User:Grenavitar/Contemporary Islam
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Please read Talk:Islam#Proposed contemporary Islam section before editting and try working with this to get to a concensus. This is surely too long for the Islam page so I made another section for extra information that could help to make an article out of this. Of course nothing here is binding but I think this might help with our working together for better results. gren グレン 21:02, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Section for Islam page
Most contemporary Muslims still live in Muslim-majority countries. Many of these countries recognize an official relationship between the state and the Islamic faith, though the details of that relationship vary dramatically from country to country. Mosque-state relations run the gamut from Turkey (an aggressively secularist country) to Iran (where the state is run by the Shi'a clergy). Some of the countries that grant a special status to Islam are still relatively tolerant of other faiths; others, like Saudi Arabia, forbid the practice of anything other than the official Wahabi (or Salafi) faith.
There are also some countries, like India, where there is a sizable and long-established Muslim minority. All these countries are part of the old Dar-ul-Islam, the Muslim realm.
Muslim life and belief in the Dar-ul-Islam, the world of Islam, is shaped by centuries of tradition. In many cases, that tradition is heavily Sufi-influenced. Traditional Islam often consists not only of Fridays at the mosque, but also of pilgrimages to the shrines of Sufi saints, membership in traditional Sufi orders, and the leadership of Sufi teachers.
This syncretic, tolerant Sufi-influenced Islam is on the defensive. Various reform movements, such as the Salafi or Wahabi and the Deobandi, have denounced this traditional Islam as idolatrous (shirk) and an innovation (bid'ah) upon the "pure" Islam of Muhammad's time. They turn their backs upon the rich tradition of Muslim figurative and decorative art and build mosques as plain as warehouses. They tear down the tombs of saints, forbid community celebrations of Mawlid (Muhammad's birthday), and stress a strict legalism rather than Sufi mysticism. This movement is far from unified. There are many currents within it. However, the Saudi Arabian Wahabi tendency has been dominant, thanks to the torrent of Arabian petrodollars that has been diverted to missionary work and the building of mosques and schools in many countries throughout the world.
Another strain in contemporary Islam is liberalism. Islamic liberals are recasting Islam in a form that they feel is fully modern, fully compatible with living an ordinary life in a Western-style secular state. Islamic liberals tend to have had Western-style educations, to respect Western secular learning, and to reject what they see as ossified traditions and repressive, antiquated clerical establishments. They argue that the Islamic law, or sharia, needs to be reconsidered in relation to modern times; interpretations that assume the social institutions of seventh century Arabia, or tenth century Baghdad, are inadequate and out-dated. They demand the revival of the principle of ijtihad, or independent reasoning by a qualified Islamic scholar, which has lain dormant for centuries. They form a third strain in modern Islamic thought, neither Sufi nor Salafi.
Conflicts between these three strains of thought are most pronounced in the Muslim diaspora, the old Dar-ul-harb, the portion of the world where Islam has not been historically predominant. Since World War II, there has been an ever-increasing migration of Muslims into Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia, in search of education and economic opportunity. While there is a tendency for Muslims from certain areas to congregate (Pakistanis in the UK, Turks in Germany, etc.), Muslims in diaspora are often of diverse origins and different Muslim traditions. It is a difficult task to form functioning communities, with associated mosques and schools, from such disparate materials in completely new conditions. Adding to the complexity are increasing numbers of Western converts to Islam. The largest group of these are African-Americans in the U.S., who bring their own culture to the mosque.
Is the neighborhood mosque to be Sunni or Shi'a, Sufi, Salafi, or liberal? Should Saudi Arabian money be accepted for construction and books? Should the Friday sermons (khutbah) be delivered in Turkish, Urdu, Farsi, Moroccan, English, French? If there is a school, what should it teach? How are imams and teachers to be recruited? All these questions have roiled or split Muslim communities and often led to a proliferation of mosques serving different ethnic communities and strains of belief.
These conflicts have become of great concern to non-Muslims insofar as they facilitate the spread of the religio-political ideology of Islamism. Islamists reject Western political theories, such as the socialism and nationalism that were once preeminent in the Arab world, and insist that the Muslim community, the ummah, will only regain its former power and unity if it returns to its Islamic roots. They want state to function like the Medinan community under Muhammad, obedient to a religious or clerical leader, and subject to Muslim law, or sharia. Many of them dream of a unified world Islamic state, covering the whole globe, uniting the ummah, leading humanity into the Islamic fold.
Islamism has been extremely attractive to some idealistic young Muslims.
- It is an ideology of protest against repressive, corrupt, autocratic governments in Muslim-majority countries.
- It is an ideology of protest against Western interference in the affairs of Muslim-majority countries, against colonialism.
- It is an ideology that provides an identity to some second-generation Muslims of the diaspora, who reject assimilation and assume a new Muslim identity that distinguishes them both from their Western surroundings and from their more traditionalist parents.
Islamists are a minority among Muslims, both in Muslim-majority countries and in the Muslim diaspora, but they are newsworthy out of all proportion to their numbers because of their belief in direct action -- violence -- as an acceptable means of bringing about the Islamist millennium. Shi'a Islamists overthrew the Shah of [[Iran and have attempted to export Shi'a Islamism to surrounding countries. Sunni Islamists such as al-Qaeda temporarily had their own state (the Taliban of Afghanistan) and have been responsible for numerous high-profile, high-casualty terrorist incidents such as (insert links). Sunni Islamists are usually extreme Salafis. (Some Salafis regard them as heretics, and call them Qutbis.)
For majority, non-Islamist contemporary Muslims, dealing with the threat that Islamism poses to their own safety and security is a pressing issue. Islamists seem prepared to kill other Muslims in pursuit of their goals. Islamism threatens whatever assimilation and acceptance the Muslims of the diaspora have been able to achieve. However, the Muslim communities, fractured as they are both in the Dar-ul-Islam and the Dar-ul-harb, have so far been unable to speak with one voice in condemnation of Islamism.
