Political Islam in South Asia: A critical appraisal of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami

2021 ◽  
pp. 223386592110183
Author(s):  
Md Nazrul Islam
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
British India ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Islamic Movement ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
Political Success

The Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI) is the largest Islamist Party in Bangladesh. It was founded in 1941 in British-India, by Maulana Mawdudi, a prominent South Asian Islamist leader. The BJI has undergone political vicissitudes during its eight-decade-long political history. The most notable political success of the Party was to have a couple of cabinet positions as a coalition partner in the Nationalist–Islamist Government between 2001 and 2006. Since the beginning of the 2010s, the Party has been in severe crisis: most of its national leaders were convicted of war crimes and put to death in the period 2011–2016. This article aims to examine the BJI’s growth and development and role in political Islam in Bangladesh. It also explores the challenges to, and responses of, the Party and their sociopolitical implications for the future of political Islam in Bangladesh. The methodology of the article is a critical analysis based on an exhaustive review of published secondary literature about the Party. The author argues that the BJI has generated a massive Islamic movement and made an enormous contribution to political Islam in Bangladesh. Yet it has failed to reform its almost-century-old organizational structure and modus operandi and effectively respond to the changed social and political contexts of Bangladesh, which has affected its organizational mobility and success.

scholarly journals Antisemitism in the Muslim Intellectual Discourse in South Asia

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Navras J. Aafreedi
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
The World ◽  
Islamist Movements

South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) has produced some of the greatest Islamic thinkers, such as Shah Wali Allah (sometimes also spelled Waliullah; 1702–1763) who is considered one of the originators of pan-Islamism, Rahmatullah Kairanwi (1818–1892), Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), Syed Abul A’la Mawdudi (also spelled Maududi; 1903–1979), and Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi (1914–1999), who have all played a pivotal role in shaping political Islam and have all had global impact. Islamism is intertwined with Muslim antisemitism. Some of the greatest Islamist movements have their bases in South Asia, such as Tablīghi Jamā’at—the largest Sunni Muslim revivalist (daw’a) movement in the world—and Jamā’at-i-Islāmi—a prototype of political Islam in South Asia. The region is home to some of the most important institutions of Islamic theological studies: Darul Ulūm Deoband, the alleged source of ideological inspiration to the Taliban, and Nadwātu’l-’Ulamā and Firangi Mahal, whose curricula are followed by seminaries across the world attended by South Asian Muslims in their diaspora. Some of the most popular Muslim televangelists have come from South Asia, such as Israr Ahmed (1932–2010) and Zakir Naik (b. 1965). This paper gives an introductory overview of antisemitism in the Muslim intellectual discourse in South Asia.

Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kalyani Ramnath
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
South Asian ◽  
World War Two ◽  
British India ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
State Practice

This Article brings a Tamil-speaking Chettiar widow and a Dutch scholar of international law - two seemingly disparate characters - together through a footnote. Set against the background of decolonizing South and Southeast Asia in the aftermath of World War Two, it follows the judgment in a little-known suit for recovery of debt, filed at a district-level civil court in Madras in British India, which escaped the attention of local legal practitioners, but made its way into an international law treatise compiled and written in Utrecht, twenty years later. Instead of using it to trace how South Asian judiciaries interpreted international law, the Article looks at why claims to international law were made by ordinary litigants like Chettiar women in everyday cases like debt settlements, and how they became “evidence” of state practice for international law. These intertwined itineraries of law, that take place against the Japanese occupation of Burma and the Dutch East Indies and the postwar reconstruction efforts in Rangoon, Madras and Batavia, show how jurisdictional claims made by ordinary litigants form an underappreciated archive for histories of international law. In talking about the creation and circulation of legal knowledges, this Article argues that this involves thinking about and writing from footnotes, postscripts and marginalia - and the lives that are intertwined in them.

Presidential Address: Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 951-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara D. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Muslim Minority ◽  
History Of

I want to begin this evening by recalling my immediate predecessor as AAS president from the South Asian field, Barbara Stoler Miller, whose untimely death in 1992 took from us a distinguished Sanskritist, a gifted teacher, and a generous colleague whose absence we mourn. In my address I continue themes taken up by Barbara Miller four years ago (Miller 1991) as well as by Stanley Tambiah, as president from the Southeast Asian field, the year before (Tambiah 1990). Then, as now, scholars across the disciplines—whether, like Barbara Miller, a scholar of classical texts; or like Stanley Tambiah, an anthropologist; or myself, a historian of British India—have struggled to understand the religious nationalism of South Asia, one of whose most tragic outcomes has been an accelerating violence against the Muslim minority.

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