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This chapter explores the interface between the women’s rights movement and the reform movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It begins with an overview of the nature of democratic rights and institutions in Iran, the ways women have played their citizenship role, and the recent social and political trends that have strengthened democratisation and women’s rights movements. It then analyses the gender emancipatory potential and limitations of the most influential current Islamist reformist strands, and the feminist contribution to Islamic reformism. Finally, recent debates within the feminist movements are described, presenting the two categories of secularist and Islamist feminisms and the emergence of pragmatic feminism.

Qursawi’s reformism is conventionally described as rejecting Islamic tradition and ulama authority in favor of secular “enlightenment,” a view that is irretrievably flawed. Addressing this historiography, which connects Qursawi to Jadidism, this chapter argues that it is based on unfounded and anachronistic premises that skew his historical memory and obscure his contributions. Instead, Qursawi must be viewed from within Islamic tradition, and accordingly his thought is approached from the perspective of Islamic intellectual history. This chapter connects research into Qursawi with the literature on contemporary reformism in the 18th-century Islamic world, and it establishes the present study’s theoretical perspective on the Islamic scholarly tradition, viewing it as a discursive tradition operating through institutions, which are shaped by historical circumstances and therefore shape Islamic discourse in turn.

Increasing frequency and higher intensity of trans-regional contacts across the Indian Ocean in the course of the 19^th century also helped turning Islam into a tool of resistance. The account will begin with the challenge of local power structures in South Sumatra by returning Hajjis inspired by the Wahhabi capture of Mecca and Medina in the early 1800s, resulting in the Padri Wars. This foreshadowed a changing of the guards of the leadership of anti-colonial activities after the Java War of the 1830s, when aristocrats were replaced by religious figures as resistance leaders. Coincidental with the high imperialism of the industrial age, technological advances making traffic between Indonesia and the holy places easier, thus accelerating the arrival of ideas associated with Islamic reformism and modernism. The political translation of these ideas into Panislamist ideologies and the hybrid religious nationalism of ‘Islamic nationhood’ were met with fierce repression on the part of the Dutch Indies colonial authorities. The chapter ends by pointing out that in the same period we also find the roots of the separatism in Aceh which would continue into the independence era.

This chapter describes the rise of modern Islamic schooling in China and the disappearance of the traditional curriculum, partially based on Persian textbooks on the unity of being (wahdat al-wujūd). In the 1920s and 1930s, Islamic reformism became popular among city dwellers in the Chinese coastal regions. They wanted to foster bilingual (Chinese and Arabic) religious and educational leaders who accepted modern schooling, to require Chinese literacy of Muslim students and to promote nation building against foreign pressures. They judged that the traditional learning in both Arabic and Persian was both too time-consuming and ineffective in legitimizing Sino-Muslims’ presence in Chinese society. In Japan’s occupied area during the Anti-Japanese War, however, Persian learning was preserved by some non-political members of Sino-Muslim society. Persian learning is now rapidly disappearing in China, especially since the political turmoil of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.

The significant differences between the premises and goals of Jadidism and Qursawi’s reformism call into question the movement’s connection with him. This chapter explores the points of divergence between the two and, addressing the historiography that presents him as a Jadidist pioneer, shows that Qursawi has no place within the genealogy of Jadidism, and also that Shihab al-Din Marjani cannot serve as the necessary link between them. Instead, Qursawi’s thought must be understood within the contexts of postclassical Islamic thought and the religious environment in the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, separate from posthumous developments transforming that environment and leading to Jadidism as a distinct movement.

This chapter begins by analysing al-Taftāzānī's construct of ‘al-Tasawwuf al-Islāmī’. It focuses on his discursive strategies by which he tried to harmonise the mystical experiences of Sufism with modern Salafic ideals of Islamic reformism. This analysis is followed by a study of his attempts to demonstrate the harmonious relationship between Sufism and theology. This is done within the context of his lifelong goal to create a ‘religious philosophy’ that provides Muslims with an Islamically authentic Weltanschauung. Emulating al-Ghazali's Ihya 'ulūm al-dīn, it brings together all of Islam's traditional sciences. The analysis of these two parts is limited to the examination of al Taftāzānī's composition. The chapter ends with considerations on the politics of al-Taftāzānī's ‘discourse of harmony’.

The Introduction summarizes the book’s content under the following headings. Since all the Chapters have been previously published elsewhere, it also adds some complementary material to bring the book up to date on some important topics: Part One: Chapters 1 to 9: Islamic charities Summary of the Chapters Some recurrent themes Faith Based Organizations and “cultural sensitivity” Islamic Relief Worldwide The West Bank zakat committees Banking problems Towards a more complete description Pakistan Turkey Domestic Islamic charity in the United Kingdom A zakat movement? Towards a more comparative approach Part Two: Chapters 10 to 17: Islamic humanism

The introduction presents an overview of the ways that theories and representations of decadence and decay have functioned in the relationship between France and the Arab world since the nineteenth century. Bringing the ideas of Walter Benjamin to bear on the Arab nahda, Islamic reformism, and Orientalist philology, it elaborates a theory of historical awakening as mutual defamiliarization. The introduction concludes by demonstrating how the anti-Semitic Orientalism of Ernest Renan fabricated the “Orient” as an object of knowledge that carried within it the mechanisms of its own undoing.

Reflecting Comintern pressure, in the early 1930s the urban-oriented Communist movement began organising peasants and agricultural workers in the Mitidja and other rural areas against expropriation and used electoral campaigns to promote their ideas. The Mitidja case signalled the importance of alliances, both for peasants and for Communists, who were most successful when they engaged in with land, national and religious struggles that reinforced each other. But by the mid-1930s the overwhelmingly European Communist movement, predisposed to prioritise urban workers and with little desire to traverse the rough roads and mountainous terrain by bus or donkey, refocused on the towns. Nonetheless, the political triangle of city – countryside – mountain was in place.

This chapter assesses Fawwaz’s writings on marriage, divorce, and family life, 1892‒1900. In stand-alone essays and a long-running debate with a customs official, published in the journal Fursat al-awqat, Fawwaz addressed the exploitation of late versions of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) and its hadith sources, and the fiction of the Islamic basis of extreme seclusion, as patriarchal mechanisms to keep women subordinate and unhappy in marriage. It assesses the reformist views of Muhammad ‘Abduh while arguing that Fawwaz focused less on legal change and more on the prevalence of misogynistic views in the marital relationship that maintained the hegemony of patriarchal social organization. In her debate with Husayn Fawzi, Fawwaz used logic, arguments from history, and knowledge of Islamic sources to reject his understanding of gender, based on his reading of the creation story, Qur’an, and hadith, and medieval marriage manuals. This debate centred on marriage but went beyond it to explore Islamic understandings of gender difference.