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This chapter provides a background on the translation and commentary on the works of Alhaj Yusuf Salih Ajura or Afa Ajura, a self-professed orthodox Islamic scholar. It describes Ajuraism, which is Afa Ajura's reform-oriented educational approach. It also explains that Ajuraism is based on the concept of orthodoxy and orthopraxy according to Sunnah that rejected the status quo of traditional Dagomba practices and the syncretism and innovations of Tijaniyyah Sufism. The chapter reviews the “Munchirism” approach, which is considered “undiluted” Islamic thought and practices based on the Qur'an and the Sunnah. It details Afa Ajura's collection of handwritten poems that address multiple intellectual issues and diverse socio-religious topics.

This chapter discusses the high Persianate intellectuals in Islamic history. The ulama were not the only patricians of Bukhara, but they were the only elite cadre whose claim to authority rested on the mastery of Perso-Islamic knowledge. Indeed, the Islamic scholars stood at the apex of a historical synthesis integrating a wide range of Perso-Islamic knowledge forms into a single whole. Just as Islamic and pre-Islamic Persian forms were inexorably intertwined in the city's mythologization, so too were the disciplines and social roles of the ulama. By the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of graduates were emerging from Bukhara's madrasas and it was not enough to simply have mastered Arabic grammar and theology: scholars distinguished themselves through their “extracurricular” and “postgraduate” scholastic pursuits. Never before had scholars had so much in common across such an eclectic range of competencies, nor would they again, following the rise of reformist Islam and the Soviet transformation.

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.

This chapter offers a conceptual discussion of Islam in Turko-Persia, providing a model for thinking about the ecologies of elite culture before the nation. The invention of tradition is a well-established concept, as is the notion that many national identities are of recent provenance. Much of what one might consider timeless or “traditional” was only recently objectified as such within the last century or two. Similarly, numerous studies have established the historical contingency of “secular” culture as separable and distinct from religion. Persian poetry understood as a “cultural” foil to “religious” Arabic texts is burdened by a dichotomy that would not have been appreciated by the original authors. The chapter then explains how Turkic culture related to the Persianate, and how Persian high culture, in turn, related to Islam. Islamic scholars of Bukhara were in different ways representative of a broader constituency of literati whose members were to be also found in western China, Iran, India, and even North Africa. However, because reconceptualizations of culture and religion in the preindustrial era are still in their infancy and often scattered across disparate literatures, the chapter builds on them, combines them, and in some cases critiques or repurposes them.

The battle to define the parameters of Islamic finance and the struggle over the authoritative interpretation of Islam is not exclusively about religion. Indeed, one of the themes developed in this book is the close association of religion in other factors such as economic, historical, political, cultural and ideological. However, since political and economic struggles are fought on religious terrain and expressed in religious terms, it is necessary to isolate, if possible, all the religious issues. This chapter provides a framework for comprehending the religious challenges faced by Islamic banks. It aims to answer three questions: 1) what are the mechanisms by which financial institutions interpret religion?; 2) what are the bases of the various possible interpretations?; and 3) what interpretations are likely to prevail? The chapter begins with a discussion of the Shariah Boards and other mechanisms designed to interpret religion for banking purposes, and then considers contending views on religious interpretation, before adopting a comparative perspective designed to map the likely direction of change in religious interpretations. It ends by discussing the current debates among Islamic finance scholars.

This chapter assesses the human impact of Bukhara's efflorescence. To what extent did Bukhara's cosmological centrality manifest in actual networks of human exchange? How far did Bukhara's allure extend, and from what points of origin were people willing to travel there for education in its colossal madrasa establishment? The story of centering the cosmopolis for a regional constituency and of deploying the corresponding social currency within that context is one that could equally be told about any number of other Persianate nodes: Lahore, Isfahan, Istanbul, and beyond. Bukhara was not unique in this regard. However, this pivot between cosmopolitan high culture and social power dynamics at the subregional level remains terra incognita. Texts were resonant across vast swathes of territory, but the mechanics of the world undergirding them are left to the imagination in much of the extant scholarship. Yet these ideas were not merely floating in the ether, and the paths taken by the ulama of Bukhara can perhaps shed light on the social world producing, and produced by, cosmopolitan transculturation. Ultimately, the chapter traces the geographical trajectories of the Islamic scholars at the heart of this study, revealing a regional cultural–religious network that revolved around Bukhara the Noble, the Abode of Knowledge.

This chapter identifies who created, recreated, and maintained the Persian cosmopolis. Islamic scholars were not the only patricians of Bukhara, and they cannot be understood outside of the larger ecosystem. They shared their elite status with merchants, competed for spiritual and cultural leadership with street preachers, and were reliant on a Turkic military elite for their wellbeing. No formal barriers existed between these categories, and non-scholarly patricians frequently invested their resources to educate themselves and become ulama. Even though there were many ways to wield influence in Bukhara (as in all societies), only the scholarly elite and the Turkic nobility were explicitly valorized as such, albeit by fundamentally distinct justifications. Merchants and preachers might also be considered patricians, but they lacked a formal place in the cosmopolis and were rhetorically subordinated to the twin pillars of the patriciate: Turkic nobility and the ulama.

This chapter provides the background to the shariʻa councils and explains why Islamic divorce has become the focus of shariʻa council practices. In 1982, a collection of Islamic scholars met in Birmingham to create a new Britain-wide shariʻa council. The scholars had hoped to deal with a wide range of religious issues, from banking and mortgages to standards for halal food. However, few of these issues were brought to their doors. As one of the founding scholars, Suhaib Hasan, said later, “We intended that the council provide decisions for the Muslim community on any and all matters, but pretty soon it became clear to us that we were spending all our time giving women divorces. This was not what we set out to do, but there was a vacuum in the community and we filled it.” When a marriage has broken down, ways must be sought to allow the woman and the man to remarry.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Islamic scholars of Bukhara during the long nineteenth century. Islamic scholars were among the most influential individuals in their society, and that power rested on their mastery of diverse forms of knowledge rather than birthright. Instead of imagining those varied competencies and practices as embodied by separate professions, this book conceptualizes them as distinct practices and disciplines mastered by a single milieu. Instead of imagining stratified castes of “ulama” as against “sufis” as against “poets,” there is a unified social group of multitalented polymaths selectively performing sharia, asceticism, and poetry as circumstances dictated. These polymaths of Islam were the custodians of the only form of institutionalized high culture on offer in Central Asia. Their authoritative command over many different forms of knowledge — from medicine to law to epistolography and beyond — allowed them to accumulate substantial power and to establish enduring family dynasties. The Turkic military elite relied on these scholars to administer the state, but the ulama possessed an independent source of authority rooted in learning, which created tension between these two elite groups with profound ramifications for the region's history.

This chapter explores in considerable detail differences and similarities between the Islamic legal tradition and international law. It discusses in detail the historical interaction between these legal traditions, their co-evolution, and the academic conversations on this topic. The chapter also addresses the Islamic milieu’s contributions to international law, and sources of Islamic law including the Quran, sunna, judicial consensus, and analogical reasoning. It talks about the role of religion in international law. Mapping the specific characteristics of Islamic law and international law offers a glimpse of the contrasting and similar paradigms, spirit, and operation of law. This chapter identifies three points of convergence: law of scholars, customary law, and rule of law; as well as three points of departure: relation between law and religion, sources of law, and religious features in the courtroom (religious affiliation and gender of judges, holy oaths).

This chapter examines the everyday practices at the Islamic Shariʻa Council, London (ISC). ISC scholars do what judges do in courts throughout the world: they try to arrive at a reasonable outcome in a way that is consistent with their own procedures and with their understanding of the relevant law. However, the ISC scholars do so in a global context of Islamic jurisprudence and of transnational movement: clients come to them from dozens of countries, many of them will return to those (or other) countries, and from time to time Islamic scholars from prestigious religious faculties drop in to observe. Understandably, the scholars on this and other councils discuss whether their practices fit with those of Muslim-majority countries and with positions taken by those prestigious Islamic scholars.

This chapter addresses the anxiety of justification, which asks about the selection among competing types of argumentation and the challenge of arriving at a common judgment from diverse starting points. This challenge is exacerbated for a British shariʻa council, as it lacks a shared set of laws or jurisprudence on which to base decisions. Each scholar has his or her own repertoire of texts and traditions, practical knowledge (of Britain, Pakistan, or elsewhere), and ideas about rights and fairness. They have different educational histories and have developed individual theological allegiances to different Islamic legal schools and to different ways of interpreting scripture. They also differ in what legal scholars call judicial temperament: how to weigh multiple criteria, such as the value of precedent, the practical effects of a decision on litigants, and the intent of lawgivers. The chapter then explores the moral, theological, and epistemological debates regarding the practice of justification.

After Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Soviet officials dealing with religion assessed the moderate line toward religion that had dominated the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the hard line that had animated Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign. They determined that both had been too extreme and opted to reconcile the two lines. In the 1970s and 1980s the restriction of religion thus became more omnipresent but less potent. A notable example concerned anti-religious propaganda, which was more widespread but less virulent than in the past. In this situation, SADUM struggled unsuccessfully to restore the power it had enjoyed during the 1940s and 1950s while quietly forming ties with “unregistered” Islamic scholars who enjoyed greater breathing room under Late Socialism. An important new development during the final Soviet decades was the appearance in the Valley of illegal study circles (hujras) questioning aspects of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam practiced in Central Asia. The scholars leading these circles were rapidly labeled as Wahhabis by their detractors in the state and among the ‘ulama.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010). Abu Zayd is part of a group of contemporary intellectuals from the Arabic-speaking part of the Muslim world known as the turāthiyyūn, or “heritage thinkers.” This strand of Islamic thinking developed in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the traumatic outcome of the 1967 war between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. Abu Zayd advocated the rigorous scholarly investigation of the Quran using innovative methods and techniques of textual criticism and discourse analysis used in literary studies, which was considered anathema by Islamist activists and made him the target of persecution. Abu Zayd and his wife sought asylum abroad, and he has since been recognized internationally as a scholar who has made pioneering contributions to move the study of the Quran and of the wider Islamic intellectual legacy forward.