the rest of society in terms of administration comes from the census documents. According to Kemal Karpat, in the population registers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ottomans classified their subjects as Muslims and non-Muslims. The latter were further classified as Christian, Armenian, or Jewish. Then he adds, oddly enough, [there is] a separate classification for Kpti, i.e., Gypsies.33 The term Kpti deserves further explanation for the purposes of this study. In Arabic as well as in Ottoman Turkish, Kpti means Copt or native Egyptian. As is the case with the English Gypsy, Spanish Gitano, and French Gitane, the Ottoman usage of Kpti results from the common belief during the period Ottoman City: The Case of Salonica during the 18th Century (in Hebrew) (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998). 32For this fetva and the court case, see Murat Akgndz, XIX. Asr Baslarna Kadar Osmanl Devletinde Seyhlislamlk (Istanbul: Beyan, 2002), 229-230. I am grateful to my colleague Mehmet Kadri Karabela for bringing this source to my attention. 33Karpat, 45. that the Roma originated in Egypt.34 Because of this terminology, according to Stanford Shaw, the Gypsies were mistakenly attached to the Armenian millet.35 In his discussion of the Armenian millet, Selahi Sonyel also states: He [the Armenian Patriarch] also ruled over all the Christians who did not belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. These included the Monophysitic churches of Asia Minor, and later Africa such as the Jacobite s, Syrians, Ethiopians, Georgians, Chaldeans, Copts and all the Gypsies of the Empire, in matters of civil law.36 [my emphasis] In fact, according to the imperial decree that was bestowed upon the Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem in 1517 by Selim I, Copts were attached to the Armenian millet along with Ethiopians and Syriac Christians. However, this decree gives no indication that the Gypsies were ever included in the aforementioned confessional community.37 Furthermore, according to Ismail Hasim Altnz, the Gypsies living in the Ottoman Empire were never granted millet status and they were never attached to any Muslim or non-Muslim confessional community. Indeed, they were treated as though they were guests kept waiting in the hall.38 Thus, whether the Gypsies were officially attached to any millet in the period under consideration requires further investigation. In Ottoman society, the place of each individual or group was fixed for the sake of economic, social, and administrative order. 34Gkbilgin, ҂ingeneler, 421; Serifgil, XVI. Yzyilda Rumeli Eyaletindeki ingeneler, 128; and G. L. Lewis and Ch. Quelquejay, Cingane, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2:40. 35Shaw, 1:152. Shaw does not explain when the Gypsies were attached to the Armenian millet, nor does he cite any source. However, in his kind reply to my e-mail message, he directed me to the Basbakanlk archives for further research on this subject. 36Selhi R. Sonyel, Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 1993), 45. For a similar argument, see T. Tankut Soykan, OsmanlImparatorlugunda Gayri Muslimler (Istanbul: topya Kitabevi, 2000), 212. 37Yavuz Ercan, Kuds Ermeni Patrikhanesi (Ankara: Trk Tarih Kurumu Basmevi, 1988), 15-17. 38Altnz, 27. However, there were some avenues of upward social mobility as far as the subject class was concerned. The devsirme system or periodic levy of (mainly) Christian boys was certainly one of them.39 However, this prospect was not open to all the sultans subjects. Romanians, Wallachians, and Moldavians were not recruited because they were vassals and not subjects of the sultans.40 Jews, and predictably, Gypsies were left out as well. The former were spared because they were professionals who served the great pashas and whose faith was as firm as that of any Muslim, while the latter were clearly detested.41 Thus, Gypsies were not permitted to exploit this window of opportunity because they were stigmatized as morally and sexually corrupt. Some Gypsies, of course, did serve in the army by performing auxiliary services, but they were never identified as part of the military and administrative class (askeri). Instead they were classified as msellems (literally, exempt).42 They were not only granted lands to cultivate, but were also exempted from paying certain taxes in return for such services during campaigns as casting cannon balls, carrying and repairing guns, and building roads.43 Since their services were valuable to the Ottoman army, they were ranked between the ruling and the subject classes,44 but they were never permitted to achieve askeri status. Partly due to the stigma attached to the Gypsies and partly due to the Ottomans desire for a settled society with its predictable revenues, the movements of the Gypsies were restricted.45 For 39Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 28. 40V. L. Mnage, Devshirme, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2:211. 41Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (London: Saqi, 1997), 34. 42For more information on the organization of the Gypsy msellems, see, for example, Serifgil, 135-142. 43Fatma Mge Gek, Msellem, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 7:665. 44For the status of the msellems in Ottoman society, see Halil Inalck, The Nature of Traditional Society, in The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy, ed. Halil Inalck (London: Variorum Reprints, 1978), 44. 45Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington, IN: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1983), 65. instance, according to an imperial decree issued in 1572, they were forbidden to traverse back and forth from the Rumelian to the Anatolian side by way of the straits. If they did so, they were to be imprisoned.46 Furthermore, they were strictly forbidden to ride a horse or carry a weapon. In fact, these restrictions were imposed upon other non-Muslim subjects as well. However, as is indicated in the Mhimme registers, the Ottoman authorities were very keen to enforce these restrictions on the Gypsies who, with their horses and weapons, were identified as sources of social discontent as well as moral and civil disorder.47 At one point in the sixteenth century, they were not even allowed to work as dealers (cambaz) in the horse market of Istanbul.48 Thus, attempts were always being made to control the movements of the Gypsies and to segregate them from the rest of the population; in fact, they were not allowed to settle anywhere in a city except in the specific quarter assigned to them. Not surprisingly, this quarter was not in the center of the city, but on its outskirts or in relatively peripheral neighborhoods. In Istanbul, for example, they were originally relegated to the quarters 49 in Edirne Kaps. And although many eventually succeeded in obtaining residence in the inner circles of the city, this caused tension from time to time, and measures were inevitably taken to expel them from those places. In a decree issued in 1763, for example, we are informed that the Gypsies had begun to live in the Fatih district, which was known for its educational, religious, and commercial importance.50 However, according to the verdict, since the Gypsies had been partaking in various sinful activities, they were to be expelled to the quarters in Edirne Kaps, where they had formerly lived.51 In fact, as the following decree from the criminal 46MD 6 (1), 108.903. 47See, for instance, MD 7 (1), 110.215; MD 7 (1), 110.216; MD 7(1), 402.836; MD 7 (3), 185.2344. 48MD 7(1), 481.1010. 49Gkbilgin, ҂ingeneler, 425. 50Halil Inalck, Istanbul, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 4:229. 51Ahmet Refik, Hicri On Ikinci Asrda Istanbul Hayat (1100-1200) (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaas, 1930), 198-199. code of Sultan Sleyman I indicates, the expulsion of the Gypsies from cities as well as the countryside had a long precedent: Some gypsies are not settled in small towns or villages and do not go peaceably about [their] business, but arm themselves, mount on the horseback and roam the villages and countryside, oppressing and wronging the peasants. These [offenders] have since ancient times been called (?). As an old kanun prescribes . . . such mischief makers shall be expelled and driven from the country.52 To sum up, Gypsies were marginalized through stigmatization, segregation, and expulsion. They were treated as the other by the Ottoman authorities in terms of their administrative status. They were seen as heretics not only in terms of their lifestyle but also in terms of the threat they seemed to pose to Ottoman sedentary life. However, the sources give no indication that they were used as slaves, which was the practice in Moldavia and Wallachia during the same period, nor that they were actively persecuted because of their deviant practices, as has been the case in Europe down to the present day.53 Professions as a Cause of Social Marginalization The hierarchy of professions or trades in a given society reflects not only societys economic and social realities, but also its mentalities.54 To provide a hierarchical schema of the professions followed in the Ottoman society is, of course, beyond the scope of 52Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. V. L. Menage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 120. The italics, except for those of kanun, are mine. 53For a comparison of the attitudes toward the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire and Europe, see, for instance, Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 173178; Zoltan Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83-95. 54Jacques Le Goff, Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West, in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 58-70; Bronislaw Geremek, The Marginal Man, in Medieval Callings, ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 347-373. this study. However, we can delineate the professions held by Gypsies and offer glimpses into how some of those professions were viewed by the authorities and the rest of society. According to the tax register drawn up in 1522-1523, the most common occupation of the Gypsies of Rumelia was that of sazende, or musician.55 In the same tax register, however, there are references to Gypsy tinsmiths, farriers, goldsmiths, sword-makers, stove-makers, makers of clout nails, leather workers, tailors, carpet makers, dyers, ironmongers, halva-makers, cheese-makers, butchers, kebab-makers, gardeners, muleteers, guards, prison guards, man servants, couriers, monkey breeders, well-diggers and others including occasionally army officers, janissaries, policemen ( subashis), doctors, surgeons, monks.56 The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia commanded that the Gypsies of Rumelia, Istanbul, Edirne, Filibe, and Sofya pay, every month, one hundred akes as tax (kesim) for their wives who are involved in unlawful sexual intercourse (na mesru file mbaseret iden),57 indirectly suggesting that some Gypsy women were associated with prostitution. The relatively high amount of the tax further indicates that the law referred to women who made a living from this trade of vice.58 As Marushiakova and Popov have demonstrated on the basis of the tax registers, there were even whole tax communities registered for fiscal purposes as gaining their income from this trade.59 The Mhimme registers also provide information on prostitution as an occupation among some Gypsy communities. For instance, according to a decree issued in 1570, the Gypsies were accused of using their wives and daughters for prostitution and retaining the ensuing profits without paying what was due to the state in taxes.60 55Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 41. 56Ibid., 44. 57Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 6 (2), 512. 58Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 45. 59Ibid. 60MD 12 (1), 228.344. As the Decree on the Number of Sheep of Turks of Rumelia has indicated, another traditional Gypsy craft was iron making. Due to this skill, Gypsy ironmongers were valued by the Ottoman state and exempted on an individual basis from the poll tax, provided this was decreed by the sultan.61 The earliest narrative source on the professions of the Gypsies is the account of the celebrated traveler Evliya elebi (1611-1679?). In his detailed description of the guilds of Istanbul, elebi talks about Gypsy bear breeders, horse traders, musicians, actors, boy dancers, and sellers of boza, a beverage made from fermented millet.62 Another European traveler from the early nineteenth century adds fortune-tellers and executioners to the list of traditional Gypsy occupations.63 It appears that fortune-telling was 64 mainly practiced by old Gypsy women.In fact, Istanbuls renowned fortune-tellers of the second half of the nineteenth century were Muslim Gypsy women.65 In terms of occupation, the Gypsies were at the bottom of the Ottoman economic and social scale. Whether Gypsies ever participated in empire-wide or international trade is not known. Yet some of them, owing to their proficiency in trades valuable to the military, were valued by the state. Above all, they were valued by the Ottoman authorities and the common people as musicians and dancers.66 However, the issue is complicated by the fact that some professions, including music performance and dance, were condemned by Islamic law and, as such, prohibited to Muslims.67 61Akgndz, Osmanl Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, vol. 1, 398. 62Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 44. 63W. R. Halliday, Some Notes upon the Gypsies of Turkey, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Series III, 1 (1922), 3:168. 64Alexander G. Paspati, Memoir on the Language of the Gypsies as Now Used in the Turkish Empire, Journal of the American Oriental Society 7 (1862), 1:146. 65Abdlaziz Bey, Osmanl Adet, Merasim ve Tabirleri: Insanlar, Inanslar, Eglence, Dil, vol. 2, ed. Kazm Arsan and Duygu Arsan Gnay (Istanbul: Tarih Vakf Yurt Yaynlar, 1995), 368. 66Fraser, 178. 67An analysis of these professions according to Islamic lawmore specifically, Ottoman lawis beyond the scope of this study. For general understanding, however, Thus, the Gypsies dominant vocational fields can be viewed as contributing to their social marginalization. Ottoman-Turkish Stereotypes of the Gypsies It has long been a common belief in Turkey that the Gypsies attachment to any religion is nominal.68 Several of our sources relate how this belief contributed to societys, and even the states, attitudes toward them. elebis accounts are illustrative. Discussing the Gypsies living in Gmlcine, our celebrated traveler gives the following description of their promiscuous ritual life: The Rumelian Gypsies celebrated Easter with the Christians, the festival of Sacrifice with the Muslims and Passover with the Jews. They did not accept any one religion and therefore our Imams refused to conduct funeral services for them but gave them a special cemetery outside Egri Qapu. It is because they are such renegades that they were ordered to pay an additional tax for non-Muslims (xarac). That is why a double xarac is exacted from the Gypsies. In fact, according to Sultan Mehmets census stipulation (tahrir) xarac is even exacted from the dead souls of the Gypsies, until live ones are found to replace them.69 An incident reported by Alexander G. Paspati from a later period also highlights Ottoman attitudes toward Gypsies as influenced by popular perceptions of their religious beliefs: In a small village near Tchorlu, between Constantinople and Adrinople, called Deghirmen Kioy (village of the Mill), encamped in 1866 a party of wandering I have relied upon a variety of sources, including Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law; Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994); M. Ertugrul Dzdag, Seyhulislam Ebussuud Efendi Fetvalar Isgnda 16. Asr Trk Hayat (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1972); Mouradgea dOhsson, XVIII. Yzyl Trkiyesinde rf ve Adetler, trans. Zerhan Yksel (Istanbul: Kervan Kitaplk A. S., 1974). 68As an example of this thought, see G. L. Lewis and Ch. Quelquejay, Cingane, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2:40-41. 69Robert Dankoff and Victor A. Friedman, The Earliest Known Text in Balkan (Rumelian) Romani: A Passage from Evliya Celebis Seyahat-name, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Series V, 1 (1991), 1:4. Tchinghians with their bears. They had all Musulman names, and were considered Musulman Bohemians. One night one of them, called Mustapha, in passing a river with his bear, got imbedded within the mud up to his waist. His cries we re heard by some workmen at a neighboring farm, but, thinking that highwaymen were at their work, they left the poor fellow to his fate. In the morning he was still found in the muddead. His companions went to the Greek Priest in the village to have him buried, but the priest, knowing that up to that day he had been called Mustapha, was unwilling to bury him. His companions alleged that his name was Theodore. Finally the Turks, finding no vestige of circumcision, gave him up as a Christian, and he was buried according to the rites of the Christian church.70 As has been suggested by Eyal Ginio, Karagz plays (Turkish Shadow Theater) can serve as another source of information on the representation of the Gypsies in Ottoman popular culture.71 In Karagz, stock Gypsy characters included a nasty witch called bok ana (shit mother).72 However, since Karagz was performed to make people laugh, the traits of the characters were certainly exaggerated. Furthermore, in the Karagz tradition, not only Gypsies, but also other nationalities living in the Ottoman territory, such as Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and others, were stereotyped in terms of their ethnic and religious affiliations as well as in terms of their professions.73 Finally, linguistic evidence can be useful in demonstrating the stereotypes attributed to the Gypsies. The origin of the term ingene, the most common word used to designate a Gypsy in Turkish, is still debated. The common belief is that the term comes from the Byzantine Greek word Atsnganoi, which denotes 70Alexander G. Paspati, Turkish Gypsies, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Old Series, 1 (1888), 1:3. 71Eyal Ginio, Exploring the Other. 72Metin And, Karagz: Turkish Shadow Theatre: With an Appendix on the History of the Turkish Puppet Theatre (Istanbul: Dost Yaynlar, 1979), 69. 73Ibid. wanderers and soothsayers.74 However, according to a recent book published on the Turkish Gypsies by A. Rafet zkan, the term comes from a combination of two words: engi-gan or engi-gane. engi has two meanings: a dancing girl and a harp (enk) player. In Persian, gan is a suffix that designates the plural of rational beings. Thus, engi-gan would refer to either dancing girls or harp players. Since these professions were common among the Gypsies, according to zkan, this may well explain the term ingene. However, there is one more explanation, a popular one, recorded by Mrs. Blunt, a European traveler: When the Gypsies driven out of their own country arrived at Mekran, a wonderful machine was made, the wheel of which refused to turn u ntil an evil spirit disguised as a sage, informed the chief of the Gypsies, who was named Chen, that it would do so only if he married his own sister Guin. This advice was followed and the wheel turned, but from this incestuous marriage the people earned not only the name of Chenguin but also the curse, which was put upon them by the Moslem saints, that they should be wanderers excluded from among the races of mankind.76 As a repertory of live museums, the sources of Turkish oral traditionsuch as metaphors, idioms, and proverbscan provide a better understanding of the image of the Gypsies in Ottoman as well as in Turkish popular culture.77 In Turkish, ingene, or Gypsy, has been used metaphorically in a derogatory sense, implying shameless, impudent, importunate, ill-mannered, dishonest, miserly, and greedy.78 It is one of the worst insults that one can hurl at a 74Crowe, Roma: The Gypsies, in Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000, 1:449. 75Rafet zkan, Trkiye ingeneleri (Ankara: Kltr Bakanlg Yaynlar, 2000), 8-9. 76Halliday, 174. For a different version of this story, see Alpman, 53. 77For metaphors, idioms, and proverbs, I have mainly relied upon rnekleriyle Trke Szlk (Ankara: Milli Egitim Bakanlg, 1995-1996); mer Asm Aksoy, Ataszleri ve Deyimler Szlg, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Inkilap Kitabevi, 1989); Gkbilgin, ҂ingeneler, 426; Resat Ekrem Kou, ҂ingeneler, in Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Ansiklopedisi Nesriyat Kollektif Sirketi, 1958-1974), 7: 3999-4000. 78See Kou, ҂ingeneler, 7: 3999. Turk.79 Similarly, in Turkish idiomatic expressions, Gypsies are associated with theft, such as in Gypsy Shalwar (ingene Salvar), or identified as shameless and dishonest, as in the case of Gypsy Fight (ingene Kavgas). In proverbs, they are referred to as corrupt and unreliable, as in the saying, A Gypsy cannot become a shepherd (ingenden oban olmaz). The Gypsy reputation for being nomadic and poor is also stereotyped in the proverb, It is worse than a Gypsys tent (ingene ergesinden beter). Conclusion Through an examination of four major kanunnames issued in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the Mhimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century, it has been demonstrated that the Gypsies were marginalized by the Ottoman state. In these state documents, specifically in the Mhimme registers, the Gypsies were stigmatized as ehl-i fesad (people of malice)80 and segregated from the rest of society by the Ottoman authorities. However, this segregation was less spatial than administrative, and this is demonstrated in two ways. First, classified by ethnicity rather than by religious affiliation, Gypsies found themselves grouped within the administrative unit called the liva-i ingane (the subprovince of the Gypsies). Although it was called a subprovince, it was not a geographical entity: the Gypsies of Istanbul and Rumelia alike were attached to this province for organizational purposes. Second, in population registers, the Gypsies were classified, separately from Muslims and non-Muslims, under the umbrella term Kpti (Copt or native Egyptian), which encompassed both Muslim and non-Muslim, nomadic and settled Gypsies.81 Yet, while both Muslim Gypsies and non-Muslim Gypsies bore the same designation, their 79Bart McDowell, Gypsies: Wanderers of the World (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1970), 145. 80See, for instance, MD 5 (1), 58.311; MD 5(1); 256.1595; MD 6 (1), 312.569; MD 7 (1), 30.66. 81Ginio notes the same usage in the sicills of eighteenth-century Ottoman Selonica. See his Exploring the Other. obligations toward the statethe most important being payment of taxeswere different. Muslim Gypsies were required to pay less tax than non-Muslim Gypsies, provided they did not intermingle with the latter; otherwise, they were liable to be punished and subjected to poll tax. However, starting with the seventeenth century, Muslim Gypsies were obliged to pay poll tax. But an analysis of this crucial question must be left to future research. Since the Gypsies were often seen as heretics, attempts were made to control their movements. Furthermore, they were not allowed to settle anywhere in a city except in specific quarters assigned to them, and whenever they managed to obtain residence in city centers, measures were eventually taken to expel them. At the same time, however, there is no indication in the sources that they were used as slaves, as was the practice in Moldavia and Wallachia during the same period. And although they defied the parameters of accepted legal and social norms, the Gypsies were never actively persecuted, and certainly not to the extent they were in European states. The Gypsies were a despised and alien other in Ottoman society. They were seen as less reliable and trustworthy than other groups in the empire. This social prejudice and contempt toward the Gypsies derived from their traditional professions and their indifference to Islamic law and Muslim social mores. Nevertheless, they filled a niche in Ottoman society. Their proficiency in iron making, for example, was valued by the Ottoman state; their talents as entertainers were renowned; and, as fortune-tellers, they served even the wives of the Ottoman elite. At the same time, some of their occupations, like prostitution, contributed to their social stigmatization. As for Ottoman-Turkish stereotypes of the Gypsies, a well-known Turkish saying is revealing: In Turkey, there are seventy-two and a half nations.82 Is there any doubt as to the identity of that half nation? 82This saying is also rendered as follows: In Turkey, there are sixty-six and a half nations. See, for instance, Ingwar Svanberg, Marginal Groups and Itinerants, in Authors Note. This study is based on my MA thesis, which I wrote under the supervision of Professor A. ner Turgay, to whom I am deeply indebted. I wish also to thank Professors Wael B. Hallaq, Michelle L. Hartman, and Donald P. Little of McGill University and Professor Mumtaz Ahmad of Hampton University for their much appreciated insights. I also owe special thanks to Professor Dana Sajdi of Concordia University for her thoughtful comments and supportive enthusiasm. Finally, I am grateful to my colleague Hasher Majoka for his valuable suggestions. Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey, 2 vols., ed. Peter Alford Andrews (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1989), 1:602. Book Reviews Akbar S. Ahmed. Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003). ix, 213 pages. ISBN 0-7456-2210-0. PB $19.95. [Editors note. Two reviews of this book are being published; the first is by Tamara Sonn, and the second, by Asma Afsaruddin.] (1) Islam Under Siege is a book for our times. As its subtitleLiving Dangerously in a Post-Honor Worldindicates, it is not about a single religious community as distinct from the rest of the world. Islam takes center stage because global developments have converged to place it at the heart of what is perceived as the breakdown of civilization. Nor is this yet another clash of civilizations discussion. Written by a renowned anthropologist of both Islamic and Euro-American societies, Islam Under Siege describes todays changing, complicated, and dangerous world in terms of social transition. The mayhem that surrounds us exemplified by, but certainly not confined to, 9/11represents the death throes of a world riven by disparities between the powerful and the powerless. The author, also a seasoned diplomat and a man of profound faith, suggests that it could represent as well the birth pangs of a global civilization based on universally accepted standards of justice and compassion. The book calls upon all peopleMuslims and non-Muslims aliketo work for greater understanding and compassion and warns of the dangers of failing to do so. In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt articulated the Four Freedoms, rights that should be enjoyed universally: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At that traumatic time, the U.S. president also called for a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighboranywhere in the world. Roosevelts sentiments were shared by many; the United Nations was established just a few years later, expressing international will to achieve similar objectives. Unfortunately, the goals remain elusive. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened; the number of people living without civil or political rights has increased; the development, manufacture, and use of weapons remains a major source of income for the worlds wealthiest economies; and perhaps most perniciously, the assumption that conflicts can be resolved militarily remains largely unchallenged at the policy level. In short, more people live powerless in poverty and fear than ever before. Akbar Ahmed describes todays apparently pervasive lawlessness and brutality as the result. (See chapters 1 and 2, Islam Under Siege and What Is Going Wrong?) Recalling the observations of the famed fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldun, as well as modern sociologist Emile Durkheim, Ahmed bases his analysis of the link between injustice and brutality on the characteristics of tribal behavior. Asabiyyah is the Arabic term used by Ibn Khaldun to identify the basis of tribal identity and solidarity. In tribal society, asabiyyah accounts for altruism and often focuses on notions of group honor. If the group or any of its members suffers offense, recompense must be made. Vengeance must be taken upon the offender to restore tribal honor. Ahmed notes that, in religious communities, tribal identity is superseded, and solidarity is based on shared commitment to religious ideals. Notions of honor shift accordingly, finding new ground in those ideals. Thus, in the case of the Islamic community, identity and honor were both based on commitment to the ideals of justice and compassion. However, religious communities are also real communities, subject to economic and political developments. In the modern era, economic and political setbacks have seriously challenged Islamic ideals in some quarters. While the Islamic community was powerful and successful in the Middle Ages, enjoying prosperity, security, social cohesion, and cultural productivity, European colonialism and postcolonial conditions have reversed its fortunes. Economic deprivation, political impotence, and continuing conflict in areas such as Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Kashmir have effectively suspended Islamic ideals among some groups. Islamic solidarity and its core values in such instances have been replaced by a kind of hypertribalism. Perceiving no benefit from broader group identitiesindeed, subjected to humiliation and outragecertain segments of Muslim societies have retreated into smaller units and concocted perverse notions of honor and vengeance bearing no resemblance to mainstream Islamic values. Ahmed identifies this aberrant behavior as hyper-asabiyyah. It characterizes not only self-styled Islamic terrorists, but the behavior of some segments of other religious communities as well. Ahmed mentions those Jews, Christians, and Hindus associated with the suffering of Palestinians, Bosnians, and Gujarati Muslims as examples. In his analysis, these groups likewise exhibit hyper-asabiyyah, violating the norms of their respective religious communities and subjecting people to terror of various forms. The systematic rape of Bosnian and Gujarati women is explicated as the most grievous example. Like the acts of so-called Islamic terrorists, these acts conform to no known norms of ethical behavior. They are examples of what Ahmed calls post-honor. The fact that they continue, with relatively little public scrutiny in all cases except those identified as Islamic, explains Ahmeds description of ours as a post-honor world (see chapter 3, Ibn Khaldun and Social Cohesion). Ahmed thus distinguishes between two kinds of honorthat based on justice and compassion and that based on vengeance. The former is the ideal, established by religious communities worldwide. The latter is characteristic of aberrant tribalism. (In an interesting aside, Ahmed also observes that the latter is characteristic of the male interpretation of social action [16].) The former is based on recognition of a shared humanity, a global civilization; the latter, on exclusive identities, the kind envisioned by those who speak of civilizations and who divide the world into those who are either with us or against us. In Ahmeds analysis, such exclusive identities facilitate hyper-asabiyyah. Reducing the other to subhuman level, hyper-asabiyyah removes the other from the purview of the subject groups ethical system. The other shares neither the responsibilities nor rights of the exclusive group. Ahmed characterizes, within the Islamic world, Pakistans founding president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as a proponent of the inclusivist vision of human dignity and Osama bin Laden as a spokesperson for the exclusivist, post-honor view of humanity. Among the most important aspects of this work, and one that distinguishes it from the majority of faith-based analyses, is that Ahmed directly confronts aspects of mainstream Islamic thought that may contribute to contemporary aberrations. He notes, for example, that the distinction between dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) and dar al-harb (the abode of war), used by medieval Muslim scholars to divide the world between us and them, must be superseded. It is no longer valid, he says, and largely irrelevant (17) since Islam is now an international religion. Roughly one-third of the worlds Muslims live as minorities around the globe and, in fact, frequently find far greater freedom and security outside of the traditional Islamic world. This is a courageous step for a Muslim scholar, as is his acknowledgement that anti-Semitism does, in fact, exist among Muslims (29, 110). It is true, as most sources point out, that anti-Semitism is essentially a Christian phenomenon, not an Islamic one; the Quran acknowledges and accepts diversity in religion as part of the divine plan. History provides no examples of systematic oppression of Jews by Muslims. And it is certainly possible to criticize the policies of the State of Israel without being anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, since the establishment of the State of Israel and the concomitant displacement of Palestinians, anti-Semitismoften in the form of the eternally popular Jewish conspiracy theory (69)has developed within some sectors of the Muslim community. Ahmed also boldly points out that, despite the clearly aberrant nature of Islamic terrorism, Muslim parents in the thousands are naming their sons Osama (29; 113). He acknowledges the double standard of the millions of Muslims (and non-Muslims as well) who rejoiced over the 9/11 attacks, while, at the same time, condemning terrorism. Nevertheless, Ahmed maintains that core Islamic values are themselves inclusivist, based on commitment to human equality and dignity. His explication of these values through Quranic references (9:11, for example) is convincing, as are the numerous instances he gives of those engaged in constructive interfaith dialogue and cooperation. For example, he describes the success of al-Akhawayn University in Morocco. A modern university, over half of whose students are female, it was established by leaders who are committed to interfaith solidarity. Ahmed recounts a conversation he had in which the king of Morocco (then crown prince) claimed that the strength of his society is based on the equality of all believers: Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe in the same God, he said, and all are essentially the same (103). Still, Ahmed acknowledges that there are far too few examples like this (see chapters 4-6, The Failure of Muslim Leadership, Searching for a Muslim Ideal: Inclusion, and Searching for a Muslim Ideal: Exclusion). He urges Muslims, therefore, to overcome the tendency toward defensiveness and the victim mentality and to find, instead, inspiration in the sublime ideals of Islam. At the first meeting of the American Academy of Religion following 9/11, it was suggested that the hackneyed phrase clash of civilizations had outlived its usefulness and that we must now begin to speak of a shared search for civilization. The suggestion was based on recognition that international terrorism did not develop in a vacuum. It is the result of conditions considered dire enough for increasing numbers of people to choose death over continued life in those conditions. The rational approach to countering this movement, then, is to identify and change those conditions. In his concluding chapter, Toward a Global Paradigm, Ahmed answers the challenge posed at that November 2001 meeting. The danger in our post-honor world (referred to in the books title) results from the reciprocal dehumanizing of hyper-asabiyyah, the retreat of groups who feel threatened into primitive gang-like behavior. The events of 9/11 were neither the first nor the last installment in the cycle of dehumanization, as the Holocaust and the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq demonstrate. But, in Ahmeds view, studied in their full historical context, the atrocities committed that day reveal the path toward a better future. They reveal the need for construction of a world civilization based on values shared across humanity. To reverse the movement that has brought us into a post-honor world we need to rediscover the dialogue with and understanding of cultures other than our own. We need to emphasize a morality that emphasizes justice and compassion for all (16). Ahmed calls for continuation of interfaith and intercultural dialogue that has emerged over the past century and gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century. Current militarist approaches to the problem of terrorism only exacerbate the root causes of violence, unbalanced distribution of wealth, and lack of democracy. Proper understanding based on dialogue will lead to policies promoting education and redistribution of wealth, which themselves will result in democratization and improving the status of women. The inclusive global civilization envisioned will not be created at the expense of uniqueness. It must be based instead on appreciation of the differences in local identities and religious traditions. Each has a role to play, and each is entitled to share in honor based on human dignity. Ahmeds view is, ultimately, an optimistic one. Despite the chaos we have created, human beingsin their shared humanity possess the ability to construct a better world. In his concluding words, [T]he committed search for global solutions to the common global problems confronting human society, and the quest for a just, compassionate, and peaceful order will be the challenge human civilization faces in the twentieth-first century. To meet the challenge is to fulfill Gods vision; to embrace all humanity in doing so is to know Gods compassion (172). The author has personally committed himself to the effort and clearly believes that the rest of us are up to the challenge (see Introduction: Gods Gamble); let us hope that he is right. Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World should be readand rereadby all those willing to participate in the struggle to regain global balance. Tamara Sonn The College of William and Mary (2) The 21st century will be the century of Islam, declares Professor Akbar Ahmed in this concise, thoughtful book (7). Since 9/11, he explains, Islam has occupied the center stage of the global arena and appears to be on a collision course with every other major religion or civilization in the world. Of course, Ahmed realizes the basic fallacy in this impressionistic depiction of events, but he records the fears and concerns of many who can only conceive of Islam and Muslims today in adversarial terms. Ahmed then goes on to identify the root causes of the economic and social malaise that is fueling the discontent of many residing not only in Islamic societies but in Third World societies in general. His perspective is that of an anthropologist, which leads him to conclude that it is primarily a sense of a lack of honor and a desire for revenge on both sides that is propelling the cycle of unremitting violence. This post-honor world, as he phrases it, that we live in now is defined by the process of globalization spearheaded by the West that has led to a dangerous attrition of the primary forms of identity that surround most individuals (51). These forms of identity are centered on family, tribe (or other primary group affiliation), state, and religion, all of which have been considerably weakened by the materialistic and consumerist values that undergird globalization. The widespread erosion of traditional morality in the West that is now being exported to the Third World through its cultural artifactsprimarily, films, television programs, and popular publicationshas instigated personal and collective crises in many societies of the world today. In Durkheimian terms, this has led to anomie. Much earlier, in the fourteenth century, the famed Muslim social theorist Ibn Khaldun had described the social disorder that could ensue from the attenuation of group cohesion or solidarity, termed asabiyyah in Arabic, a concept that is still relevant in todays post-honor world. Furthermore, culturally constructed notions of honor continue to resonate in contemporary societies, creating more sources of intergroup friction. In particular, atavistic notions of male honor can rear their head when a society or polity feels under seige. Thus, the 9/11 attackers were reacting, at least in significant part, to a sense of a loss of honor, both at an individual and national level, while the American mission of reprisal against them was similarly motivated by a desire to regain lost honor and pride. The siege mentality gripping both worlds and the sense of wounded pride shared by both create a gaping chasm between the tworeinforcing the image of a clash of civilizations in the making and rendering the possibility of a dialogue between civilizations more remote. In the process of delineating the sense of malaise currently gripping Muslim communities, Ahmed does not shy away from airing some very dirty laundry in public. He refers to a lecture and dinner party he attended in Cleveland, Ohio, after 9/11, organized by the Ibn Sina society there. The event was attended by about sixty professional Muslims, representing various ethnic groups. A significant number of them were of the opinion that the 9/11 atrocities could be justified in view of American complicity in various acts of hostility directed at Muslims around the world, particularly in Israel/Palestine. Ahmed also points to the punitive measures visited on many activist intellectuals and political dissidents by a number of Islamic countries for their public criticism of repressive, undemocratic government policies. This allows Ahmed to make valuable contrasts between the state of affairs today and classical Islamic civilization firmly grounded on, among other moral principles, respect for human life, tolerance of difference, compassion, and justice. Rootedness in such foundational principles led to the flourishing of Islamic civilization, whether in Baghdad or Crdoba, in the medieval period. Thus, the converse is true: the attrition of such basic moral values in Islamic polities today due to a variety of factorsAhmed hones in on, particularly, the dehumanizing aspects of economic globalization has led to the decline of such values. Severe spiritual, epistemological, and psychological crises have consequently ensued in these societies. Such crises are compounded by the rise of Islamophobia in the West in particular. These two trends stoke anxieties and paranoia about the other, leading to a pattern of spiraling violence and counterviolence. The way out of this morass, says Ahmed, is signalled by the Sufi slogansulh-i-kullpeace with all, a holistic worldview that resolutely embraces all in its ambit, regardless of ideological proclivities. Expressed in more general terms, inclusivismin the religious, political, social, and economic senseis the answer to the virulently polarizing trends gripping our societies. Although this is not an original position, Ahmed restates it with passionate conviction and makes the case for it with compelling clarity. At a time when clamorous, exclusivist voices are being privileged in powerful quarters, Ahmeds plea for more compassionate understanding on all sides is well-timed. Written in a scholarly, yet highly accessible and engaging style, Islam under Siege offers to a broad audience a cogent and prescient analysis of the insecurities that bedevil our world and a reasoned, practical palliative for them. It is highly recommended reading for a broad audience that wishes to gain a more nuanced and profound understanding of what is at stake for us in the post-9/11 world. Asma Afsaruddin University of Notre Dame Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg, eds. Islam and Democracy in the Middle East. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xxvi, 322 pages. ISBN 0-8018-7848-9. PB $17.95. This is a collection of some thirty articles that have appeared in the Journal of Democracy. The contributions are divided into three sections: Democratization in the Arab World (eleven articles); Iran and Turkey (eight articles); and Islam and Democracy (eleven articles). The separate treatment accorded Iran and Turkey is not fortuitous; both countries, in which struggle over Islam is central, represent enigmatic exceptions in the region. Turkey proceeded from a synthesis of democracy, autocracy, and pluralism to a liberal democracy with some religious coloration, judging by the 2002 electoral success of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). Iran oscillates between modulated theocracy, with the entrenched constitutional principle of wilayat al-faqih (rule of the jurisconsult), and a raucous and turbulent move to a hybrid of democratic liberalism and clerical authoritarianism. Besides, the constitutional guarantee for secularism in Turkey and the protection of religious authority in Iran set both apart from other states in the region. The variety of authors included and the nation-states discussed in the volume necessarily precludes any uniformity of style, perspective, analytical paradigm, or conclusions. Herein lie both the strength and the weakness of the work. The Middle East is largely populated by adherents of Islam, who are not necessarily opposed to the so-called democratic ideals of the West. Yetand this is the works leitmotifthis region exhibits a certain antipathy to democratic change. The Iranian Revolution of February 1979 and the post-Khomeini emergence of new trends in power play across the region are the two main templates for the analytical and theoretical discourse in this work. Both the proponents of political reforms and the beneficiaries of autocracy are afraid of a full-blown democracy; the latter are terrified by the prospect of losing their grip on economic and political power, and the former, already emasculated by institutional and financial dependency, are perpelexed as to how to transform their profound differences into a positive instrument of democratic governance. This is a common phenomenon in most, if not all, of the countries discussed, namely, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Egypt. A number of strategies are employed by various regimes to maintain the status quo ante. In his contribution (67-75), Abdeslam M. Maghraoui argues that the Moroccan monarchy has estranged ordinary Moroccans from everyday politics by depoliticizing the public sphere. By a process of toleration through accommodation, autocracies have caused rifts and dissensions in the opposition. Daniel Blumberg, however, makes the significant remark that Islamists do not oppose, or wish to replace, incumbent power blocs because they are undemocratic but because they have no sense of mission (269). This may well explain the centrality of the slogan Islam [rather than democracy] is the solution, the trademark of the moralist and religious ideologues in the Middle East and North Africa. Although liberalized autocracy, as found in some of these countries, may not be a substitute for democracy, it has given a sphere of influence to nationalists, tribal blocs, secularists, and Islamists. The Islamists have been able to make electoral gains at the expense of the other groups, as can be established from Jillian Schwedlers study on Yemen (91-98), Russell E. Lucass essay on Jordan (99-106), and Jason Brownlees expos on Egypt (48-57). The two essays on Turkeynamely, those by Soli zels (162176) and Ziya nis and E. Fuat Keymans (177-189)indicate that the electoral success of the Islamist AKP owed more to the failures of the traditionally established parties and to the resolve of the electorate to punish them and try out a new party (163) than to any other factor. The ascending profiles of the AKP in Turkey following the 2002 elections and of Mohammad Khatamis reformist Islamic Participation Front following the 1997 and 2001 elections have stimulated the discourse among political theorists and observers on the extent to which the Islamists are prepared to embrace the separation, or at least the distancing, of religion from state, although, as Bernard Lewis rightly notes, there is historical interpenetration, almost an identification, of the two (217). But the dominant role of the conservative Council of Guardians in Iran, which vets and disqualifies, often whimsically, proreformist candidates, and the Turkish militarys custodianship of the constitution will throw into relief any pragmatic move toward a popular and liberalized democracy. This may well lead to a more radicalized reformist tendency or to a return to a benign or a brutal autocracy. The extent to which secularism can be reconciled with Islamism in a democratic discussion or system is the subject matter of the third part of this volume. The various essays suggest that the issue of the compatibility of Islam with democracy has lost its centrality, and that the issue now is whether democracy is indeed essential to Islam (cf. Antony T. Sullivan, The West, Islam, and the Democratic Imperative, Studies in Contemporary Islam,4 [2002], 1:19). Ladan and Roya Boroumand (283-298) present the specious and objectionable thesis that much of the ideological content of radical Islam is inspired or borrowed from Marxist-Leninst or Fascist notions. According to them, todays Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorels Rflexions sur la violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shiite Islam (286). This is certainly a misreading of the genealogy and the Gedankenwelt of martyrdom in Islamism. Advocates of sociopolitical change, be they secularists or exponents of martyrdom, often belong to the group that sociologist Antonio Gramsci characterized as organic intellectuals (quoted from his prison notebooks in Steven Feierman, Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa, African Studies Review 28 [1985], 2-3:113). Islamists who uphold the notion of aestheticization of death in pursuit of an agenda do not have many predecessors in the political history of Islam. In any case, the regions autocracies can be best brought to an end through a homegrown process of what Vickie Langohr (276282) calls gradual democratization, by which the existing political systems would grant secularists, illiberal Islamists, and those from other interest blocs effective entrance into the political system. This cannot be accomplished from the outside, as the current scenario from Iraq would seem to show. In Ali Mazruis view, the administration of George W. Bush would like to democratize not only Iraq, but the whole of the Middle East (IGCS [Institute of Global Cultural Studies] Newsletter, Binghamton University, 4 [2003], 1:1). The West may not succeed in forcibly hoisting the flag of democracy in the region. After all, democracy has certain essential elements and procedures, two of them being contestation (competitiveness) and participation (inclusiveness), and it has to pay due regard to cultural peculiarities (see Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971]). The two above-mentioned elements are not altogether lacking even in acknowledged autocracies. According to Jean-Franois Seznec, the Saudi ruling class regulates itself internally by following certain democratic procedures (77). The main problem facing the Arab world is certainly not liberalization, but rather, how to transform a peculiar authoritarianism into a participatory and competitive system. Electoralization of autocracyand, indeed, sunnatization of parliamentarismcannot be a substitute for full and genuine democracy. This proposition is brilliantly established by the various articles in this volume. Amidu Olalekan Sanni Lagos State University Robert O. Freedman, ed. The Middle East Enters the Twenty-first Century. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002. x, 397 pages. ISBN 0-8130-2575-3. PB $29.95. Among the events of the concluding part of the twentieth century that have had crucial implications for the future of the Middle East are (1) the Arab-Israeli peace process, whose high point was the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, (2) the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and (3) the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The volume under review consists of the proceedings of a conference on the same theme held in November 2000 at Baltimore Hebrew University. The Iranian Revolution and the concomitant rapid growth of political Islam had a deep impact not only on the Middle East, but also on the Muslim world as a whole, on the United States, on Russia, and on the world at large. The same is true of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and of the Iraqi invasions of Iran (1980) and Kuwait. The book is divided into four sections: The Persian Gulf and Turkey, The Arab-Israeli Core Area, Egypt and North Africa, and The Outside Powers, this last section examining the American and Russian policies toward the Middle East. An epilogue (331-370) discusses the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Although the 2003 American-led war on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein came after the appearance of this volume, the dominant position of Saddam as the prosecutor of the wars against Iran and Kuwait and his portrayal of himself over the years as the only Arab leader brave enough to stand up to the West (25) have significantly influenced the conduct of internal and external politics of the entire region. The contribution by F. Gregory Gause III (62-79) furnishes a common thread that binds the states of the region together. The decline in the states oil revenues after the cataclysmic wars of the 1980s and 1990s caused a sociopolitical disequilibrium that led to an upsurge of political activism in the 1990s. In some statesin Saudi Arabia, for exampleIslamists challenged the ruling house and promoted anti-American sentiments insofar as the United States was seen as the main prop of the monarchy and the principal ally of Israel. The last essay in this section is on Turkeys foreign policy toward the Middle East, the incoherence of this policy being due more to changing circumstances in strategic and tactical terms than to a disjunction between the objective factors necessitating activism and the subjective impact of a culture that is traditionally averse to involvement in the Middle East (80). David Shinkland rightly observes that Turkey is open to conflicting opinions and influence from diverse groups, much more than is commonly realised (Islam and Society in Turkey [Huntingdon, UK: The Eothen Press, 1999], 3). The Levant is the subject of study in the second section. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian-populated lands looms large, as highlighted by Ilan Peleg (113-136). But, as noted by Barry Rubin, the two-state solution proposed by the UNs original plan of 1947 has steadily receded into the background, so what the Palestinians would have received in 1939 has progressively frittered away (138). An old anecdote may not be amiss here. The prophetess Sibyl of Cum once visited Tarquin the Proud, the king of ancient Rome, and offered him nine books of prophecies at nine hundred pieces of silver. The king considered the price outrageous. The prophetess came back the next day after burning three of the volumes and offered the remainder at the same price. The king felt slighted and rejected it. She left and called again the following day; she had burned three more and offered the remaining three for the same price. The king decided to buy them (Sir James Craig, A Life with the Arabs, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 28 [2001], 2:145). The Arabs, especially the Palestinians, have failed to settle for realism, and whatever compromise they may want to accept now will be on Israeli terms. In regard to Syria, emphasis in the post-Hafez Assad era has shifted to improving the battered economy, and Bashar Assad has attempted to do this by reforming the bureaucracy, adopting modern thinking, and discarding the personality cult that enveloped his father (197). Egypt and other North African states are discussed in the third section of the book. Egypt is particularly crucial; it was affected by all the three developments that inspired this work. A poor domestic economy and a weak social welfare system have increased the tide of Islamism since the time of Nasser. Egypts strong ties with the United States have limited its freedom of action in foreign policy, especially in relation to the Arab-Israeli imbroglio. So, the Egyptian foreign policy, according to Louis Cantori, expresses the characteristics of a state in its strong and weak dimensions (239). Irans model has inspired Islamists in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. But ideological disorder and the lack of a unifying leadership have made it impossible for the oppositions in Iran, as elsewhere in the region, to coordinate, lead, and sustain the type of integrated multiclass revolutionary alliance that could replace the existing orders (cf. Dariush Zahedi, The Iranian Revolution Then and Now: Indicator of Regime Instability [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000], 150). Ben Alis Tunisia, as in the Arab Maghrib Union, is witnessing a phase in the replication of hegemonic political practice in the name of liberalization, which is about control rather than democratic power sharing. The final section of the book appraises the American and Russian power brokerage in the region in the last century. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union has left its successor state, Russia, weak politically and economically, thus leaving the United States as the sole superpower in the world. The American policy in the region from the standpoint of its special ties with Israel and the strategic importance of the Gulf states as Americas main source of oil have redefined the domestic and foreign policies of the region, especially since 9/11. Furthermore, the Euro-Atlantic alliance, especially as it relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict and to the fight against terrorism (331), have also undergone some repackaging. The post-Saddam period is certainly going to redefine the political equations in the region. Americas unilateralism in the garb of a limited coalition of the willing is now giving way to a multilateralism, to be midwifed by the United Nations. The antebellum division within the European Union over Iraq has by no means disappeared, and the European Unions policy of damage limitation (364) seems as yet unable to show what effect a truly democratic Iraq will have on the regions other states. By and large, the book has sufficiently demonstrated that the three major developments that heralded the Middle East into the twenty-first century will continue to be crucial. Amidu Olalekan Sanni Lagos State University Vojtech Mastny and R. Craig Nation, eds. Turkey Between East and West: New Challenges for a Rising Regional Power. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. xiii, 280 pages. ISBN 0-8133-3412-8. PB $36.00. This collection of articles assesses the direction of Turkeys foreign policy in relation to its historical identity, democratic experiment, and economic potentialities. Based on the proceedings of a 1994 conference, the articles reflect the post-zal era ambivalence in Turkeys national mission and geopolitical position. The book starts with Kemal Karpats article on the Ottoman legacy, which argues that the modern identity consciousness of Islam and the West has a contingent history, one that carries a potential for the convergence of Muslim Turks and Christian Europeans on a path of democratic politics. The articles by Duygu Bazoglu Sezer, Bruce Kuniholm, R. Craig Nation, and Heinz Kramer discuss various barriers in international politics, including European images of Islam and the Turks, that keep Turkey from becoming integrated into the European Union. Clement Dodd and Ilkay Sunar approach the specific problems in domestic politics that obstruct the growth of a healthy and stable democracy in Turkey. The pieces by Ziya nis, Faruk Sen, and N. Blent Gltekin and Ayse Mumcu analyze economic development and networks and discuss the prospects of convergence with the global economic system as well as the shortcomings of that process. The theme of a certain tension between the political will for convergence with the universalpredominantly Westernnorms of politics and development, and the divergence of the actual Turkish experience characterizes most of the articles. In the case of Turkey, this convergence can be easily measured by its relations with the European Union and becomes a conspicuous issue for its foreign policy as well. Turkey Between East and West displays cautious optimism about the process of Turkeys future modernization, and it does so by elaborating why this process had so many drawbacks and raised so many doubts about itself. Some drawbcks were endemic to the modernization process in a volatile international system, while certain problems faced by Turkey reflected the role of culture and identity in that process. While all the articles are well written, they are not well integrated. There are hardly any shared concepts and theories, such as multiple modernities, a constructivist view of international relations, or a globalization paradigm that could effectively bring out the latent commonalities of the articles. Readers will recall the extraordinary series of events that have occurred since this book was conceived about a decade ago. Some of the books assessments regarding the politics of religious identities in both the domestic and the international politics of Turkey may seem obsolete in the face of a moderate Islamist government pushing aggressively for Turkeys integration into the European Union. Yet, even a decade ago, almost all the authors agreed that the long-term structural factors were pushing Turkey in the direction of further integration with both the European Union and global capitalist modernity. The book could be useful for graduate students in Middle East studies, especially those interested in recent Turkish history, who wish not only to acquire a background in Turkeys geoculture and geopolitics, but also to deal with the question of the latent structural and contingent factors that have caused a radical change in Turkeys position between East and West in less than a decade since the books publication. Cemil Aydin Ohio State University Negin Nabavi. Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the Dilemma of Authenticity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003. xiii, 221 pages. ISBN 0-8130-2590-7. HB $55.00. This is a highly lucid and well-documented analysis of the consolidation of what might be called a national intelligentsia within the unfolding confines of contemporary Iranian political and cultural history. As such, it gracefully contextualizes the diverse array of ideological perspectives that emerged therein, as well as the explosive inconsistencies and divergences of opinion intrinsic to this particular formation, so as to ultimately render the term intelligentsia a perpetually ambiguous social category. In this vein, the text devotes its primary focus to the latter half of the twentieth century and concentrates, in particular, on the aftermath of the failure of Irans nationalist-democratic coup of 1953 and on the coups ensuing repercussions for the Iranian intellectuals stance amidst the onset of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Thus, the books explicit intention, seemingly, is to demarcate the discursive borderlines and political achievements that circumscribed the volatile existence of the Iranian intelligentsia in the said period, and the book accomplishes this venture with minimal difficulty. The work commences its analysis with a brief mention of the nascent development of a self-conscious intellectual class at the beginning of the twentieth century and its later assimilation into the definitive leftist body of the Tudeh Party. At this juncture, Nabavis inquiry might have benefited from a more extensive examination of the emergence and vital influence of insurgent intellectuals throughout the course of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution as well as the substantial sector of the educated elite who (in direct contact with Bolshevik causes then thriving in the Soviet Union) began to import their own mutated brand of socialist and communist ideology (best exemplified in the Jungle Movement of Gilan). Furthermore, a more involved study of the theorization of the intellectual as a conceptual classification might have been warranted in this preliminary chapteri.e., an articulation in greater depth of the diverse contributions of (among others) such writers as Gramsci, Benda, Adorno, and Foucault on the definition of an intellectual subjectivity and its role in evoking meaningful potentialities for changeif only in order to frame with increased specificity the authors characterization of the various Iranian personalities who are cited as representatives of an authentic national and cultural intelligentsia. That established, Nabavi next traces with remarkable diligence the topography of circumstances by which a variety of crises in the Iranian intellectual disposition began to surface by the middle of the century. Here, the text starts to show an acute sensitivity in portraying the political, even existential, phase of disillusionment undergone by the nations most prominent writers, leaders, scholars, and social critics, a generalized dejection that Nabavi attributes to the growing disenchantment over the return to power of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the subsequent imposition of brutal techniques of censorship, large-scale persecution, and the systematic repression of ideas that came to serve as the hallmark of a new era in monarchical despotism. Consequently, Nabavi then proposes the argument that it was precisely amidst such a vicious machinery of regulation and control that a major segment of thinkers found itself compelled to begin innovating outlooks on the inherent and seemingly inevitable relationship of the intellectual to political action. Certainly, among the most eminently vocal to thrust themselves to the forefront of this rising debate was Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whose scathing social commentaries against Western imperialism and the absorption/erasure of native cultural forms set the tone and rhythm by which later writers would begin to implicate themselves fiercely within the operation of the political arena of their time. At this stage, Nabavi executes a close reading of the theoretical edifice of westoxification, through which Al-e Ahmad vocalized his anger with the prevailing conditions of his day, a term which, in his estimation, encompassed a taxonomy of plagues that had infected every dimension of the social continuum from the most abstract conceptions of identity to the most mundane manifestations of the collective unconscious. Among these, Nabavi isolates Al-e Ahmads attention to the insidious treachery of the intellectual stratas infatuation with foreign ideas, the rampant class inequalities and flagrant economic exploitation of the masses, the spiritual destitution inflicted by the invalidation of localized religious custom, the anaesthetization of consciousness by materialism and technocracy under the rhetoric of international progress, and the desecration of long-standing everyday cultural practices in the name of a teleological drive to civilization (here synonymous with the deceptions of capitalist modernity). Herein, Nabavi astutely delineates the trajectory of such insights, formed within a strange matrix of anticolonial nativism and Marxist thought, as embodying the essential precursor to an unprecedented phenomenon of Third-Worldism that would overtake and reconfigure the discursive parameters surrounding the question of the intellectual in Iranian society in the following years. After having outlined this initial stage of emiseration in the psychic makeup of the Iranian intelligentsia, Nabavi discusses the way in which the introduction of a newfound Third Worldist platform would endeavor to lend a more sweeping coherency and implicit universalism to the intellectual front. As well, this conceptual innovation allowed the reigning intellectuals of the sixties and seventies to reformulate their understanding of collective contestation and strategies of opposition that could bridge theory and practice into simultaneity. Ultimately, the text pursues the contortion of this ideological shift as it successively converted itself into the identitarian symbolism of radical Islam, revealing the manner in which the resurrection of theological narratives formed a rally cry against the looming infiltrative presence of globalization and, therein, helped to mobilize disenfranchised sectors of the citizenry with both apocalyptic rhetoric and an innate accessibility to an aura of metaphysical legitimacy. Following this transition to its logical conclusion, Nabavi terminates her own discussion with the ascendancy to dominance of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters among the clerical establishment, a vanguard that effectively fused historical atavism with politicized Shiism as a vehicle of rebellion. Here, the text demonstrates the somewhat reckless and regretful submission of other branches of the national intelligentsia to the rapid momentum of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, an opportunistic self-subordination that, Nabavi rightfully maintains, contributed to the current extinction of a solidified and intercommunicative intellectual class in Iran today. Here, Nabavi cautiously weighs the manifold interpretations as to why the intellectual class proved so readily willing to concede its autonomy to the growing sovereignty of the religious movement in the wake of an ominous theocracy. Eloquent and well-structured, Nabavis project shows a dedication to historical accuracy and a deep familiarity with primary sources. The only legitimate critique of it may consist in a call for expansion of those elements already pervading the books textual content, such an expansion enhancing, perhaps, the complexity of the points raised. For instance, Nabavi exposes the intriguing dual-interplay through which the Iranian intelligentsia at once lamented and attempted to defy all indebtedness to Western resources while simultaneously deriving its own sense of purpose extensively (yet not entirely) from European philosophy, such as is evidenced by the astounding intimacy many Iranian writers and activists held with Sartrian notions of engagement then circulating at large. In this sense, Nabavi could have displayed a deeper concern for the intricacies of how these alien rationales were adopted and transformed in the revolutionary visions of the disparate fragments of the Iranian intellectual identity. Likewise, although the author states at the outset that her research is restricted primarily, though not exclusively, to periodicals and special journals, the omission of any aesthetic analysis remains a glaring gap. While there are some abbreviated remarks on the presence of such poets as Ahmad Shamluno direct impression of his poetic production is given beyond his bureaucratic participation in miscellaneous writers associationsthe overall absence of any considerable attention to the literary imagination so crucial in the dissemination of discontent, the often occluded link between aesthetic creativity and political subversion, leaves the text consigned to certain limitations. Moreover, while Nabavi clearly evaluates the co-optation of the intellectual class by the monarchical regime throughout the 1970s, emphasizing, with striking fluidity, the patterns of extortion and seduction through which so many once staunchly antagonistic adversaries then betrayed themselves to the states agenda, she does not offer a more nuanced investigation of the impact and theoretical basis behind the upsurge in guerilla militancy (which remained a marginalized, yet incisive, dimension of the political sphere); in one instance, she cites an emblematic incident of the martyrological trial of Khosrow Golesorkhi without fully unraveling its significance for the more comprehensive aspirations of the text. Indeed, had she penetrated further into such moments, dedicating a more elaborate analysis to events and conditions already present in the text, it might have given the work greater congruity. Overall, Nabavis project is a useful augmentation of the existing understanding of the particular historical experience of the Iranian intelligentsias rise and fall over the past century. As such, it forms both a necessary and a cohesive addition to the field of Iranian studies, objective in its tone, far-reaching in its scope, and disciplined in its scholarship and methodology. It has broader implications for the overall subject of the relation of the intellectual to the enactment of sociopolitical resistance. Jason B. Mohaghegh Columbia University S. Frederick Starr, ed. Xinjiang: Chinas Muslim Borderland. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004. xv, 484 pages. ISBN 0-7656-1318-2. PB $32.95. Xinjiang: Chinas Muslim Borderland is a most informative study of Chinas westernmost province, home to a substantial population that is both Turkic and Muslim, that shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The contributors to this edited work focus their analysis on the history of the region and its peoples, on the impact of Chinese rule and Han immigration, and on ethnic, cultural, demographic, and political issues affecting the region. The contributors also address the present and future role Xinjiang plays in Chinas relations with surrounding countries. This work represents the combined efforts of a group of Western scholars to provide educated nonspecialists with an authoritative introduction to the territory and its people, past and present. The Xinjiang Project, as it is known to the participants, was conceived as a two-part undertaking. This book represents the completion of the first partthe second part (yet to be undertaken) will analyze the geopolitical implications of the research thus completed. Part 1 of the study examines the historical background of Xinjiang and its peoples. James A. Millward and Peter C. Perdue give a thorough account of the regions political and cultural history through the late nineteenth century, stressing that the very idea or understanding of Xinjiang has changed throughout time owing to the regions dynamic nature in terms of human migration and the political, cultural, and ethnic clashes between the Han Chinese and other peoples of South and Central Asia. In chapter 3, Millward and Nabijan Tursun analyze the political history of the region, focusing on Chinese strategies of control and demonstrating the difficulties and problems confronting the Chinese from the time Xinjiang became a Chinese province during the Qing dynasty until the end of the Mao period. Part 2 of the book examines and analyzes the present Chinese policies in Xinjiang. Dru C. Gladney discusses the Chinese program of development and control in the region, paying special attention to Beijings policy of ethnic integration, noting that Chinas nationality policy has oscillated between the extremes of pluralism and ethnocentric repression. In chapter 5, Yitzhak Shichor discusses the historic role played by the Chinese military in Xinjiang by giving a detailed account of the changing order of battle and command structure of the Peoples Liberation Army in the province. Shichor concludes his essay by pointing out that Beijing regards Xinjiang as Chinas gateway to the Islamic world and, as such, has placed a high level of urgency in establishing and maintaining good relations with the countrys Muslim neighbors. One reason for this policy is the threat of Muslim fundamentalism and the fear of a resurgent movement for Uyghur independence in Xinjiang. Beijings strategy is to convince the Islamic states along Xinjiangs border that they must not support separatist groups in the province. Part 3 analyzes the local economic and educational forces and factors affecting Xinjiang. Calla Wiemer examines the economic trends and realities of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, while Linda Benson takes a close look at education and social mobility among minority populations in the region. Sean R. Roberts concludes part 3 with an insightful analysis of transborder interaction between Xinjiangs Muslims and peoples of the bordering countries of South and Central Asia. Part 4 investigates the costs for Beijing of control and development in Xinjiang. Stanley W. Toops addresses the demographic factors confronting the Chinese government as well as the impact of Beijings water policies on Xinjiangs Muslim population. Jay Dautchers essay discusses public health issues as well as social pathologies affecting the peoples of Xinjiang. Part 5 examines the indigenous response to Chinese policies in Xinjiang. Justin Rudelson and William Jankowiak investigate how Beijings rule affects Uyghur culture and identity, while Graham E. Fuller and Jonathan N. Lipman discuss Islam in Xinjiang. Fuller and Lipmans study pays close attention to Beijings anti-Islamic policies and their effects on the Muslims of the province. The authors point out that, since the early 1990s, the Chinese government has been using the phrases separatism and splittism and illegal religious activity in official state discourse in the region to explain and support stringent police controls on Islam. They conclude that the importance of Islam in Uyghur nationalist movements can only grow, but they also point out that these movements face formidable challenges in achieving greater autonomy or independence for the Uyghur people. In chapter 14, Gardner Bovingdon and Tursun analyze contested histories of the region, explaining the divergence of purpose and perspective between Chinese and Uyghur historians. In the final chapter, Gladney addresses the Uyghur response to Chinese rule and concludes that Chinas nationality policies have neither lessened the Uyghur peoples attachment to the land nor affected their cultural and historical perspective. Xinjiang is an immensely informative and insightful study of the Uyghur perspective on the various issues confronting the region. Unfortunately, it does not take into account Chinese points of viewa bias openly admitted by the editor. The contributors are reasonably well-informed on their respective subjects, but, occasionally, the reader comes across factual errors such as Wiemer placing the port city of Karachi in the Bay of Bengal! Mistakes of this sort are far and few between, though. Even though a one-sided study, Xinjiang makes an important contribution to understanding Chinese-Uyghur relations as well as Chinas relations with Islamic states bordering the province. For anyone interested in Central Asia, Xinjiang is a worthwhile read. Dirk Richard Morton Hampton University Peter van der Veer. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. x, 205 pages. ISBN 0-691-07478-X. PB $17.95. The author examines the nineteenth-century encounter between Britain and India from a combined perspective of historical anthropology and comparative religion. He recommends replacing the abstract idea of Britain as modern versus India as traditionally religious with a more complex analysis. The front cover of the book has a picture of a husband and wife team of British Salvation Army workers wearing a combination of Indian clothes and the Salvation Army uniform shirts. The photograph conveys something of the ambiguity of our notions of religion and modernity in relation to British India. Van der Veer suggests using an interactional perspective. He wants to escape from the essentialism of modern Britain versus Indian antimodernity. He advocates moving toward a more nuanced recognition of interactionas visually suggested by the Indian-style Salvation Army uniform. Replacing this essentialism means moving toward a more fragmentary enterprise by focusing on different instances of interaction. Each chapter of the book deals with one such instance. Chapter 1 is entitled Secularity and Religion. The author maintains that secularity and religion are mutually interdependent aspects of the process of nation-state formation, and that this process follows different tracks in different cases. Giving the vote in Britain to Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters meant moving away from the identification of the state with the Church of England. One result was the formation of voluntary associations for charitable and educational projects. This phenomenon, which occurred in Britain, was transferred to India. In nineteenth-century Britain, Protestant conceptions of unworthiness before God were transformed into an emphasis on progress as a characteristic of those possessing good morals. Thus, the white mans burden developed as a notion of spreading ethics and progress. In chapter 2, new ideals of the moral state are considered. The notion of the duty to convert the rest of the world was a novel idea at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The title of William Careys book, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1790), indicates the new emphasis coming to birth in evangelical circles. The acts of founding missionary societies and sending forth large numbers of dedicated workers for this new cause were all new in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. The colonizing movement was understood as liberating for the heathens of the world. The new inclusiveness within Britain was seen as indicative of the inclusiveness to come as the virtues of the evangelicals were spread around the world. The beginnings of the Brahmo Samaj was indicative within India of a readiness to accept the new emphases on the virtues of responsible citizenship, along with a modification of traditional Hinduism to meet the new standards. Van der Veer emphasizes the strong parallels between Indian and European rational religion. Spiritualism and political radicalism are the topics of chapter 3, which features the adventures of the Theosophists Madame Blavatsky, Henry Olcott, and Annie Besant and their Indian disciples in Victorian India. Van der Veer indicates that Spiritualism had an enthusiastic following in both Britain and India, where the leaders of the movement were mainly plebeian autodidacts, often women. After Besant left her Anglican clergyman husband, she became a leader of antiestablishment causes, such as the Match Girls Strike, birth control, and socialism. Her causes in India included support for Indian independence, the founding of schools for girls, and the establishment of Benares Hindu University. The Theosophists connected the Spiritualism of India to that of Britain and forged a new Indian basis for anticolonialism. The Hindu reform movements, such as the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna movement, stressed changing the perspectives of Hindu thought to stimulate new modes of opposition to domination by foreigners. The Spiritualists developed their own modes of resistance to the evangelicals. Moral Muscle: Masculinity and its Religious Uses is the title of chapter 4. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was perceived by many British evangelicals as proof that they had not tried hard enough to promote their values. In response to the news of the slaughter of English people, many sermons were preached in England on the failure to spread the Christian Gospel effectively in India. The mutiny was adjudged a retribution against the English for sinful negligence. A more muscular Christianity in the form of a more vigorous effort was required. The evangelical revival movements in Britain stressed what are today called family values. The Hindu reform movements of the nineteenth century did the same. The author says that a gendered language came to signify the imperial nation-state and the colonies. Thus, the British talked about the manly Englishman and the effeminate Hindu; in response, the Hindu reformers developed a rhetoric of the manly Hindu. This example illustrates well the authors key notion of the interaction between Britain and India. In many different ways, the British and the Indians came to mirror each other as part of their mutual entanglement. Schools in both England and India began to emphasize physical exercise as a necessary preliminary to moral pluck. The topic of chapter 5 is the development of Orientalist studies of Indian scriptures as an aspect of cultural interaction. In 1868, Max Mller gave his inaugural lecture at Oxford. He called for respectful scholarship of the religious literature of all the religions of the world. One of his major works was the editing of The Sacred Books of the East. Although England was not much influenced by his efforts to promote mutual respect among adherents of all the worlds religions, Indian intellectual leaders responded with enthusiasm to Mllers approach. Mller himself never went to India, but he was actively interested in developments toward a reformed Hinduism. He believed in a universal morality based on humanism and natural religion. Thus, he thought that the dominance of the Brahmins in traditional Hinduism would be changed into a modern Hinduism stressing universal values. The myth of the Aryan origins is the subject of chapter 6. Mllers studies of linguistic similarities in the Aryan languages of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek instilled, in parts of the British intellectual establishment, a certain affection for India. The term Aryan came to signify kinship between Britain and India. Another development in nineteenth-century Britain took the form of an obsessive interest in allegedly scientific proofs, such as the study of shapes of skulls, which guaranteed certain humans the right to dominate others. An interest in criminology became linked with the studies of skulls and languages. In the Indian context, this led to an interest in criminal tribes as products of hereditary characteristics of villainy. Van der Veer concludes this intriguing collection of examples of interaction with a discussion of the roots of modernity. Looking for these roots in the past of any one tradition is less illuminating than a study of interactions. He says: Origins of modernity cannot be neatly located in Western civilization; they must be sought in the mess of encounters in which Indian begums, Hindu converts, and later Theosophical Universalists are all present. The underlying thesis as to the value of the study of interactions is effectively demonstrated. The variety and oddness of much of what has actually happened, such as the Indian Salvation Army uniforms, the sermons on the 1857 mutiny as proof of God punishing the English for failure to promote the Gospel effectively enough, the conviction that criminal tribes have characteristic skulls, and the founding of Benares Hindu University, might well elicit humility from scholars who struggle to make sense of it all. The richer our sense of complex interactions, the more likely we are to have some valid insights. Sheila McDonough Concordia University, Montreal Naveed S. Sheikh. The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. xii, 206 pages. ISBN 0-7007-1592-4. HB $75.00 In language that is remarkably rich, precise, and elegant, Naveed S. Sheikh demonstrates how the political needs of three statesSaudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistanhave shaped an organization that purports to represent the modern ummah, the worldwide Muslim community. Far from a reason for the foreign policies of these states, Islam has served as a rationale: [I]nstead of the state serving the ultimate ideals of Islam, Sheikh writes, Islam comes to serve the immediate objectives of the state (139). Islam emerges from this study as a product of social and political forces much more than a producer of them. I almost put aside this gem of a book after reading thirty pages, irritated by what struck me as pretentiousness. But with a full restart and a different mood, admiration superseded misgivings. It is a difficult book, not for reasons of social-scientific jargon, of which there is little, but because the argument is tight and the language recherch. The book is ostensibly an empirical study of an international regime, but, as the author puts it, Both the narrative and definatory [sic] claims have been minimized in order to allow analysis to carpet the spatiotemporal limitations (19). One chapter, consisting of 61 of the 141 pages of the main text, provides an account of the founding and maintenance of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. The remaining 80 pages interpret this data in the light of international relations theory and the debate about a clash of civilizations. Appendixes and notes, along with a bibliography and an index, occupy the last 65 pages of the book. Sheikh argues that the OIC, founded in 1969, has consistently served the foreign policy interests of its three most important states. While the fifty-seven member states (listed in Appendix A) now include 1.3 billion people and one-fourth of the worlds land, the OIC does not represent a transnational union of all Muslims. Those who live in nonmember states, such as India, the United States, France, and China, are excluded. It does not constitute a challenge to nation-states, or even a supranational actor in international affairs, but, rather, an arena in which member nations nurture their own national identities and further their foreign-policy goals. The Arab defeat in the Six-Day War and the attack on the al-Aqsa mosque by a Jewish arsonist in 1969 gave the Saudis a chance to seize the initiative from Gamal abd al-Nasir and Arab nationalism as the principal antagonist of Israel. According to Sheikh, Saudi Arabia has utilized the organization to deradicalize Islam, to keep the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Palestinian saddle (the continued failure of the PLO is preferential to the potential success of other voices [49]), and to deflect critique of Saudi dependence on the United States. The Shahs government in Iran joined the OIC as a public relations exercise. After the revolution, the Islamic republic formulated itself as a dualistic binary to the Saudi Monarchy (63) and came to see the OIC as a vehicle for delegitimizing the Saudi regime. During the long war between Iraq and Iran, the Saudis found themselves reverting to pan-Arabism as a defense against pan-Islam. But the failure of Irans ambitions and its return to the defense of the nation-state and national interests enabled Iran to achieve reconciliation with the Saudis. The Iranian leadership came back to seeing the OIC as a vehicle for international rapprochement: a mantle (signifying pietistic aspirations) and as an arena (allowing the pursuit of raison dՎtat) (72). As for Pakistan, whose origin made it an Islamic state, national interests have dictated activism in the OIC, especially to legitimate its stance against India. It has vetoed Indias entry into the OIC despite the presence of 160 million Muslims in that country. Sheikh says that Indian Muslims may outnumber Pakistanis since the bifurcation of Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. As for Pakistans relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sheikh writes: As a generic condition, Pakistan has often found itself to be a balancer, almost by default, in the Tehran-Riyadh equation, making close ties with either a liability. On the other hand, neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia has been in a position to decisively distance itself from Pakistan as this would be detrimental to the delicate division, and balance, of interest between them and their wider leverage in the OIC and the Muslim world at large. (98-99) The result of the pushing and shoving among these three founders created what Sheikh calls a triangle of neutralization aimed at fending off other states behind a masquerade of Islamic internationalism within the OIC (100). Domestic politics rather than loyalty to international Islamic aspirations explain why the OIC remains an arena rather than an actor in international politics. From his analysis of this data set, which is limited by lack of access to discussions within the OIC and confined by scope to three of the organizations members, Sheikh launches an attack on Samuel Huntington and on theories of international relations more generally. He accuses Huntington of a cultural essentialism so unrefined that it is barely distinguishable from cultural determinism. . . . What you do is a function of what you are and, recalling the civilizational premise, what you are is a function of where you are (109). Sheikh finds, to the contrary, that Islam had little to do with the way the three states behaved but much to do with how they rationalized their behavior. Sheikh extends his critique to theories of international relations, which tend to take identity as one of the givens from which an actor deduces a course of rational action. In fact, identities are multiple and malleable, contingent upon context and circumstance. A Saudi Arabia thoroughly Islamic in its identity at one moment becomes Arab at the next. Even a thorough identification with Islam does not define policy since Islam has no single, unambiguous meaning. Islam turns out to be a variable, independent in a rhetorical sense, dependent in a practical sense. It conditions the thinking of the makers of foreign policy, although efforts to measure its impact necessarily fail. It is used both to legitimize the status quo and to undercut it. The particular use of Islamic texts and traditions is variable and contingent on contemporary, usually rather material, concerns (121). By their choices and their actions, in response to interests and material circumstances, states constantly shape and reshape their own national identities. Islam becomes a category of social construction (rather than revelation) and remains, by trial and error, a continuously evolving religious hermeneutic (121). As a scholarly essay, this book is a tour de force. As a vocabulary lesson, it is fabulous. But, as a printed book, it is underwhelming. Errata abound. Should not credulous be credible on page 20? Should not weary be wary on page 101? Milieux is misspelled on page 102. On page 136, the word have seems to be missing from to been condemned. I suspect that there are quite a few other errors. Robert D. Lee Colorado College Just World Trust. Human Wrongs: Reflections on Western Global Dominance and its Impact Upon Human Rights. Penang, Malaysia: Just World Trust, 1996. vi, 288 pages. ISBN 983-9861-04-2. PB. Price not indicated. Hashim Makaruddin, ed. Globalisation and the New Realities: Selected Speeches of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications, 2002. 236 pages. ISBN 967-978-818-0. PB. Price not indicated. Mahathir Mohamad occupies an interesting and important position in the contemporary debate about globalization. As prime minister of Malaysia for the past twenty-one years, he has presided over a period of phenomenal economic growth and modernization that has made Malaysia the envy of its neighbors. In 1997 and 1998, Malaysia was hammered by the general economic crisis in Asia, and Mahathir gained notoriety with a decision to impose capital controls on foreign investment coming into the country. This act clearly showed that the Malaysian leader was unwilling to follow all of the Western, neoliberal rules of the globalization game. But both before and after the turbulent events of 1998, Mahathir has worked to establish his own particular perspective on the challenges of the new post-Cold War world economy. The two books under review give witness to Mahathirs efforts and, more important, offer extensive evidence of critical views that are all too often caricatured or minimized in mainstream Western commentary on globalization and contemporary international politics. Globalisation and the New Realities is a collection of twenty speeches by Mahathir that span the years 1996-2002. Human Wrongs is a collection of essays stemming from contributions made at a 1994 international conference held in Kuala Lumpur on the subject of Rethinking Human Rights. Sponsored by Just World Trust (JUST), the conferences keynote speaker was Mahathir; other contributors represent a variety of critical intellectual voices from Asia, Europe, and North America, largely taking aim at what is wrong with the present human rights paradigm (v). Globalisation is an interesting volume because of the way it demonstrates the character of Mahathirs thinking. It is a necessary contribution to the continuing discussion of the meaning of the post-Cold War global economy in that it shows how that topic has been both hyped and vilified and how little we really understand about it. Mahathir is an interesting and pragmatic politician striving to be a statesman on difficult terrain. His perspective on globalization is at once supportive and criticalsupportive, owing to the tremendous progress achieved in Malaysia based on capital and trade linkages with global markets, and critical, given the vulnerability inherent in the position of smaller countries that must contend with larger and more powerful players and forces. As a national leader who retains acute memories of the struggle for political independence, Mahathir ranges from deploring what he sees as the recolonization of small countries under the impact of globalization (23) to pragmatically suggesting smart partnership strategies designed to harness globalization to the purposes of Asian countries (79). As a Muslim, Mahathir also addresses the meaning of globalization for Muslim countries and the Islamic community as a whole; in this context, he is skeptical about the capacity of Muslim countries to act in a concerted fashion but insists that mastering information technology is the pathway for Muslims who will be successful and not merely spectators of a process dominated by others (27). Mahathirs speeches represent a politically nimble set of presentations across a variety of economic and political forums. He is essentially arguing for a kind of enlightened globalization that would require, first, a different set of global attitudes and regulations in favor of smaller countries and, second, continued practical efforts by smaller states in the Southern Hemisphere to improve the character of their own governance and unite around common regional and monetary strategies. Ultimately, he is rather fatalistic about such prospects, especially the former, but sees this as a long-term process that needs to be coaxed along (111). In many ways, Mahathirs arguments are a rehash of Third World pleas for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) from the 1970s, updated to take account of the varied consequences of globalization in the 1990s. But his voice is a necessary one, both for developing countries who seek self-help and regional strategies and as a partial corrective to propagandists for globalization in more advanced capitalist states. The twenty-six essays of Human Wrongs are an attempt at a critique of the dominant Western view of human rights (iv). The character of these essays varies from shrill diatribe to thoughtful analysis. The world of power politics, especially as connected with the European tradition of statecraft, has never been hospitable to a consistent appreciation, let alone application, of human rights as guiding norms of policy. Hypocrisy in moral affairs is hardly difficult to expose. Those essays in the volume that take the West (largely undifferentiated as an actor) to task for the nastiness of conquest and colonialism in the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries conveniently forget that any operative notion of human rights in international affairs (let alone within many Western countries) did not materialize until the twentieth century. That said, this volume is to be appreciated for its effort to reveal how much of the human rights discourse is largely influenced and shaped by the dominant Western position in world affairs. The 1994 conference, which produced these essays, was, in part, a response to the gathering momentum of globalization, not only in its economic challenge of market capitalism, but also in regard to the spread of Western values and democracy. The bleaker dimensions of rapid economic change and consumerist behavior were alarming to representatives of more traditional, not least in Islamic, societies (see Mahathirs comments, 5-12). To the extent that most of these essays find fault with Western hegemony or domination as the prevailing cause of distorted economies and societies in the Southern Hemisphere, they can be identified as radical or structuralist in their criticism. The more effective of these essays do point out, however, that national-level reforms within these countries are just as necessary to any improvement as structural adjustments in the international political economy (see the useful essay by Martin Khor on Northern Domination of the Global Economy and Some Human Rights Implications, 59-78). Many of the criticisms registered against the Western paradigm of human rights are not new: the Western emphasis on individual rights over societal, collective, or cultural rights; the Western emphasis on political and civil rights over socioeconomic rights; and the Western insistence on economic liberty, making values of efficiency and profitability more important than equality and justice. Such arguments have been waged, in an unresolved fashion, since, at least, the introduction of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What has changed is the context of contemporary globalization, which has aggravated the challenges posed to these societies. More interesting from an intellectual point of view are several of the essays in the second half of Human Wrongs. The essays by Claude Alvares (Humans Without Rights: The Intellectual Dimension of Western Global Domination and Its Consequences for the Human Rights of Five-Sixths of Humanity, 138-150) and Vandana Shiva (Science, Ecology, and Human Rights, 151-164) both make significant arguments about the consequences of the Western scientific outlook for other forms of knowledge. Alvares argues that Western science has become the dominant mode of knowing and the foundation beneath the spread of Western domination in culture and technology. Shiva complements his essay by arguing that the reductionism inherent in Western science basically devalues non-Western knowledge traditions, hence devaluing diverse forms of creativity. While one may argue with the notion that science is Western, in its structural organization and commercial application, it does tend to reflect Western domination. Useful and provocative essays are also contributed by Jeremy Seabrook (on the character of Western media, 165-170) and Edward Herman (on freedom of expression in the West, 171-180). These four essays, among others in this volume, can be usefully read as comparative exercises in cultural and social criticism. The last few essays in this volumethose by Richard Falk, Ziauddin Sardar, Mahmoud Ayoub, and Chandra Muzaffarare particularly compelling as they depart from much of what was previously offered and turn to religion as a possible avenue for redefining human rights. Rather than voicing structuralist arguments, these writers begin to sound like conservative cultural critics that one can find in the West. The eminent Falk takes up the conservative lament about the importance of responsibilities versus that of rights, and even recognizes that religion, rather than the Wests presumed thoroughgoing secularism, can contribute to the creation of a more tolerant society (Human Rights and the Dominance Pattern in the West: Deforming Outlook, Deformed Practices, 234-242). Sardar writes a very thoughtful essay on the difficulties of relearning traditions of Islam as a necessary step toward any alternative framework for human rights discussions (Some Thoughts on an Alternative to the Imperium of Human Rights, 243-254). Both Ayoub (Asian Spirituality and Human Rights, 255-267) and Muzaffar (Towards Human Dignity, 268275) reflect upon the necessary spiritual dimension of any renewed framework for human rights and point to the prospective contributions that might come from both Asian religious traditions and those traditions in dialogue with Western religious thought. One can only hope that the vitality of these traditions has not eroded, especially in the West, given the nihilistic tendencies and fragmentation of Western society that the more perceptive of these writers detect. As Muzaffar points out, Without a larger spiritual and moral framework, which endows human endeavor with meaning and purpose, with coherence and unity, wouldnt the emphasis on rights per se lead to moral chaos and confusion? (272273). Many in the West would agree with him. Both these books, despite their rhetorical and analytical problems, should be read more widely in Western academic and political circles. As Mahathir noted in Human Wrongs, faith in modern civilisation is fast diminishing (12). Unfortunately, the immediate prospects of global economic deflation and worsening global security conditions in relation to the war on terrorism will probably shift the attention of many to other concerns. Mahathir would hardly be surprised, for, in his own statements, one always encounters the battle between fatalism and hope. That is not an unreasonble posture to take for a political leader who aspires to statesmanship in difficult, if not impossible, terrain. Malaysia and Asia could do much worse for leadership. Keith Lepak Youngstown State University Joseph A. Camilleri and Chandra Muzaffar, eds. Globalisation: The Perspectives and Experiences of the Religious Traditions of Asia Pacific. Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia: International Movement for a Just World, 1998. viii, 214 pages. ISBN 983-9861-09-3. PB. Price not indicated. This work is the product of a three-day conference held in Malaysia, 4-6 July 1997. Sponsored by the International Movement for a Just World, a Malaysian nongovernmental organization (NGO), and the International Christian Peace Movement (Pax Christi), Australian chapter, also an NGO, the conference and the subsequent book focus on the impact, or far-reaching implications, of globalization on the social, cultural, and religious traditions of the Asia Pacific peoples (i). Conference participants reflected the religious and ethnic diversity of Asian Pacific societies and included participants from government ministries, NGOs, and the academic community. The editors succeed in capturing the conferences diversity by incorporating a number of case studies documenting the conflict of values between the Asian Pacific religions and contemporary globalization. David Loy, a lecturer at Bunkyo University, Japan, for example, adopts a classic neocolonial theme in his paper on Buddhist values and the modern transnational corporation. Using the Bhopal disaster and Union Carbides response, Loy illustrates the conflict between the profit motive of transnational corporations and Buddhisms traditional respect for life. Gedong Bagoes Oka, a Hindu and Gandhi scholar, adopts a similar approach in his case study of the conflict between Hindu values and the ethos of contemporary globalization. Oka examines the five articles of Hindu faith and compares them to the materialistic and ruthless nature of contemporary globalization. By according preference to economic gain over traditional values, globalization conflicts with and erodes Hindu conscience. Oka does not reject globalization but calls for the replacement of a materialistically oriented globalization with a spiritual globalization consistent with the traditions of Hinduism and other religious traditions. Drawing heavily from the works of Gandhi, Oka concludes that contemporary globalization is the antithesis of the spiritual globalism intended by Gandhi (36). To provide continuity and a common theoretical base, the case studies are organized around two themes: the cultural reempowerment of Asia and the need for a new internationalism based on diversity and self-determination. These themes are introduced in the first two chapters, followed by the case studies. The book concludes with a conference report and a well-constructed call to action outlining a new internationalism based on a pluralist and multicultural world. Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister and finance minister of Malaysia, introduces the first theme in his paper The Challenge of Globalisation. Ibrahim is critical of the impact of globalization on traditional cultures, noting that for five hundred years, Asian societies have had to respond and adjust to the influences of the West. Prolonged and increasingly intense acculturation has already resulted in a confusion of values, moral decay, and the collapse of the family institution. Interestingly, Ibrahim does not reject globalization, waning against erecting a fortress to prevent foreign influences; instead, he calls for respect for traditional values within the context of a multicultural global society. Ibrahim concludes that religious vitality is critical to cultural reempowerment and is necessary to avoiding further acculturation and maintaining a multicultural world. Joseph A. Camilleri, president of Pax Christi Australia and professor of international relations at La Trobe University, Melbourne, lays the conceptual foundation for the second theme, the new internationalism, with an economic analysis discussing the impact of the economic policies of contemporary globalization. Camilleri examines long-term economic and cultural trends, concluding that current globalization policies are not economically sustainable and are culturally destructive. Camilleri describes three paradoxes that require a comprehensive response: creating a new internationalism based on democratization, Third-World development, and greater economic self-reliance. There are several competing conceptualizations of globalization. The professional literature and contemporary media in the West, especially in the United States, usually defines globalization as a combination of internationalization and liberalization. Globalization is conceptualized as an economic and political phenomenon. There is an assumption that, since the failure of communism, nations have little option but to adopt free-market policies and liberal democratic institutions. Nations failing to make the necessary reforms and adjustments will be left behind in poverty and drudgery. In contrast, the 1997 conference and subsequent book define globalization as Westernization, and much of the research presented is intellectually grounded in the Westernization and neocolonial literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Mostly avoiding the sweeping macro generalities and the anti-West rhetoric common to the Westernization debate, the book provides a diverse and thoughtful analysis of globalization and its effects on traditional societies. Readers, especially those with only a rudimentary knowledge of Eastern religions, will gain valuable insights into the increasing conflict of values between the forces of globalization and traditional cultures. The book avoids the sweeping generalities and macro analysis that are much too common in the globalization debate, its strength lying in its ability to clearly identify traditional cultural values and compare them directly to the values and ethos of globalization. The conference reports and the call to action in appendix 2 make it clear that the editors and contributors are critical of contemporary globalization, concluding that globalization is a flawed process that requires substantive change both to protect traditional cultures and to create a sustainable global system. David Porter Youngstown State University Farish A. Noor, ed. Terrorising the Truth: The Shaping of Contemporary Images of Islam and Muslims in Media, Politics and Culture. Penang, Malaysia: Just World Trust (JUST), 1997. xix, 181 pages. ISBN 983-9861-07-7. PB. Price not indicated. [T]here still exists long-buried and deeply-harbored prejudices [against Islam]. . . . The irrational, often bigoted, hatred of Islam and all that the Islamic world represents is an example of such deeply ingrained prejudice. (1) As the title suggests, the book, like the conference from which its contents are drawn, offers a critique of the treatment of Islam in the non-Islamic media. The definition and nature of terrorism, the meaning of jihad, and the question of legitimate authority and constitutional framework for Muslim societies are discussed in some detail, often drawing heavily upon the Quran and the Sunnah. Terrorising the Truth reminds us that the media exposes us to negative images of Islam on a regular basis. But the book goes beyond the negative images of Islam and discusses the fundamental relationships between Islam and the rest of the world within the context of history and current global forces. In doing so, Terrorising the Truth makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Islam, terrorism, and current U.S. foreign policy. Using examples to illustrate critical points, the book documents the medias bias against Islam, which both forms and reinforces negative stereotypes and creates cross-cultural mistrust and misperception. Farish Noor, who coordinated the publication of conference papers into book form, offers a particularly poignant illustration of the long-buried and deeply-harbored prejudices against Islam. Immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing on 19 April 1993, Noor reminds us, there was a nearly universal assumption that Islamic terrorists, probably Arabs, were to blame for the incident. For most Americans, this rush to judgment belongs in the past and today is of little consequence, whereas, for many Muslims, particularly Arab-American Muslims, the memory of that rush to judgment, combined with a persistent refusal to apologize, reflects the deep-seated cultural, religious, and racial biases common in the West, illustrating an embedded prejudice against Islam. In a similar manner, often combining a historic perspective with recent events, Terrorising the Truth reviews Islamic relations with Europe, Australia, Russia, India, China, and South and East Asia. We are reminded of the Russian czars campaigns to seize Black Sea ports and to expand into what have become Islamic republics along Russias southern border. The current Chechen conflict is reviewed from the perspective of the Chechens right of self-determination and within the broader definition of terrorism. The images of Islam in India begin with an examination of the continuing consequences of the 1947 partition of colonial India into Hindu and Muslim countries. The ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir, the contemporary rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and the resulting anti-Muslim violence is presented as part of an unbroken chain of discrimination and conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The prognosis is hardly better for China. China, and most of Asia, has adopted secular and materialistic policies that conflict with basic Islamic beliefs. Islam is seen as an impediment to progress, a source of violence, and a challenge to Chinas self-image, development, and future. Perhaps the most interesting analysis of Islams negative images is the psychological perspective provided by Ghazali Basri, director of the Islamic Centre at the University of Agriculture, Malaysia. Basri focuses on the conflict between Islam and Southeast Asian societies, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia, arguably the most economically dynamic Muslim countries in the world. Nevertheless, not unlike the other regions considered in the book, the people of Malaysia and Indonesia harbor negative images of Islam. Islam was introduced to Southeast Asia through trade, resulting in a pattern of gradual accommodation that usually minimizes social and religious conflict. Basri reminds us that historically, the Muslim communities in both countries were at the mercy of feudal lords willing to corrupt Islams message to satisfy their needs and wishes. The situation was exasperated by European colonialism, which marginalized Islam as a matter of foreign policy. Independence brought scant relief, as secular states criticized Islamic nationalism to win popular support, and political parties, emulating the feudal lords, used Islam to their own ends. According to Basri, the Islamic community has a dangerous tendency to develop similar negative stereotypes and attitudes leading to negative self-images. The long-term impact is not addressed, but one can speculate that the resulting frustration and rage will eventually be expressed through violence. Interestingly, in the preface, Noor predicts the development of an ideological form of Islam, which, today, would be referred to as Islamist or Islamism, in response to negative stereotypes and poor self-images. While each region is unique, one is struck by recurring themes and patterns of misperception. Almost universally, non-Muslim societies perceive Islam as a backward religion and Muslims as fierce, merciless, authoritarian, and intolerant. Whether this stereotype reflects long-buried and deeply-harbored prejudices against Islam, as suggested, can be debated, but to do so would be missing the point of the conference and the book. The questions of interest concern the development of these stereotypes, why and how they persist, whether they feed intolerance and violence, and how Islam and its neighbors can overcome these images. The second part of the book consists of a series of formal papers and essays, each focusing on a specific aspect of relations between Islamic and non-Islamic socieites. For example, Chandra Muzaffar, senior research fellow at the Science University of Malaysia, focuses on the meaning and definition of terrorism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, the term terrorist has been increasingly applied to Muslims fighting oppression. Muslim fighters in Palestine, Chechnya, and Kashmir are, according to Muzaffar, fighting against oppression and for their right of self-determination. Typically, they would be classified as freedom fighters, but, since they are fighting against the interests of the West and are struggling to get their rights as Muslims, they are labeled terrorists. Attempting to explain the origins of the clash between Islamic and non-Islamic societies, Erskine Childers reviews the historic relationship between Islam and its neighbors. The Europeans and other non-Islamic societies remember Islams periods of violent expansion, while Islam remembers the Crusades and the imperialism of more recent times. This selective memory is reflected in the American and European educational system that perpetrates the myth of a self-generated Western civilization, failing to acknowledge Islams contributions to Western civilization. While Europes educational system may not be explicitly anti-Islamic, the very omission of Islams historic contributions, combined with the lack of an academic focus on Islamic studies, contributes to nurturing the long-buried and deeply-harbored prejudices and reinforcing negative stereotypes against Islam. The sad conclusion is that distrust and misrepresentation of Islam are both common and embedded in the Western and non-Islamic media. Increasingly, the West perceives Islam as the primary threat to world peace and stability, in effect replacing the Cold-War fear of communism with a new cold war based on the fear of Arab nationalism and Islamic terrorism. For many readers, the most intriguing and informative papers are authored by Chaiwat Satha-Ananddraw, president of the Social Science Association of Thailand, and AbdulHamid AbuSulayman, rector of the International Islamic University Malaysia. Both authors present formal philosophical and religious arguments, relying heavily on the Quran and the Sunnah, to explore Islams teachings on armed struggle, the ethics of war, jihad, and nonviolence. In effect, both authors challenge the interpretations of faith used to justify terror as a political weapon by providing alternative faith-based interpretations. AbuSulayman challenges the negative Islamic stereotypes, arguing that the Quran and Sunnah favor nonviolent action to rectify injustices. The conditions that justify force are narrowly defined in the Quran and Sunnah, and unauthorized violence is described as an illegitimate criminal, and immoral act (101). Supporting his interpretation with passages from the Quran and Sunnah, AbuSulayman defines Islamic constitutional principles, political authority, and the tradition of shura, or consultation. Satha-Ananddraw, in his paper The Nonviolent Crescent: Eight Theses on Muslim Nonviolent Actions, offers a nonviolent interpretation of Islam rarely seen outside the Islamic world, certainly not in Western media outlets. Drawing on the Quran, he provides an extensive analysis of jihad, the ethics of modern warfare, and the importance of nonviolent struggle. He stresses that all Muslims have moral obligations that guide all actions, including jihad. Neither of the two authors rejects violence; each insists that the legitimate use of force, as justified by Islamic religious teachings, is restricted to a set of narrowly defined conditions. While acknowledging Islams ills, such as oppressive governments, terrorism, and the tendency of Islamic militant groups to be self-isolating, Terrorising the Truth calls for Muslims to develop both a contemporary political philosophy based on Islamic religious teaching and culture and a culture of peace based on the Islamic principles of justice and unity. The book concludes with a call to action that outlines individual, community-wide, and institutional actions designed to overcome Islams negative images. Muslims are called upon to reach out to bridge the gap with the non-Muslim communities and to engage in humanitarian and intercommunity work. The Muslim community is encouraged to become politically active and to develop economic influence. Muslims are called upon to challenge negative stereotypes by monitoring media distortions and to sensitize individual journalists. The most persuasive argument to read this book is the date of the conference on whose proceedings the book is based1995, six years before the terrorist attack of 9/11 and eight years before the invasion of Iraq. As a consequence, Terrorising the Truth provides an unfiltered critique of Islamic and non-Islamic relations, helping to explain the frustration that give rise to Islamic radicalism. David Porter Youngstown State University M. J. Akbar. The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. xx, 272 pages. ISBN 0-415-28470-8. HB $25.00. Times being what they are, any review by a Christian of a book authored by a Muslim on jihad and the conflict between Islam and Christianity almost by necessity requires establishing some context. I am a Christian in the Quaker traditionand, thus, a pacifist by convictionbut also, by tradition, a critic of mainline Christian traditions and mainline Christian history. I have little investment, emotional or religious, in defending many of the aspects of Christian history that M. J. Akbar finds objectionable. If I were called upon to review the times and events described in Akbars work, I would not be nearly as civil. Akbar is downright restrained when he describes American and European (I refuse to call it Christian) duplicity in dealing with Islamic and Asian regimes in the last 150 years! Akbar is a keen observer who manages to inform and, in fine Indian tradition, entertain at the same time. Indeed, the book reads like a series of dinner conversations with a learned and fascinating guest willing to hold forth on matters near and dear to his heart. Akbars view of Islamic history includes a clear admiration for what is worthy and a gentle willingness to question what is troubling (even if it dwells a bit less on the latter than I would have hoped at times). The book is safely premised on the fact widely noted by Islamicists worldwide, namely, that Westernmore specifically, Americanimpressions of the Islamic world are woefully uninformed. A major section of Akbars work, therefore, simply retells the sweeping story of Islam itself, using, as guide, the role of warfare as a tool of both expansion and internal change. Containing no technical or theological analyses of jihad, the book takes a more popular historical view of warfare as an aspect of Islamic history. There is little debate about the justifiability of certain conflicts. Akbars work maintains a journalistic dispassionateness amounting to a sort of realism. Many Americans and Europeans are particularly interested in the Muslim attitudes toward and the role of violence in Islamic history and practice, and Akbar clearly knows his audience. The narrative summarizes Islamic history with sustained attention to the series of impressive military victories against all reasonable odds, especially the victories of the first three hundred years of the religious movement. At the same time, the author offers a sober and critical analysis of current political realities in many contemporary Islamic societies: no Muslim country from the old empires has had an honest and sustained democracy. Where it is currently honest, as in Bangladesh, it is not sustained. The uniform of the army looms over even liberal Turkey (xvii). I applaud the authors willingness to be reflective, even as I lament his focused attention on warfare as a missed opportunity to become more familiar with the beauty and spiritual depth of a tradition that has much to teach Westerners. Perhaps that would be a different book, but I do not entirely approve of history as a narrative largely consisting of kings and generals or caliphs and generals. As a result, there is hardly a mention of the sustained (and, at times, bitter) criticism within the Christian tradition that was directed against the crusaders zealous thirst for blood (as documented, for example, by Palmer Throop and Benjamin Kedar) or of the Eastern Christian critique that advocated coexistence, even in the early centuries of Islamic expansion (as described in Arab-Christian sources by Samir Khalil Samir). Surely, both trends are as important to mention as the escapades of the rogue Quaker, Josiah Harlan, whose abandoning of his tradition is evident both in his military exploits and in his willingness to practice medicine without training! If we are going to do history, at least partly, by anecdote, then which anecdotes we choose can be a matter of debate! It would not be fair, however, to overlook a disquieting sadness in Akbars prose, and it would be wise for Western readers, especially Christian ones, to listen carefully to these tones in the book. The sense of disappointment is most evident when he describes lost historical opportunities, particularly in the last two centuries. A wistfulness characterizes his descriptions of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and a Pakistan that never quite happened as some of the dreamers had wished. There is also a certain sadness in his descriptions of, for example, Jamal ad-Din Afghanis driving vision for change in Islamic society, which did not result in an equally driving reform but seemed to derail into self-destructive anger among many of his later readers. How else are we to read Akbars care in noting that this fiery prophet died alone and, like Marx, in a kind of British exile, with only his Christian assistant attending him. I emphasize these minor points to illustrate a larger one: a frustrated hope, Akbar suggests, is behind a great deal of contemporary Islamic rhetoric. It is precisely this frustration that Westerners, particularly Americans, seem singularly uninterested in incorporating into their foreign policies because it would force them to humanize the faces they always see shouting incomprehensibly on the evening news. Akbar knows this, and his prose hits the mark again and again by the invitational quality of his discussion and the humane attention to what might have been. The book is complete with a very helpful timeline, a glossary of terms and names, and a good bibliography of sources. A few complaints: The subtitle of this work is somewhat misleading. Christian readers will argue that the book is not about religion as such. Akbar rarely means Christianity when he speaks of Christianity. He means the WesternEuropean and North Americancultural traditions whose representatives often speak with (an increasingly rare) Christian vocabulary. While it might have been at least descriptive to refer to Europe as Christian before the twentieth century, it is clearly nonsense to speak that way now. A cursory reading of intra-Islamic conflict suggests that it is also difficult to speak of Islam when one really means culturally Islamic societies, despite a great variety of interpretations of these various cultural versions of Islamic traditions. This is perhaps one of the most important difficulties in doing any work on Muslim-Christian relations: we are usually not talking about the same thing when we speak of religion and politics. Secondly, Akbar probably ought to be a bit more careful with theology. His belief that Christianity lacks the ability to recognize and honor Muhammad is overstated. For Akbar to write that [i]t is . . . incumbent upon the Church to declare Muhammad an imposter. To do anything else would be to make Christianity a 611-year-old religion and Christs mission could not be deemed eternal (41) is, I believe, very misleading, both politically and theologically. Theology very rarely drives policy in the Westand has not for some time. Thus, even if Akbars religious assertions about Christian close-mindedness were still accurate for many conservative Christians, it is virtually irrelevant politically. Furthermore, liberal Christianity is, despite the evening news, alive and well. Beyond realism in politics, it is simply wrong to suggest that [t]he Quran venerates Jesus [but] for the Church to return the compliment would be suicide (41). While I may personally hope for even more progress in interfaith dialogue on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, progress in recognizing non-Christian faith has undeniably been made in that church. May I suggest that Akbar read some papal documents, starting with Vatican II! Finally, I would have hoped for a bit more prescription in the books final pages. There is a sense in which popular books like this (there are virtually no footnotes), which are clearly meant to inform on a wider scale than academic monographs, are a bit disappointing when they step back from prescriptive suggestions. Akbar impresses us with his often wise, always downright entertaining, and deeply informative narrative. We feel cheated that he did not offer some guidance in the end, for it is from such writers as this that we can genuinely learn. When it comes to Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world, we cannot afford only to review the mostly awful past, even if it is as informative as this one certainly is. May we hope for part 2? Daniel L. Smith-Christopher Loyola Marymount University Majid Fakhry. Averroes (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works and Influence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001. Great Islamic Thinkers series. xvi, 187 pages. ISBN 1-85168-269-4. PB $23.95. Majid Fakhry. Al-Farabi, Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works and Influence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002. Great Islamic Thinkers series. viii, 168 pages. ISBN 1-85168-302-X. PB $23.95. Majid Fakhry is rightly well known as a commentator on Islamic philosophy, and these two books are a good indication of the high standards that he has established in the discipline. The approach that Fakhry follows is largely historical. He wants to show how each thinker fits into his own time and what contributed to the cultural conditions of that time. He also goes on to explain the influence of Averroes and al-Farabi and the role they continued to play in philosophy after their deaths through the impact of their thought on the work of others. In the book on al-Farabi, we find a long explanation of the role that al-Farabi played in naturalizing Greek philosophy in the Islamic world and in establishing logic as an independent discipline of knowledge within that world. Al-Farabi, like so many of the great Islamic thinkers, was interested in a wide range of subjects, ranging from natural science to music, and Fakhry describes all these different strains of his work. The style of exposition is remarkably similar to the style of al-Farabi himself calm, judicious, and clearand Fakhry succeeds in bringing out the main features of this important thinker. He takes a similar approach in the book on Averroes, linking him closely with Aristotle and with the long commentatorial tradition. Averroes was also a significant medical thinker and lawyer, and this is described, together with his influence on subsequent thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas. Particularly well done in the book is the discussion of Averroes developing views on ethics, physics, and metaphysics, together with a careful analysis of his closeness to and, at times, his differences from Aristotle. Anyone seeking an introduction to the views of these two thinkers will be well served by these books. Fakhry is not just a commentator on this period of thought, but very much the doyen, in the sense of establishing a particular historical approach appropriate to this form of thought. This reviewer is not, on the whole, a supporter of that form of interpretation, yet there can be no argument about the quality of these volumes. One wishes that Fakhry had occasionally gone a bit further, perhaps in speculating on the wider intellectual influence of his thinkers or the wider implications of their ideas. He is rightly skeptical of the idea that Averroes is the harbinger of modernity, the Renaissance, the Nahdah, and so on, but many of Averroes concerns clearly resonate with a much wider community than merely intellectuals in the Middle Ages, and it would have been interesting to have seen more discussion of this fascinating issue. Also, both thinkers raise a lot of controversial comments, both within the context of Islam and within philosophy in general, and Fakhry might have wanted to take some of those comments on and see how far they might be taken. These cavils aside, the reader of these volumes will be left with a solid foundation in the thought of these important thinkers. Fakhry has served the world of Islamic philosophy well yet again. Oliver Leaman University of Kentucky Islam and Science: Journal of Islamic Perspectives on Science. Center for Islam and Science, Alberta, Canada. Vol. 1 (2003), No. 1. ISSN 1703-7603. This journal is long overdue for several reasons. First, few cultures are struggling more than Islam with the problem of inserting science and its associated technologies into a traditional culture. This challenge, however, is not unique to Islam. Euro-Americans have been struggling with it since the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century. This struggle both separates Islam from and unites it to Euro-Americans, and attention to it can enhance mutual understanding. Second, while much divides Euro-American intellectuals from Islamic theoreticians, certain problems are shared between the two. For example, how shall we interpret quantum theory? How shall we evaluate the claim that evolution has given an intellectually satisfying, naturalistic explanation for what traditional cultures might call the presence of spirit? Most philosophers in both cultures are aware that these scientific theories have challenged many of our traditional assumptions. Muslim thinkers are also challenged by these theories, and this journal allows for the cross-cultural conversation that can enhance our appreciation of these theories. Third, the lethal technological weapons created by Euro-American science have made possible the current political relations between Islam and Euro-America. It is easy to appreciate the Islamic worlds desire to secure the science and technology necessary to acquire these weapons. However, acquiring these weapons may only transform Islam into a pale image of Euro-America. Fourth, there exists, in my view, an Islamic appreciation of science that is free of a controlling myth that has contributed to making science the servant of Euro-Americas military-industrial complex. This myth is the assumption that science is value-free. Islamic theoreticians tend toward the postmodernist conviction that science is not value-free, but rather laden with the cultural values of those who make it possible. Science is not, by nature, free, but servile; the only real question is, who will be its master? Euro-Americans have much to learn from this postmodern, Islamic understanding of science. Finally, there is a close relationship between science and secularism that is fruitfully introduced in this first issue but needs to be further explored. The opening essay in this journal involves a dialogue with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a leading historian and philosopher of Islamic science. Nasr has written extensively on the question of preserving the essentially transcendent aspect of Islamic culture in any dialogue with science and technology. According to Nasr, if there is to be a dialogue between Islam and science, it must take place with great caution because of the danger that such a dialogue may lead to an absorption of Islam into thoughtless scientism, which characterizes modern Euro-America. For Nasr, scientism rejects any transcendent foundations and assumes that science is sufficient to answer the deepest philosophical and cultural questions. Nasr, however, does not merely warn about the dangers of a thoughtless scientism, but also argues that Islam has the resources to contribute to an improved philosophy of nature because it has never accepted the simpleminded dualism that radically separates mind from body. This mind-body dualism is, according to Nasr, an essential aspect of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which, he believes, has left Euro-America with an essentially incoherent understanding of nature itself. Nasr is a tireless advocate of developing Islamic universities within the United Statesbuilt somewhat on the model of Catholic universities, such as Georgetown or Notre Dame. Such universities, he believes, would support the development of an Islamic cognitive space by which the insights of Islam could enrich the cultural space of the country. The second essay of this journal comes face-to-face with articulating the meaning of science within the framework of Islamic foundations. Osman Bakar carefully notes that there are many meanings of Islam and science, but he straightforwardly identifies three essential commitments necessary for understanding Islam. They are islam, iman, and ihsan. The first refers to submission to the divine will, the second refers to the acceptance of divine truth, and the third refers to the practice of religious virtues that are necessary for transforming the self and the world according to a divine plan. These are essential for Islam, and if there is to be a genuine Islamic science, then Islamic science must develop within these fundamentally religious commitments. Science, on the other hand, involves four components, according to Bakar. First, science is a discipline of structured concepts, theories, and experiments. The second component is what he calls the set of basic epistemological hypotheses that are assumed, rather than proved, by science. The third is a set of methods, though not shared by all the sciences, that have logic as their common thread. The fourth involves the goal-directed character of scientific thought, which Bakar sees as the development of universal laws aimed at discovering the essential nature of things. For Bakar, science is fundamentally realistic. If we grant these sets of assumptions, how will dialogue and transformation become possible? This is a complicated question, but Bakar is thoroughly committed to the concept that, like science, Islam is realistic and furnishes its followers with a profoundly realistic image of the nature of the world. If science and Islam are to dialogue, it must be on the assumption that both share a common goalnamely, to discover a deep understanding of the real world. But according to Bakar, Islam gives a more general and fundamental understanding of the world; therefore, Islamic science must involve a careful adjustment of science to the more epistemologically and metaphysically basic religious presuppositions of Islam. The next essay is a straightforwardly philosophical discussion of whether science can offer evidence for the existence of a transcendent reality. Mehdi Golshani is concerned that science gives us a pointless or existentially meaningless vision of nature if it is interpreted without religious input. In the absence of such input, science by itself eliminates all reference to the teleological character of nature. This vision, according to Golshani, is mistaken because it fails to appreciate what he calls the mysterious kind of guidance present in all of creation, which the Quran as well as recent scientific developments affirm. He refers to the anthropic principle that affirms the presence of purpose within nature, and this purpose is signaled by the fact that the world appears to be fine-tuned to human mathematical capacities. Golshani refers to Paul Daviess view that the world need not exist in a way that allows for mathematical interpretation; the world, being so conformable to mathematical inquiry, suggests that it has a deep design that is compatible with the views of Islam. The fourth essay, by Ibrahim Kalin, reviews the cosmological doctrines of Mulla Sadra, especially those surrounding the concept of substantial motion. This doctrine is ontological in the sense that it presents an internalist view of motion that portrays motion as guided by a divine plan. The doctrine of God, as the first cause, is essential to this vision of substantial motion, but God is not to be understood in mere deistic terms. God is not portrayed as the original clockmaker who sets the world in motion and abandoned it to its own mechanistic logic. Rather, for Kalin and Sadra, God is portrayed as the active cause that is necessary for actuating motion. This is an internalist account of motion because it presumes that causal relations among objects would be impossible unless these objects contained an inner logic that is being made external through the passage of time. Kalins view is traditional in the sense that it emerges against a backdrop of an Aristotelian interpretation of causality. This account will raise many challenges to Euro-American philosophers of science who are accustomed to thinking within positivist or pragmatic assumptions regarding causal relationships. The last essay on which I will comment is Mohammad Hashim Kamalis Islam, Rationality and Science. What makes this essay especially interesting is its clarity in identifying the distinct problem that has troubled Euro-Americans since the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century. How does one coherently adopt a scientific attitude within the framework of a religious worldview? Christians such as Ren Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz felt the conflict and postulated different deductive metaphysical systems to accommodate the twin truths of science and religion. Kamali leans more toward an inductivist view of both science and religion. According to him, knowledge in both religion and science is based on experience, and even our basic convictions are the result of observation and reflection on what is given within human experience. What is most challenging about Kamalis view is his notion that religion and science have a common origin, one that can provide a basis for communication between them. Let me close with some comments regarding secularism. For Kamali, secularism is a device for offering an account of the world, which is theologically empty. While Kamalis account of secularism is fascinating, it is somewhat narrow since it hints that religious thinkers cannot, in principle, be secular. The history of science belies this assumption. It is better to portray secularism as a species of political and social silence that creates both a public and a private sphere. These spheres can allow dialogue among theists, agnostics, and atheists. The public sphere is where dialogue among people of opposing moral and theological viewpoints can take place, even in the absence of any substantive view of the good life. Such dialogue often involves a fair amount of what Ludwig Wittgenstein would call talking past one another. But such conversation is not without surprising outcomes. This secular public sphere is the domain of individual rights, and the single most important right is the right to be left alone to choose what constitutes ones own substantive view of the good life. This public sphere is one in which the central moral virtue is tolerance. The private sphere, on the other hand, is where one finds meaning, fulfillment, the good life, and, with luck, God. Such a sphere is essentially voluntary, a space where one finds like-minded fellow travelers to share ones substantive practices. These spheres are human artifices devised not to dispense with God, but to allow for peaceful dialogue among people who lack a shared vision of the transcendent. Brendan Minogue Youngstown State University Gary B. Ferngren. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 401 pages. ISBN 0-8018-7038-0. PB $19.95. A major challenge for the editors of a book is to construct an internal matrix that can provide a cohesiveness to the collection of papers that constitute an edited volume. Without the presence of an internal thread that weaves individual contributions together, an edited volume remains a collection of so many articles, each written by a different author, with a distinct flavor of its own and disconnected from the other articles of the book. Though the individual articles of an edited volume are not meant to be like chapters of a book by a single author, one does expect an edited book to have a certain degree of inner cohesiveness that raises it beyond the level of being merely a collection of articles. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction fails to rise to this expectation; it is a collection of articles that lacks an internal thread, and, thus, one can only evaluate it on the basis of individual articles. But before an attempt is made to examine individual articles, let me explain the missing links. The book, according to the write-up on the back cover, surveys the relationship between Western religious traditions and science from the beginning of the Christian era to the late twentieth century, suggesting a model not of inalterable conflict but of complex interaction. There is a disconnect between this claim and the contents of the book. If this brief note is taken seriously, one would expect the book to remain within the parameters so defined, but that is not the case. Western religious traditions are not covered; it is merely a book about the relationship of one strand of Christianity to science. But then, one finds an article, simply called Islam, which attempts to construct a very general picture of the nature of scientific enterprise in Islamic civilization and ends by bringing up the highly complex issue of decline of science in that civilization. One wonders what to make of this strange mix. The Introduction by the editor of the collection could have provided a semblance of internal unity to the volume, but this very short note merely highlights the reductionist approach to the question of relationship between science and religion for it delineates the science-religion conflict in a very narrowly defined temporal and thematic arena. For the editor of the volume, the history of the science-religion relationship is merely a history of the relationship between Christianity and science, and that, too, a history that starts toward the end of the nineteenth century and is epitomized by the Galileo and Scopes trials! In addition to any internal cohesiveness, the bookif one can call such a hodgepodge a booksuffers from several other defects. First of all, with one exception, it is a collection of some thirty essays assembled from another edited work of the editor, The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 2000), which contains 103 articles; the only article specifically written for this volume is The Scopes Trial. Thus, the material that makes up this volume is merely a reprint of articles written for the encyclopedia. This leaves one with the question: what is the justification of such a reprint, so soon after the release of the parent work? This may be justified on the basis of a marketing decision that seeks to sell a shorter version of the previously published material, but there is no intellectual justification for reducing the vastly complex issue of the relationship between science and religion to the set of parameters defined by the editor. Given its limited approach, the volume should have been called something like A History of the Relationship Between Christianity and Science in America, for it is no more than that. Though part 1 and part 2 of the edited volume (and I hesitate to call it a book) attempt to construct a historical background, their generalities and sweeping nature merely construct a broad and undifferentiated outline, which does nothing to enhance our understanding of the historical roots of the conflict. The presence of a chapter on Islam at the end of part 2 does little to define the making of the relationship between modern science and Christianity; this is a generic article that delineates the broad outline of the Islam-and-science relationship in stereotypical manner, without going into the depth of the complexity that actually characterized that relationship. Every single subtopic mentioned in this articlesuch as the translation movement, Goldzihers Islam versus Foreign Sciences argument, the hugely influential but equally complex Neoplatonization of the Aristotelian corpus, and the complex relationship between the philosophical tradition and physical sciencesis left hanging in the air, without grounding it to the subject of the relationship between Islam and science or to the wider context of the volume. No attempt is made to explain why, in a volume dealing with the relationship between Christianity and science, an article on Islam was needed. Moreover, the article itself does nothing to justify its inclusion for it lacks any discussion of the impact of debates on the relationship between Islam and science on the relationship between Christianity and science. Even thematic unity is absent, for this heterogeneous collection of articles, bound together in one volume, deals with such diverse topics as Gender, Postmodernism, Ecology and the Environment, and Scientific Naturalism. No doubt all of these diverse issues can fall into the general domain of the relationship between Christianity and science, but they can only do so when treated within a definite matrix constructed to explore this relationship. In the absence of such an internal matrix, they remain individual articles, with their own themes and methodology; even if they do contribute toward our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and science, such a contribution remains disjointed. Individual articles, when judged as stand-alone papers, are also redundant, academic, textbook affairs, shedding no new light on the relationship between science and Christianity and repeating what has been circulating in the science-religion discourse for over two decades in various forms. Take, for instance, the article by Richard Olson, entitled Physics. This broad overview, which attempts to provide insights into the nature of the relationship between physics . . . and religion [read: Christianity] from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, is merely a trite summary of developments in this field, which has been central to the science-religion discourse. It neither places the developments in a broad historical context, nor provides any background on the social, philosophical, and spiritual trends of the time that influenced the discourse. This may be due to space limitation, but this is hardly a justification for a four-hundred-page volume; after all, one expects such a collection to do justice to the subject matter by at least providing a focused and in-depth examination of some of the major areas. However, that is precisely the problem with this collection; it lacks focus, and where substantial issues are tackled, the treatment remains superficial. The section on biological origins is not only a caricature of the rich and diverse material available on the subject, it is thoroughly Americanized. The inclusion of the chapter The Scopes Trial, written specially for this volume, only underscores the Americanization of the issue. The relationship between religion and the question of biological origins is central to the science-religion discourse, but this volume does not do justice to even this central theme. Ronald Numbers article, Creationism since 1859, likewise, merely provides a summary account of the issue within the American context, as if this main theme of the science and religion discourse has nothing to do with Europe or other regions, even within the Christian context. Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to call this volume a disjointed collection of previously published material that falls far short of its intent and purpose and that does nothing to enhance our understanding of the relationship between science and religion. Muzaffar Iqbal Center for Islam and Science Alberta, Canada Attilio Petruccioli and Khalil K. Pirani, eds. Understanding Islamic Architecture. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. xiii, 134 pages. ISBN 0-7007-1438-3. PB $25.95. This volume addresses the state of contemporary Islamic architecture against the backdrop of Western capitalism. The essays in it are written primarily by theorists and practicing architects and do not serve as a general introduction to Islamic architecture. The collection is geared toward designers who already possess knowledge of the architecture of the Islamic world. The preface clarifies that the book is an attempt to bring diverse thought processes (vii) to bear on this subject by including essays written by practitioners rather than academicians. In the introduction, Petruccioli states the problems facing contemporary Islamic architectural design, setting the stage for the essays that follow. The work is inspired by what Petruccioli sees as a twofold crisis of Islamic architecture that has led, over the past forty years, to a near-complete loss of cultural identity as seen through architecture in Islamic countries. He blames the modern movement that promoted the use of a Western architectural language throughout the world without caring for the indigenous cultural and religious needs of the people whom the architecture served. Secondarily, he points to the rise of the designer and the pursuit of a star system, whereby architectural design began to see itself more as an artistic endeavor than one that created practical, objective environments appropriate to cultural roots and use (xi). According to Petruccioli, the resultant rupture from architectural heritage caused by this involution within the design field led to an architecture that became more a product of the design studio and less integrated within the social and political realities of its function (xi). The essays are divided into three subheaded sections that address meaning from faith, meaning from history, and contemporary trends. Following each essay is a short commentary written by another practitioner or expert in the field of architectural design (many of whom are also contributors of essays). In most cases, the comments provide a critical foil to the ideas presented in the essays. Each essayist is then allowed a short response to address the preceding comments. The only exception to this format follows Suha zkans essay, for which the comments were not included owing to their length and, consequently, no response was provided by zkan. The first five essays deal with meaning from faith. These essays are rather personal in their approach to Islamic faith as a driving force in architectural design. Mohammed Arkouns essay, first published in Architecture Beyond Architecture: Creativity and Social Transformation in Islamic Cultures: The 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture (edited by Cynthia C. Davidson with Ismal Serageldin [London: Academy Editions, 1995], 16-19), raises questions regarding spirituality in Islamic architecture. It does so by focusing on the 1995 Aga Khan Award master jury deliberations that raised, on the one hand, the issue of tradition versus innovation in terms of achieving spirituality in architecture and, on the other hand, the issue of the interconnectedness of culture, politics, and religion in achieving architectural solutions. Nader Ardalans essay on the paradise garden as a visual paradigm of Islamic architecture deals with the spiritual concept of a universal Absolute and mans relationship to it. S. Gulzar Haiders essay on what makes architecture Islamic is driven by a personal quest to raise the level of discourse on Islamic architecture from oversimplification to a befitting complexity (23). To this end, he maps the crossing perspectives of cosmology, power, law, and spirituality in a manifold arrangement. Abdul Rehmans essay on the grand tradition of Islamic architecture lays out a set of design principles based on his contention that form and meaning in Islamic architecture is Islamic if the act of creation is in the spirit of divine faith (27). The final essay in this section, by Khalil K. Pirani, deals with discovering concepts from faith by presenting nine concepts stemming from the Quran that are applicable to architectural design. He presents these concepts as general guidelines that, in the words of the commentator S. Gulzar Haider, will inject ethical dimensions into the practice of architecture (36). Five essays make up the second section, which deals with meaning from history. These essays focus on the architectural history of Islam, with examples drawn from countries throughout the Muslim world. The first essay, by Ronald Lewcock, traces the development of the Islamic urban environment in contrast to the Greco-Roman origins of many Muslim-conquered cities outside of Arabia. He traces the movement away from the Greco-Roman grid to a more ancient system of land parceling dating back to pre-Islamic cultures of the East. Ludovico Micaras essay on interior space in the architecture of Islamic countries presents the authors reading of two architectural images from an early eighth-century illustrated Quran. Micara sees, in two of the earliest Islamic architectural images, a particular idea of space (49) and uses these images as a starting point for a discussion of the Islamic importance of interior space and enclosure (52). Jale Nejdet Erzens essay dealing with the aesthetics of space in Ottoman architecture presents the sixteenth-century accomplishments of the Ottoman architect Sinan as a guide for modern architects in the Islamic world. She points out that it was Sinans continuous search for new forms and structural solutions that was the key to his ability to create an architecture that was unique each time, even within traditional norms (63). She proposes that, through analysis of these forms, architecture in the Islamic world today can recapture some of its old significance (63-64). Adhi Moersid, Achmad Fanani, and Tulus Setyo Budhis essay, which deals with changes in the Islamic religion and the built environment, addresses the spread of Islam to Indonesia and the adoption of local forms in the creation of Islamic architecture. Mahvash Alemis essay, dealing with Persian gardens and courtyards, interprets Persian garden design as a historical model for the authors own design work. Of the final seven essays, which deal with contemporary trends in Islamic architecture, the first four discuss the architectural lessons of modernism within the regional diversity of the Islamic world and utilize contemporary projects as illustrations. Suha zkan briefly traces colonialism and modernism in the Islamic world as two temporal boundaries (85) that condition architectural design. zkans focus on the merging of modernism and traditionalism is carried through to Ali Shuaibis essay, which focuses on various regional responses necessitated by projects designed by a firm named Beeah, of which Shuaibi is a partner. Continuing this focus, Rasem Badran emphasizes the relationship between man and place in the architecture of the Islamic city. Badrans somewhat holistic approach places great importance on Islam as a religion that is socially aware and interested in the community without neglecting the individual (109). Eugenio Galdieris essay also takes the debate between Islamic tradition and modernism as its starting point. He summarizes the major reasons for the urban crisis in Islamic architecture in the modern period and proposes innovation as the most difficult but most promising path toward revitalization in this field of design. The following two essays focus on the condition of the Islamic urban environment in the modern period. Kamran T. Diba focuses on the influence of Western culture on Islamic society and the resultant humiliating subjugation to Western ideas and values that has brought about an identity crisis in Islamic societies (119). He goes on to offer brief suggestions and discussion regarding Islamic urban development in contrast to Western models. Arif Hasans essay offers a concise summary of the problems facing the urban environment in the Islamic world in the market-driven economy of the postcolonial age. He points to the architect as uniquely capable of preventing the rapid deterioration of the built environment (126). The final essay, by Kausar Bashir Ahmad, presents parameters for the overhaul of architectural education in the Muslim world. Ahmad champions the restoration of links with tradition while maintaining a global point of reference. His comments are based on information gathered from over one hundred architecture programs in more than twenty-six countries. Ahmads contribution is a fitting final essay in that it offers constructive suggestions for educating architects in the Islamic world. The essays included in this edited volume comprise a mixed bag in terms of their scholarly approach to the subject matter. The essays seem overly short. Their length was perhaps dictated by the inclusion of commentary and response, and, in many cases, the essays do not fully flesh out or illustrate the ideas presented. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of important information and provocative ideas included within this collection. Overall, Understanding Islamic Architecture presents a broad picture of how living theorists and designers perceive and approach architecture as an Islamic endeavor. Stephanie Smith Youngstown State University Sarah Louise Baker. From Utah to Eternity: A Mormon-Muslim Journey. Oxford: Sakina Books, 2001. v, 488 pages. ISBN 0-953-80565-4. PB 9.95. One of the most difficult subjects to describe or explain, as clergy and professors of religion alike well know, is that of faith. How is one to express the ineffable? St. Teresa of Avila and Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi may turn to lyrical strokes of the pen to evoke the awe of the encounter with the divine. But, for all the absolute certainty it provides, faith belongs to the domain of the inexpressible. One would think that a reader would identify easily with this most common of experiences, but the certitude of ones faith often precludes such acceptance from readers steeped in a tradition other than the one described, blinding them to the similarity of the vision they witness from different windows. A fortiori, anyone reading a book describing conversion from ones faith to another one is likely to be deeply offended. One cannot accuse Sarah Louise Baker, who describes in this novel the journey of a young Mormon missionary into the spiritual world of Islamand who herself is a convert to Islamof portraying Mormon tradition in a bitter or angry way, as is often the case with a new convert. There is a genuine recognition of the wholesome nature of Mormon life and its insistence on family values, sexual responsibility, and work ethics. But, of course, universal values can be found in all traditions, and, eventually, criticism of some of the tenets of the faith regarding the nature of the divine and the regulation of ones relationship with God is bound to surface. The tight control established by the Mormon church over all aspects of its members lives, providing them with education at its own universities and employment in its own extensive business holdings, supplied and maintained through the heavy taxation of the disciples, is bound to be praised as successful social service by the Mormons and criticized as undue cultic regimentation by outsiders. Beyond this complete social integration, the chief occupation of the church is proselytizing; the disciples are expected to devote two years under closely regulated supervision to the task of converting the heathen. Conversion in a capitalist world is bound to become a business. In addition to being exposed to Mormon tenets, businesspersons will be specifically offered lucrative business deals and promises of rewarding ventures through the vast holdings of the church so that the new convert could, as the hero of the book discovers, kill two birds with one stone and have a soul at ease and a successful career assured (187). It is only normal that, in a country where market economy is the reigning ideology, the chief concern of the new churches would be to market themselves and that the index of their success in the religion market would be the number of their converts-shareholders. In this tough competition, nothing can be left to chance: a huge center filing information about possible religious market shares and providing extensive training to missionary salespersons in promoting and extolling the merits of their religious product is indeed state-of-the-art religion Made in the U.S.A. The ready-made missionary speeches are expected to produce instant conversions and, like the fast food and ready cash offered at drive-through windows, salvation without effort is doled out for your convenience; the converts can even rest assured that all their ancestors will benefit retroactively from their conversion. In the new world order, religion, like the social and economic systems, is tailored to human needs and abides by the culturally supreme goals of achieving material and spiritual comfort in the self-centered ideology of modern men and women. God can be dragged to the psychoanalytical couch of the new churches where his creatures can vent their anguish at his expecting too much from them in a world where everyone ought to be assured the American dream and where the new mediators will help them achieve reconciliation with the Father by making him promise to love them and extracting from him a guarantee of salvation. Adhere to the tenets of any of the new churches or the new Jewish and Christian spiritual movements, and you will be guaranteed eternal acceptance and freed to devote yourself to the business of achieving material success in this world, with all your sins and responsibilities now discharged by the savior-church. A recent letter to the Washington Post by a reader irate at his churchs condemnation of the invasion of Iraq summed up the matter quite neatly. The job of his church, he said, was not to call him to account for his political choices, but rather to provide him with comfort and assurance of salvation that would relieve his anguish over decisions in which God had no business meddling (Letters, Washington Post, 6 April 2003). This lack of accountability was one of the first issues to cause distress to the young hero of the book, along with the Mormon representation of God as a man who used to be just like us but eventually perfected himself into a divine beingthereby realizing, perhaps, his very own American dream. In the novel, the Mormon missionaries are instructed to avoid targeting Muslims, who, obviously, are not swayed by the American utopia. The Muslims whom Jake, the Mormon youth, encounters are deeply suspicious of missionaries from Western churches that made the fatal mistake of tying their public relations campaign to the successful business of achieving political hegemonyin the past, by allying themselves with colonial powers and, today, through the blind and active support many provide to Israel, whose flag represents, in their messianic vision, the first phase of their world conquest. Such patriotic/messianic zeal on the part of most of the evangelical churches has not helped interreligious dialogue and has reflected negatively on all of Western Christianity. Thankfully, the damage is limited only to the image of the Western churches, the Muslim world having been engaged since its inception in productive dialogue with the Eastern churches, and the latter being firmly aligned with their fellow Muslim citizens, whether in Palestine or anywhere else in the Muslim world, against many of the foreign policies of the West, particularly those of the United States. The use by former colonial and current U.S. governments of Christian rhetoric only serves to strengthen Muslims belief that they are facing a new crusade and that separation of church and state has yet to hit Western foreign policy. The book hints at this education in world affairs with which the new converts are suddenly faced after years of lack of exposure in a self-contained American context. In general, the book accurately describes the basic Islamic tenets (at times, though, it inexplicably fails to do so, as when Jake wonders about the fate of non-Muslims in the hereafter and leaves the matter to God without referring to the explicit Quranic verses on the issue), and it is clear that the convert is not taken in by some strange Muslim cultic sect, as the Mormon church, which instantly dispatches deprogrammers to straighten out the lost sheep (as described in a most entertaining passage), believes. But not enough light is shed on the important Islamic concepts. One cannot expect deep philosophical discourse from a youth, and it would be unfair to keep comparing books about conversion to Muhammad Asads The Road to Mecca,a standard that seems almost impossible to emulate. But the concepts and world vision of a religious tradition can still be expressed without recourse to arcane discourse; this, however, requires literary skills that the author does not seem to have mastered yet. Full of psychological insights, the book successfully portrays the difficult road of conversion, the doubts, the naive demands for miracles, the guilt of betraying ones heritage, and the anguish of the pain inflicted on ones familya family that, in the book, ends up being far more supportive than a Muslim family often would be when faced with the same situation. The authors sense of humor makes for an enjoyable read as she wryly notes the multiple ironies that dot the young mans conversion journey, such as criticizing Mormon proselytizing only to fall into zealous attempts to spread the Muslim faith. She provides a poignant portrait of the loneliness of the convert and his uneasy relationship with Muslims, who either overidealize him or consider him an imperfect Muslim in need of instruction and knowledgea task to which they arrogate themselves simply by virtue of being born in a Muslim culture. From the easygoing Syrian and Indonesian families to the cultic followers of Louis Farrakhan to the puritanical and fanatical bornagain Muslims, the new convert cannot but be bewildered by the differences in customs and practices in the Muslim world and especially amongst Muslim immigrants. Too often, the immigrants who find their faith anew in a foreign world turn to a mindless attachment to a ritualistic life mimicking all the details (real or imaginary, religiously mandated or not) of the life of the Prophet, from the wearing of beards of a certain length to the imperative of sitting down before drinking a cup of water. This obsessive ritualism, into which the reform movements, including Wahhabism, have degenerated (quite ironically, since they arose originally to fight precisely this kind of idolatry), can find adherents among new converts who may be afraid of not following correctly the requirements of their new faith. Many, however, will be turned off by such cultic practices or by the cultural customs of their fellow Muslims in regard to, for example, the treatment of women. Indeed, a special reward is deserved in the hereafter by those converts who manage to retain their faith after facing the dismal reality characterizing much of the contemporary Muslim world. But new converts, like second-and third-generation Muslims freed from the cultural shackles of the immigrants, can and will likely build organizations to respond to their needs as Americans with a liberating understanding of a faith unconstrained by cultural customs. Despite a few problems (awkward sentences and occasional verbosity, for example), the book is a welcome and interesting window on the world of conversion and reflects the vibrancy of one of the youngest faiths to take root in American soil. Whether this new movement will result in yet another church devoted to translating religion into capitalist terminology or will manage to push away the dead straw of accumulated cultural practices to recover an authentic interpretation of its holy book is the test now facing American Islam. Maysam J. al Faruqi Georgetown University Gordon D. Newby. A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002. xii, 244 pages. ISBN 1-85168-295-3. PB $16.95. This one-volume work nicely combines the exhaustiveness of an encyclopedia and the precision and rigorousness of a dictionary. It complements existing reference works in the English language, such as Cyril Glasss The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam and Patrick Hughess The Dictionary of Islam, though, somewhat surprisingly, it does not mention any of these in the bibliography. Aiming at a balanced presentation, Newbys work offers objective coverage of all the different branches and movements within Islam, including the Sunni, Shii, and Sufi traditions. The entries explain key historical moments, pinpoint important geographical locations, define concepts from jihad to hajj, and outline the achievements of figures from Rumi to Malcolm X. Interestingly, in establishing head entries, the Arabic terms receive preference over the English equivalents. For example, the entry Intention, for example, is cross-referenced to Niyyah, under which a detailed annotation is provided on the meaning and significance of niyyah and on the religious contexts in which niyyah is mentioned. Some of the other terms receiving comprehensive treatment are Paradise (see al-Jannah), Prayer (Salat), Charity (Sadaqah, Zakat). But the rule of according precedence to the Arabic terms is reversed with regard to such terms as Nikah (Marriage) and Malak (Angels). A third arrangement consists of a group of annotated terms that are similar in meaning but are, nevertheless, treated separately. For example, there are separate entries for Jesus and Isa, for millet and ummah, namazgah and masjid, and ablution and wudu. Despite the diverse nature of the terminology used in the book, a biblical audience would fail to find subject entries if they searched for terms that are familiar to themterms like worship, rite, ritual, meditation, tomb, benediction, blessing, grace, liturgy, human rights, or humanism. A new edition can, perhaps, provide cross-references to guide the reader through. Among the strong points of the book are its appendixes: (a) Gods ninety-nine names; (b) chronology, covering the period from 570 to 1992; (c) bibliography; and (d) thematic index. The book avoids controversial issues. The book provides insufficient treatment of many terms and namesfor example, ihsan (doing good deedsan important Sufi term), suq (market), nastaliq (a script), dargah (Sufi shrine), musalla (prayer mat; small, makeshift mosque), the names of Islamic months, and Wahhabism. Also, at times, the descriptions seem too brief. While brevity is a laudable feature in a concise encyclopedia, elaboration is sometimes needed to eliminate ambiguity. For instance, the book mentions the Shiis as a group that is opposed to Sunnis (see Sunnis and Shiis), but fails to explain what doctrines set the two groups apart. Ambiguity, likewise, results from the rather brief explanations of such terms as khutbah, hilm, and din. This handy, low-priced reference work on Islam should be of interest alike to individuals and libraries. Mohamed Taher Ontario Multifaith Council, Toronto Studies in Contemporary Islam, a refereed journal, is published semiannually, in spring and fall. It is devoted to the understanding, review, analysis, and critique of contemporary Islamic religious, intellectual, and philosophical developments as well as of sociopolitical changes in Islamic societies. The journal aims to be interdisciplinary and international in its range and coverage. It is intended as a forum for scholarly dialogue and communication; it does not promote a particular point of view or ideology. The views expressed by authors in the journal are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the journals editors or represent the journals position. Studies in Contemporary Islam is indexed in the Index of Islamic Literature. Notes to Contributors. Two printed copies of the manuscript should be sent to Mumtaz Ahmad, Department of Political Science, Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia 23668 (mumtaz.ahmad@cox.net), with an electronic copy e-mailed to Mustansir Mir (mmir@ysu.edu). The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) is the preferred reference for format and style. Authors will be requested to supply accepted manuscripts on disk. It is assumed that a manuscript submitted to Studies in Contemporary Islam is the authors original work and neither has been published in any formprint or electronicnor is under submission in any formprint or electronicanywhere else. For further information, contact the Center for Islamic Studies at Youngstown State University. Books for Review. Books for review should be sent to the Center for Islamic Studies at Youngstown State University. Subscription. Institutional $30, individual $15. Checks, made payable to Studies in Contemporary Islam, should be mailed to the Center for Islamic Studies at Youngstown State University. Information. Information about Studies in Contemporary Islam is available at the website http://www.as.ysu.edu/~islamst/sci.htm.