The Islamic Principles of Social Justice: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 14-30
Author(s):  
Hayat Alvi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Islamic Militancy ◽  
Early Islamic

The idea of nonviolent civil disobedience is to act against injustice and unjust laws. This has been Mahatma Gandhi’s motivation, as well as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s. For an Islamic religious authority of Maulana Azad’s stature and caliber to embrace nonviolent activism for the sake of social justice, it is a significant change in the course of action in Islam against oppression. The concepts of justice/injustice, oppression, and social justice need to be examined in historical context, beginning with early Islamic history, followed by the period of British colonial rule and the Indian struggle against it as led by Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad. This article analyzes the principles of Maulana Azad in the struggle against injustice, and how that compares to the principles and practices of Islamic militancy and jihadism. The latter are viewed as illegitimate, while Maulana Azad’s Islamic credentials render his acceptance of nonviolent civil disobedience as far more legitimate.

India-Pakistan Relationship: A Case of Perpetual Instability

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanzeela Khalil
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Personal Involvement ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Two Sides

The study aims to dispassionately analyze what the future holds for Indo-Pak relations. The two sides have maintained strained relations since their independence from the British Colonial rule in 1947. It appears unlikely that India will change its course of action owing to the US support and resultant dismissiveness towards Pakistan’s peace overtures. The current security situation between India and Pakistan is presumed to be unprecedented because of Prime Minister (PM) Modi’s history of personal involvement in actions against Muslims and Pakistan. Therefore, the improvement in bilateral relations cannot be expected until the time some major compromises are made by the leadership on both sides. The lack of convergence in how each side views its security along with a long history of mistrust, are the root causes of this strained relationship. Although the broader dynamics of the Indo-Pak relationship cannot be analyzed in isolation from the very presence of nuclear weapons in the region; however, the occurrence or non-occurrence of crisis between India and Pakistan is not primarily subject to the presence or absence of nuclear weapons. The actual causes of conflict remain the non-resolution of outstanding disputes. To this end, India lacks a demonstrable and consistent political will to resolve conflicts through a spirit of accommodation, compromise, and reconciliation.

Revisiting ModernNaẓmApproaches to the Qur'an: Iṣlāḥī’s Interpretation of Q. 107 and Q. 108 in hisTadabbur-i Qurʾān

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-74
Author(s):  
Kamran Bashir
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Internal Feature ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Polysemous Words ◽  
Early Islamic

Modern naẓm approaches to the Qur'an ask for a detailed study of the interpretive methodologies and assumptions that function behind them. In order to understand such structural approaches, the present article offers a focused study of two important suras of the Qur'an (Q. 107 and Q. 108), involving some polysemous words, in the Urdu tafsīr of Amīn Aḥsan Iṣlāḥī (d. 1997), Tadabbur-i Qur’ān. Iṣlāḥī’s theory of naẓm has gained considerable attention in the academy and is worthy of investigating from new perspectives. It is built on a holistic and unified system of connections within a sura and between suras. The paper aims to investigate the mechanism through which Iṣlāḥī identifies naẓm, and examine its relationship with specific meaning and historical context of a sura. It argues that Iṣlāḥī’s concept of naẓm, which he presents as an internal feature of the Qur'an, seems to be based on and shaped by a specific view of the life of Prophet Muḥammad. It appears that non-linguistic factors play a pivotal role in his theory of naẓm. Therefore, in order to fully comprehend his system of linkages in the Qur'anic discourses, there is a need to further investigate how he understands the biography of the Prophet and the early Islamic history in comparison to other exegetes and historians, and how he approaches the question of the authenticity of our knowledge about the details of Muhammad.

Ghaylan al-Dimashqi: The Isolation of a Heretic in Islamic Historiography

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Judd
Keyword(s):  
Moral Authority ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Sufficient Power ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Islamic Historiography ◽  
The Right ◽  
Early Islamic

The meaning and significance of accusations of heresy are difficult to ascertain, regardless of the religious setting or historical milieu in which they appear. Scholars studying medieval European religious history have described heresy as opposition to the Christian church's doctrinal authority, emphasizing that heretics were not only religious but also political dissenters. They questioned church doctrine per se, but also, perhaps more significantly, challenged the church's authority to determine doctrine. In early Islamic history, concepts of heresy and orthodoxy are somewhat more difficult to define. After the Rashidun, there was no dominant religious voice in the community. Instead, a variety of opposing parties struggled for the right to define doctrine. In such circumstances, there could be no orthodoxy, since none had sufficient moral authority or coercive power to impose their views to the exclusion of all others. Consequently, there could be no heresy either, because heretics are simply those whom the dominant religious authority deems to be outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Only after proponents of a particular set of views gained sufficient power to impose their views on others could heterodoxy become heresy.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
Native Women ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Important Position ◽  
The One

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar examines gender relations in indigenous societies of central Mexico and Oaxaca from the 1520s to the 1750s, focusing mainly on the Nahua, Ñudzahui (Mixtec), Bènizàa (Zapotec), and Ayuk (Mixe) people. This study draws on an unusually rich and diverse corpus of original sources, including Ñudzahui- (Mixtec-), Tíchazàa- (Zapotec-), and mainly Nahuatl-language and Spanish civil and criminal records, published texts, and pictorial manuscripts. The sources come from more than 100 indigenous communities of highland Mexico. The book considers women’s lives in the broadest context possible by addressing a number of interrelated topics, including: the construction of gender; concepts of the body; women’s labor; marriage rituals and marital relations; sexual attitudes; family structure; the relationship between household and community; and women’s participation in riots and other acts of civil disobedience. The study highlights subtle transformations and overwhelming continuities in indigenous social attitudes and relationships. The book argues that profound changes following the Spanish conquest, such as catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christian marriage, slowly eroded indigenous women’s status. Nevertheless, gender relations remained inherently complementary. The study shows how native women and men under colonial rule, on the one hand, pragmatically accepted, adopted, and adapted certain Spanish institutions, concepts, and practices, and, on the other, forcefully rejected other aspects of colonial impositions. Women asserted their influence and, in doing so, they managed to retain an important position within their households and communities across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Political Obligation and the Brutish in Man

1971 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellis Sandoz
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Public Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Present Essay

The present essay brings together through the technique of illustrative analysis certain reflections on political obligation which seem to be of critical importance if contemporary civil disobedience and widespread erosion of established public authority are to be understood. The attempt is here made to sketch the theoretical and historical context of the current American crisis in political obligation. This context is, however, so vast that a genuinely comprehensive analysis cannot be given within the scope of a brief essay. I have, consequently, resorted to illustration; and rather full notes have been supplied in order to indicate the range of relevant materials and to allay at least some of the misgivings that must inevitably arise from oversimplification.

scholarly journals “There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
National Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

British Raj to China's Hong Kong: The rise of madrasas for ethnic Muslim youth

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
WAI-YIP HO
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Day School ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Muslim Youth ◽  
British Colonial

AbstractThe madrasa, the Islamic institution of learning, has for centuries occupied a central role in the transmission of religious knowledge and the shaping of the identity of the global Muslim community (umma). This paper explores the sharp rise in the number of madrasas in contemporary Hong Kong. It examines, in particular, how South Asian Muslim youth, after receiving a modern education in a conventional day school, remain faithful to their religious tradition by spending their evenings at a madrasa studying and memorizing the Qur'an. Engaging with the stereotypical bias of Islamophobia and national security concerns regarding the ties of madrasas to Islamic terrorist movements over the last decade, this paper argues that the burgeoning South Asian madrasa networks have to be understood in the context of Hong Kong's tripartite Islamic traditions—South Asian Muslim, Chinese Hui Muslims, and Indonesian Muslims—and within each Muslim community's unique expression of Islamic piety. Furthermore, the paper also identifies factors contributing to the increase in madrasas in Hong Kong after the transition from British colonial rule to China's resumption of sovereign power in 1997.

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