The Islamic State

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Louay M. Safi

IntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to delineate the basic elements involvedin the concept of the Islamic state and to clarify the basis and scope of politicalpower. More specifically, discussions will focus on the purpose of the Islamicstate, the source of political legitimacy, and the scope of state power. I willcontend that a clear distinction should be made between the role and purposeof the state and those of the ummah, for only through the separation of theresponsibilities and objectives of the two can the injunctions of the Shari‘ahand the principles of revelation be properly observed.Historical BackgroundAlthough the word “state” (dawlah) was first used in the Qur’an, almostsix centuries had to elapse before the word was given its first technical definitionby Muslim scholars. The word dawlah was mentioned once in the Qur’an(in 59:7) in connection with the distribution of the fay’ (the property Muslimsappropriated from the Banu al Nadr upon the latter‘s expulsion from Madinah).The Qur’an justified this departure from the usual practice of dividing thespoils among the fighters by referring to the divine intention of preventingthe circulation of wealth among a small group within the society?Up until the late fifth century, one could hardly find any reference tothe state in Muslim literature, or in Western literature for that matter. Otherterms such as al amsar or dar al Islam were employed whenever a referencewas made to the territories under Muslim control. Alternatively, the stateas a political body was identified by its political organs, i.e., al khilafah, ...

Author(s):  
Milad Dokhanchi

Problematizing Asef Bayat’s notion of “post-Islamism,” this article proposes an alternative definition for the concept, having in mind the case of Iran. The current conception of the term “post-Islamism” may be challenged via a survey of post-revolutionary Islamist movements that resisted the state and as well as Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s concession to the concept maslahat (expediency), through which state expressed preference for modern reason over sharia law. The case of Islamists contesting state power questions the monolithic image of Islamism drawn by Bayat as movements longing to create a state based on the doctrine of velāyat-e faqih. Also Khomeini’s concession to maslahat indicates that the Islamic state must be seen as one of the participants in “post”-Islamist secularizing trends in Iran. Hence, Bayat’s post-Islamism was more of an inevitable political phenomenon adopted by the state itself than a conscious project adopted by Muslim secularist intellectual figures seeking to put an end to Islamism. Unlike Bayat’s post-Islamism, which celebrates the end or a “break” from an Islamist paradigm, this article then invites readers to expose Islamism to post-modern critique, the result of which would not be a negation but rather a revival of Islamism that takes into account the contingencies of the post-modern condition. Similar to post-Marxism and post-anarchism, post-Islamism maintains the ethos of the traditional canon, Islamism in this case, while rejecting its authoritarian and universalist tendencies. A post-Islamist politics has yet to emerge, yet its introductory philosophical foundations have been already developed in the 1990s by figures such as Abdolkarism Soroush and Morteza Avini. Soroush’s post-Islamism, however, ultimately landed in a modernist liberal episteme, hence remained Islamist, while Avini, despite his support for the state, offered a much more radical critique of Islamism while remaining faithful to its ethos.


2020 ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
James Pickett

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.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-295
Author(s):  
Muridan Muridan

M. Natsir was one of the most prominent figures in religious discourse and movement in Indonesia. He was ada’wa reformer as well as a politician and a statesman.His most well known ideas were about the relationship between Islamand state, Islam and Pancasila, and his idea on da’wa. He stated that a country would be Islamic because of neither itsformal name as an Islamic state nor its Islamic state principles. The principles of the state could be generally formulated aslong as they referred to the Islamic values. Natsir also stated that the essence of Pancasila didn’t contradict with Islam; evensome parts of it went after the goals of Islam. However, it didn’t mean that Pancasila was identical with Islam. In relation toda’wa, he stated that it should be the responsibility of all Muslims, not only the responsibility of kiai or ulama. To make a da’wamovement successful, he suggested that it needed three integrated components; masjid, Islamic boarding school, andcampus.


1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Muridan Muridan

M. Natsir was one of the most prominent figures in religious discourse and movement in Indonesia. He was ada’wa reformer as well as a politician and a statesman. His most well known ideas were about the relationship between Islamand state, Islam and Pancasila, and his idea on da’wa. He stated that a country would be Islamic because of neither itsformal name as an Islamic state nor its Islamic state principles. The principles of the state could be generally formulated aslong as they referred to the Islamic values. Natsir also stated that the essence of Pancasila didn’t contradict with Islam; evensome parts of it went after the goals of Islam. However, it didn’t mean that Pancasila was identical with Islam. In relation toda’wa, he stated that it should be the responsibility of all Muslims, not only the responsibility of kyai or ulama. To make ada’wamovement successful, he suggested that it needed three integrated components; masjid, Islamic boarding school, andcampus.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quraysha Bibi Ismail Sooliman

This paper considers the effect of violence on the emotions of IS fighters and the resultant consequences of those emotions as a factor in their choice to use violence. By interrogating the human aspect of the fighters, I am focusing not on religion but on human agency as a factor in the violence. In this regard, this paper is about reorienting the question about the violence of IS not as “religious” violence but as a response to how these fighters perceive what is happening to them and their homeland. It is about politicising the political, about the violence of the state and its coalition of killing as opposed to a consistent effort to frame the violence into an explanation of “extremist religious ideology.” This shift in analysis is significant because of the increasing harm that is caused by the rise in Islamophobia where all Muslims are considered “radical” and are dehumanised. This is by no means a new project; rather it reflects the ongoing project of distortion of and animosity toward Islam, the suspension of ethics and the naturalisation of war. It is about an advocacy for war by hegemonic powers and (puppet regimes) states against racialised groups in the name of defending liberal values. Furthermore, the myth of religious violence has served to advance the goals of power which have been used in domestic and foreign policy to marginalise and dehumanise Muslims and to portray the violence of the secular state as a justified intervention in order to protect Western civilisation and the secular subject.


Author(s):  
Оlena Fedorіvna Caracasidi

The article deals with the fundamental, inherent in most of the countries of the world transformation of state power, its formation, functioning and division between the main branches as a result of the decentralization of such power, its subsidiarity. Attention is drawn to the specifics of state power, its func- tional features in the conditions of sovereignty of the states, their interconnec- tion. It is emphasized that the nature of the state power is connected with the nature of the political system of the state, with the form of government and many other aspects of a fundamental nature.It is analyzed that in the middle of national states the questions of legitima- cy, sovereignty of transparency of state power, its formation are acutely raised. Concerning the practical functioning of state power, a deeper study now needs a problem of separation of powers and the distribution of power. The use of this principle, which ensures the real subsidiarity of the authorities, the formation of more effective, responsible democratic relations between state power and civil society, is the first priority of the transformation of state power in the conditions of modern transformations of countries and societies. It is substantiated that the research of these problems will open up much wider opportunities for the provi- sion of state power not as a center authority, but also as a leading political structure but as a power of the people and the community. In the context of global democratization processes, such processes are crucial for a more humanistic and civilized arrangement of human life. It is noted that local self-government, as a specific form of public power, is also characterized by an expressive feature of a special subject of power (territorial community) as a set of large numbers of people; joint communal property; tax system, etc.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
V.A. Morozov

The article analyzes the state of public health on the example of domestic and foreign statistics, as well as prospects for its development and improvement. The state of relations and forms of interaction of budgetary medical institutions (state, municipal) with private clinics, as well as directly private clinics with the structures of municipal and state power are considered. The directions and ways of interaction of power and business structures for improvement of methods and forms of service of patients on the basis of indicators of values and innovations are offered.


Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.


BMJ Leader ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. leader-2020-000380
Author(s):  
Onyinyechi F Eke ◽  
Alister Martin ◽  
Hazar Khidir ◽  
Onyeka Otugo ◽  
Andrew Marshall ◽  
...  

In response to an imminent surge in COVID-19 cases, the state of Massachusetts (MA) released its Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) guidelines in April 2020. A small group of Boston healthcare providers, community members, lawyers, ethicists and disability advocates brought to bear our collective strengths to forge a formidable coalition now known as the Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity, to champion the rights of marginalised groups that would be adversely affected by the implementation of the original MA CSC guidelines. In this coalition, members of marginalised communities were adequately represented, led discussions on the implications of implementing inequitable elements of the CSC guidelines and actively involved in creating an alternative framework. In this article, we discuss the process of building a coalition whose concerted advocacy efforts led to the revision of the MA CSC guidelines.


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