Abstract
Debates concerning Islam and Muslims in the West are inscribed in several transnational spaces. As described in chapter 3, identifications and connections to countries of origin are still a significant part of Muslim religious identities. Despite the fact that transnational identifications to Islam were not discussed in our focus groups, they nevertheless influence the definition of what is true Islam not only for Muslims but also for political agencies and media in the West. These transnational trends are part of a broad space defined by multiple and contradictory religious authoritative voices.
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Notes
The Hizb ut-Tahrir party is one of the most significant contemporary pan-Islamist movements that still advocates for the restoration of the Caliphate. Founded in Jerusalem in 1953, it claims branches in the Muslim world as well as Europe and the United States. In Great Britain, the party is known under the name Muhajirrun and has been active in the public sphere, particularly before September iu. Suha Taji-Farouki, A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate (London: Grey Seal, 1996).
“Movements that were conceived as movements of ‘renewal’ were in fact more a part of the ongoing processes of Islamization of societies on the frontiers of the Islamic world. They were, in effect, part of the ‘formation’ of the Islamic societies rather than the ‘reformation’ of existing ones.” John Obert Voll, “Foundations for Renewal and Reform: Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford History of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 516–517.
John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117–118.
Abou El Fadl, The GreatTheft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 73–74.
Rachel Bronson, Thicker than Oil. America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University, 2006), 10. According to its website, the King Fahd Foundation has wholly or partially funded 30 such projects in Africa, 6 in South America, 23 in Asia, 6 in Australia and Oceania, 12 in Europe, and 22 in North America. (The website is http://www.kingfahdbinabdulaziz.com/main/m4.00.htm).
There are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very active at the grassroots level and in creating Muslim organizations to cooperate with political institutions (see Brigitte Marechal, Les Freres Musulmans en Europe: Racines et Discours (Muslim Brothers in Europe: Roots and Discourses) (Leuvenm: BRILL, 2008)). There are religious authorities related to some Muslim countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Turkey) who propagate a traditional interpretation of Islam. Finally, there is a proliferation of independent authorities: scholars (Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University and known for his reformist thinking), social activists (Hamza Yusuf, director of the Zeytuna Institute in San Francisco), and more traditional authorities (Cheikh Qaradawi, who became global with his show on Al Jazeera called Al Sharia wal Hayat (Sharia and Life)).
For a typology of the different religious leaders operating in Europe and in the United States, see J. Cesari, When Islam and Democracy Meet (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritarian and Authoritative in the Islamic Tradition (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 125.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980), 55.
“A distinction must be introduced here regarding the status of women in the Tabligh. Because married women are allowed to do missionary work, they get an intense Islamic education and can be taken away from the family circle and their conjugal duties. A dissonance is thus created between the theoretical vision of the ideal woman and the reality of women within Tabligh. In other words, one consequence of women’s participation in Tabligh is to modernize, in a certain fashion, the condition of women and to make women more autonomous—in spite of the extremely conservative discourse on the role of the Muslim woman which dominates Tabligh.” R. Collsaet, Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge in Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 102.
G. Starrett, “The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo,” American Anthropologist 97(1) (1994): 51–68
and Johanna Pink, ed., Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
V. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum International, 2005).
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© 2013 Jocelyne Cesari
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Cesari, J. (2013). Salafization of Islamic Norms and Its Influence on the Externalization of Islam. In: Why the West Fears Islam. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137121202_7
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