Abstract
The study of the relationship between Islam and violence has been largely dominated by two epistemological approaches. The first is the essentialist, and predominantly Orientalist, approach, which seeks to explain acts of violence by Muslims with reference to an underlying set of features, beliefs and practices that embody the real essence of the Islamic tradition. According to this view, there is a direct and internal relationship between Islam and contemporary Muslim practices of violence. Contrary to this, the second anti-essentialist approach is critical of the Orientalists’ reductionist epistemology and its inability to account for the complex heterogeneity of Islamic interpretations and lived experience. For anti-essentialists, Islam becomes an irrelevant category in the explanation of Muslim violence. Hence, they seek an explanation for this phenomenon not in the classic texts and medieval history of Muslims, but by reference to external factors, such as material contexts and socio-economic conditions. Nonetheless, this leaves entirely unaddressed the Muslim identity of the actors, and whether it is plausible to disregard the relevance of Islam to the explanation of the phenomenon and identity of the actors under discussion (i.e. violence by Muslims).
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In addition to Talal Asad, similar arguments have been made by others such as Timothy Fitzgerald (1997), Daniel Dubuisson (2003) and Tomoku Masuzawa (2005). For instance, Fitzgerald has argued, as an analytical category, religion is ‘a clumsy concept,’ ‘fraught with confusions’ and does not pick out any distinctive cross-cultural, trans-historical aspect. Following his examination of the construction of ‘world religions’ in the contexts of India and Japan, Fitzgerald concludes that the category of religion should be abandoned because it is ‘meaningless’ and ‘analytically redundant’ (Fitzgerald 1997, 93; 2000, 153).
- 2.
Huntington (1996) argues that after the Cold War, the dominant form of conflict at the global stage will be neither ideological nor economic, but cultural. Nation states will be replaced by broader civilisational blocks. Thus, there are two central ideas to Huntington’s thesis. First, ideology has been replaced by civilisation as the dominant force of politics and mobilisation; and second, Islam is a major force in this new civilisational conflict (Huntington 1996, 258; Mamdani 2004, 21).
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Generally speaking, such arguments contain recurring reference to what are known as the ‘ideologues of radical or political political’ Islam, such as Hassan al-Banna, Abul Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb (as well as Muhammad Abd as-Salam Farag) (Sivan 1990; Berman 2004; Wiktorowicz 2006). Some also point out that Islamist extremism and violence is associated with a particular branch in Sunni Islam arising in Saudi Arabia, first promoted by the Najdi reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). For good or ill, ibn Abd al-Wahhab, like Qutb, was inspired by the thought of ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence (Wiktorowicz 2006; see also Abou El Fadl 2005). The militant political thought of Qutb in particular as well as the strictly literalist reformism of ibn Abd al-Wahhab are regarded as the wellsprings of modern-day jihadist movements and violence in much of this literature.
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Sulaiman, M. (2019). Orientalism and Anti-Orientalism: Epistemological Approaches to Islam and Violence. In: Mansouri, F., Keskin, Z. (eds) Contesting the Theological Foundations of Islamism and Violent Extremism. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02719-3_5
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