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The papalist revolution of the 11th century led to greater divergence between the political thought of the West and of Islam and Byzantium. Pope Gregory VII's views on papal sovereignty provided a prototype for the modern Western state. He and his supporters desacralized kingship. Their attempt to subordinate the state to the church provoked a reaction which led to secular theories of the state. This ‘first European revolution’ coincided with the rise of city republics and economic development. Sunni Islam was consolidated through a firmer alliance between the sultans and the 'ulama. But the Mongol invasions hastened economic and cultural decline. The Shi'ite revolution in 16th-century Iran resulted in social dominance for the Shi'ite 'ulama. This laid a basis for their rise to political power in the 20th century. These changes in the relationship between religion and politics had the opposite results in the West and in Islam.

Chapter 9 explores how U.S. IRF policy might help undermine Islamist extremism and transnational terrorism. It describes the various forms of extremism, both Sunni and Shiite, and how traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions have misunderstood the threat from both. It analyzes mistakes made by American diplomacy since the 1970s, including the assumption that political Islam is synonymous with Islamist extremism. It shows how the Kemalist model of privatized Islam in Turkey has beguiled and misled U.S. policymakers. It then engages creative arguments made by U.S. analysts from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rand Corporation to show how even forward-looking analyses have missed the mark. The chapter concludes with a set of principles and strategies for U.S. policymakers as they attempt to advance American interests in the Muslim world, and in other nations where religion is playing an increasing role.

American Muslims comprise the most diverse Islamic community that has ever existed. They are immigrants and American born, with more than 30 percent of their population African Americans. Most are Sunni, though Shi̒ites have increased to about 20 percent. Some American Muslims hope to keep alive in their religious practices customs from their country of origin, while others are looking for ways to formulate an American Islam that is at home in the West. Most American Muslims are orthodox in belief and practice, although America fosters a wide range of heterodox movements that often claim to be Muslim. This chapter asks who American Muslims are, what are their major issues and concerns, and in what ways have they been involved in Christian-Muslim dialogue.

This chapter examines coverage of Iran and Iraq and shows how it has veered from underestimating the political force in Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heterodox innovations to overestimating the political ambitions of Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders. It shows how ignorance about Shi’ite and Sunni beliefs and practices, including the role of Shi’ite shrines and Sufi brotherhoods, has led to misreporting major political divisions in Iraq, and even its day-to-day politics. In the process, the chapter gives an overview of current religious dynamics in both countries. It has become a commonplace that the American administration was insufficiently aware of the religious complexities of Iran and Iraq when it led the invasion of Iraq in 2003; it is less commonly noted that press coverage has suffered from the same problem.

This chapter demonstrates how major divergences have occurred in the fatwas being issued by Sunni and Shia religious authorities regarding the permissibility of third-party reproductive assistance. In recent years, new fatwas emerging from the Shia world have condoned third-party gamete donation, whereas gamete donation continues to be banned across the Sunni Muslim countries. These divergent Sunni and Shia Islamic approaches toward gamete donation have affected the moral decision making of infertile Muslim couples in ways that are only beginning to be realized. The degree of consensus across the Sunni Muslim countries is quite striking, as are the ways in which these fatwas have guided the clinical practices of the Middle Eastern IVF community.

This chapter analyzes how the vast majority of Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, reject both sperm donation and adoption as solutions to male infertility and childlessness. In the Arab countries, sperm donation is practiced only in Lebanon, but there, too, it meets with ardent resistance on the part of most men. The chapter narrates the story of Hasan, a police officer in southern Lebanon, who believes that he cannot regard a child conceived through donor sperm as his legitimate son. Hasan's reaction is not surprising in that assisted reproductive technologies evoke strong feelings about kinship. Of all of the anthropological work that has been written about the assisted reproductive technologies, the most substantial and most foundational is that which explores the effects of these technologies on kinship and family life.

This chapter considers the changes resulting from these events as they affected Ibâḍi theory concerning types of Imam, the principle of one Imam in a misr, permitted behaviour towards occupying powers, and what is permitted in warfare against the jabâbira and ahl al–baghi (tyrants and renegades). It continues with a survey of the evolution of Ibâḍi fiqh during this period, the concern with recovering and recording past records (taqyîd) into hifz and jawâmi', culminating in works like the Musannaf and Bayân al–Shar', and with it abandonment of the old peculiarly Ibâḍi form of siyar literature. In the process, Ibâḍism opened itself to developments elsewhere in the Islamic world, notably Sunni norms: analysis of Omani, Maghribi, and Hadrami contemporary literature shows how hadîth were absorbed into the âthâr of the community but without the accompanying isnâd scholarship. The key figures of the period as well as their literature are surveyed. The chapter concludes with a preliminary discussion of the last main figure of the 5/11th century, al–'Awtabi.

The historical study of the Ibāḍiyya offers a means by which scholars can gain a fresh perspective on the course of Islamic history by side-stepping the usual Sunni and Shi‘ite accounts and assumptions. Ibāḍī imāmate theories offer a means to reassess the uniqueness of Ibāḍī sectarian identity by tracing the development of the imāmate, and locating the historical precedents for it in the broader Islamic currents out of which the Ibāḍiyya developed. In so doing, this study has attempted to correct the common scholarly misperception of the Khārijites and Ibāḍiyya as anomalous cases in Islamic history. This study has offered a model for understanding how a religious institution develops, even across geographical boundaries, into an integral aspect of religious identity.

The major objective of this chapter is to introduce the Islamic ethical discourse in the context of newly emerging field of bioethics in the Muslim world. What is critically needed in the Muslim context is to demonstrate to the religious scholars that Islamic ethics shares a common moral terrain with the secular bioethics that can provide an opportunity to dialogue with the international organizations like WHO or UNESCO to protect human dignity and to advance human physical and psychological health. Until recently, there has not been any serious attempt at defining the epistemic parameters of bioethics as it relates to Muslim culture. Commonly bioethical issues have been raised in the Muslim world without much interest in native cultural sensibilities about human wellness and illness. Universalization of medical education has led to an erroneous assumption among healthcare professionals and institutions in Muslim societies that the solutions offered to moral dilemmas in the Western secular setting applies across other cultures. However, the growing interest in specifically Islamic solutions among largely religiously sensitive population has required healthcare institutions and professionals to take people‘s moral and religious sensibilities more seriously to provide culturally sensitive solutions in medical practice and research.

This chapter discusses the efforts to create a nation out of Iraq's disparate communities. One of the most urgent and important tasks that was undertaken by the new Iraqi state was to mold disparate communities, divided by ethnicity, sect and tribe, lacking social and cultural connections, into one viable nation. This was no easy task for the King and his government. The state that the British assembled in 1921 had major fissures between Arab and Kurd, Sunni and Shi'ite. These fault lines overlapped with, and indeed were cemented by, the cultural and economic disparities that existed between the urban and rural areas. Of the rural population, much of which was abjectly poor and illiterate, 65 percent was Shi'ite and only 16 percent was Arab Sunni. These communal divisions would prove to be some of the most obstinate hurdles to social and political integration in Iraq during the first decade and a half of the country's life, and even beyond.

This book explores the concept of hospitality within the Islamic tradition, particularly Sunnī Islam. Drawing primarily on the Qur'ān and other areas of Islamic thought, it looks at signs and words of hospitality which are both actions and exhortations to establishing more generous and giving relationships. It also incorporates some literary works by those for whom eating and guest hospitality was a civilizing force. In investigating the way the Muslim intellectual tradition has spoken of hospitality as a concept and as an act, the book shares some personal reflections on Christian hospitality, highlighting both similarities and contrasts in structure and language. It concludes by arguing that hospitality includes notions of forgiveness as well as reaching out to others, and that the very basis of hospitality is compassion.

This excursus is a preliminary list of 18 Sunni and Shiʿi works dedicated to the merits of Rajab, or to those of the three sacred months (Rajab, Shaʿban and Ramadan), or to all meritorious times (Faḍāʾil al-Awqāt). It is arranged in chronological order of the date of the authors’ death, from the tenth to the fifteenth century.

Saudi Arabia has perhaps the broadest blasphemy and apostasy prohibitions. The government uses its position as custodian of Islam's two holiest shrines, Mecca and Medina, to assert that its Wahhabi interpretation of the faith is the authoritative one. Effectively, this means that Muslims of different views, whether Shias, Sufis, reformers or political dissidents, may be condemned as apostates. For example, the opening fatwa of a government educational pamphlet rebukes a European imam for his “infidelity” because he “casts doubts about the infidelity of Jews and Christians.” This is a serious charge since, according to the country's textbooks, it is permissible to kill someone for infidelity, though within the Kingdom, prison terms and flogging are more likely. Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, including Ismailis, suffer disproportionately for blasphemy offenses. Among those in the Sunni majority Sunni convicted in recent years were democracy activists, imprisoned for using “unIslamic” terminology, such as “democracy” and “human rights.” Among those given prison terms and lashes for “mocking religion” were teachers who discussed the Bible in class and made favorable comments about Jews, or who maintained that the dominance of radical Islamists over Saudi university culture had harmed the quality of programs.

This chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about ideological encounter between Islam and African Americans. The book traces the history of the proto-Islamic black-nationalist spin-off movements of the early twentieth century through the rise and preponderance of orthodox Sunni Islam by the century's end. It attempts to explain the ideological dislocations and attempted adjustments that accompanied the shift in the basis of religious authority which followed the influx of Muslims from the Middle East and Asia after the repeal of the National Origins Act and the Asiatic Barred Zone in 1965.

Just as loving parents have their children take vaccines, loving Muslim parents instill a healthy regimen of Islam for their children, hoping to safeguard their American offspring from perceived and real societal ills. This chapter investigates the various “vaccines” or burgeoning religious institutions that aim to “inoculate” young Sunni Muslim Americans with the religious background necessary to face the challenges of forming a sustainable hybrid identity. First, it looks at the various motives students may have for pursuing a religious education: whether it is for a Muslim's idea of leisure activity, the solidification of social networks, facilitating identity construction, alleviating the paucity of credible Muslim American religious scholars, or simply to know God and His will. Second, it considers models of religious education, citing specific popular institutions, their history, their organizational structure, and their target audience. It explores the physical setup of the classrooms with an eye on gender, pedagogical style, and curriculum. The chapter features models based on some of the more frequented venues cited. The institutions under consideration are generally part-time seminaries that either specifically target or attract young college-aged Muslims in the 18–24 age bracket.

This chapter focuses not on Baqir al-Sadr as scholar of fiqh and usul al-fiqh, but on Baqir al-Sadr the philosopher. Khomeini was also a philosopher, yet Khomeini's influence in this domain has not been felt. Rather, his legalistic and political ideas have survived him. The philosophical ideas of Baqir al-Sadr, on the other hand, have spread beyond the Shiʿism into Sunni communities throughout the world. Baqir al-Sadr engaged Western philosophical ideas, not to discredit them but to challenge them when he saw fit and to incorporate them into his own system when appropriate. Baqir al-Sadr's goals are ultimately religious. He wished to show that religious knowledge was not the antithesis of scientific knowledge, but that the two are actually in the same category, thereby addressing issues of paramount concern to Muslim intellectuals.

Shuiab Abdur Raheem was a Sunni Muslim who lived and worked as a night clerk at the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York. Although he was active in terms of participating in Muslim practices and he had a relatively good job, he preferred to leave his work as soon as he could because problems arose regarding his identity as an orthodox Muslim. Shuiab was well aware of how to distinguish between the Nation of Islam or the “Black Muslims” and orthodox Islam, which attempts to adopt the scriptures and the teachings attributed to the Holy Quran while also considering the life of Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah.

Naima Saif’ullah’s biography depicts the religious conversion of a modern woman. Naima’s biography describes how she was able to break bad habits of smoking crack or marijuana, how her health conditions have improved, how she was able to realize and better fulfill her roles as a daughter, mother, and sister, and how she was able to attain psychic stability through her Islamic faith. The inclusion of an account of how Islam provides women with empowerment and courage to face problems as strong-willed adults is vital to this study because not only does this address general questions regarding African-American women who have adopted Islam, but it also embodies a historical account of the independent Sunni movements that occurred during the 1980s.