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Law professionals and politicians in Egypt looked skeptically upon the Europeanization of Egyptian law as early as the 1870s. But it was only in the 1920s and after that Egypt saw more common opposition to European law. The reasons for the gradualness in the rise of Islamic legal revivalism were many. From 1882 into the 1920s, a foreign occupation monitored the publishing market and classroom education. Egyptian law professionals were accustomed to a decades-old process of European legal incursion into Egyptian laws. The Egyptian political elite maintained an outwardly ambivalent posture in the face of the marginalization of Islamic law. Prominent intellectuals did not consider the marginalization of Sharia among the most pressing problems facing Egypt during the first forty years of colonization. A locus for heightened expression of Islamic legal revivalism was the Sharia College, a school founded in 1907 to prepare students to work in Egypt’s Sharia Courts.

This Chapter focuses on the idea of positive vs. negative space in ideology and religion. It discusses Islamic revivalism and Wahhabism in detail in the context of statehood. discuss the fragility of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran- the Islamic Republic. It considers the religious and cultural differences within the region noting in particular Shi’ite and Sunni peculiarities. It also covers the views and ideologies of al-Qaeda and Daesh. It covers in great detail Islamic governance and thereby dispels the false claims and doctrines of post-modernist al-Qaeda and neo-medievalist Daesh which seeks absolute control of religion, population and, imperial territory. The Chapter looks at counter efforts, namely, Islamic Centrism, by using historical evidence to demonstrate the characteristics of pan Islamic governance as a positive space in The Hijaz.

The history of Egyptian legal thought provides keys to appreciating the origins and content of present-day Islamic legal thought worldwide, and this book has attempted to facilitate the positing of connections between past and present. To find connections, one can look to contemporary practices that would have appeared novel or foreign to an Egyptian jurist in 1875. Many attitudes of today were either hard to conceive or inconceivable then. This concluding chapter summarizes novel practices in Islamic legal thought from present-day Egypt that can also be, in many cases, observed worldwide. The concluding chapter discusses the decline of Franco-Egyptian methodologies and their function within the wider spectrum of Islamic legal revivalist thought. Finally, this concluding chapter evaluates at a high level the dilemmas and priorities of Islamic legal revivalism in the present day.

The introduction places this book in the fields of social history, Southeast Asian Islamic scholarly traditions, Islamic revivalism, and the history of Patani and the contested Malay-Thai border zone. It outlines the theoretical and historiographical underpinnings of the work. Chapter one also notes the contemporary relevance of the work on a region

This chapter explores modes of projecting Islam into public visibility through alternative formulations of mediated masculinity. For many years, the Muslim conceptualization of gender roles followed a traditional pattern that assigned men and women to separate spaces of public versus private. Arguably, the discourse embraced by Muslim televangelists challenges the binarism of more traditionalist views on masculinity and femininity and reinscribes gender roles within the larger project of religious and social revivalism. Indeed, in recent years, Middle Eastern satellite television has prominently featured a new generation of media personalities who, in the face of an authority crisis in Islam and a climate of semantic disorder, are creating public deliberative spaces to revalorize their religion and redirect individual energies in the service of an Islamic revivalism that is concerned less with the militancy of political Islam than with the Islamicization of modernity.

The 1930s witnessed a flourishing of writings by Egyptian lawyers, judges, and jurists who advocated the revival of Islamic law and promoted Islamic law as an alternative to European law. The leading forum for advocating the revival of Islamic law was the journal al-Muaamah al-sharʿiyyah (The Sharia Lawyers). The Egyptian Sharia Bar Association published the journal’s first issue in 1929. Most contributors were law professionals and scholars affiliated with the Sharia Courts. The editors and contributors advocated for expanding the jurisdiction of Islamic law beyond family law and returning the jurisdiction of Sharia to the civil, criminal, and constitutional spheres of Egyptian law. They developed principles, methods, and strategies for pursuing Islamic legal reform. The contributors also published academic research to advance the cause of Islamic legal revival.

The religious and intellectual landscape of the Volga-Ural region changed significantly over the course of the 19th century. This chapter addresses those changes, focusing on three main historical phenomena: the adoption of European approaches and subjects in Islamic education and pedagogy, the introduction of Arabic-script printing and periodical publishing, and the fragmentation of Islamic religious authority. These phenomena all contributed to a new religious and intellectual landscape that arises following the 1905 Revolution, which is marked by debates over the ulama’s stature as foremost religious interpreters and non-ulama elites speaking for Islam and for Muslims alongside scholars. Characterized by conflicts over the continued validity of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the role of ulama, the discourse of this period included new debates and movements, including Jadidism, which emerges out of the broad changes taking place.

It is one thing to forge a new vision of a religious tradition. It is another to win authority for it. Al-Ghazali understood this and crafted his Revival of the Religious Sciences not only to expound his Science of the Hereafter, but to win a following for it. The Revival of the book’s title was the primary strategy al-Ghazali employed to this end, claiming that his agenda was to not to promote a vision of the Islamic religious tradition of his own devising, but rather to restore that tradition to its pristine origins. He bolstered his revivalist rhetoric with several other authorizing strategies.

This chapter explains the parameters of study and the criteria used for selecting the works of feminist Qur’anic interpretation that are its focus, as well as the reasons for referring to them as works of feminist tafsir. The author briefly summarizes the historical backdrop for the emergence of the works (including the rise of Islamic revivalism beginning in the late 1970s and women’s rights movements in response), distinguishing between first-generation and second-generation scholars of the field. She goes on to provide short biographical profiles of the six scholars whose works are studied in depth: Riffat Hassan, Azizah al-Hibri, Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, Sa’diyya Shaikh, and Kecia Ali. The chapter also introduces the three major interpretive methods that link the works together (historical contextualization, intratextual reading, and the tawhidic paradigm) and provides an outline of the book’s organization.

This chapter constitutes a survey of the activist strand within al-Āqḥiṣārī’s writing, particularly the demand he placed on the Muslim faithful to actively engage in enjoining good and forbidding evil. There is also an assessment of the broader implications of the research findings, including a discussion on al-Āqḥiṣārī’s influence beyond the Ottoman lands.