Radical Islamic Conference in London
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/wo...=1&oref=slogin

The conference was dedicated to the return of the Khilafah, or caliphate, the organization of Muslim power that held sway for centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Titled Khilafah: The Need and the Method, it was held at the Alexandra Palace, a 19th-century entertainment complex in grand gardens in northern London, and drew a largely professional audience — IT managers, bankers, teachers. For hours, speakers assailed the British government for linking the group to terrorism, and for too often treating Muslims as terrorism suspects, and drummed at the theme of the need for Muslim rule.

“There is no Islam as a way of life without a Khilafah,” said Kamal Abuzahra, an Islamic academic of Bangladeshi origin, earning a roar of approval and calls of “Allahu Akbar.”

Hizb ut-Tahrir, founded in the early 1950s by a Palestinian judge dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood, has existed in Britain for a number of years and remains legal in other Western countries, including the United States. But it is banned in a number of Muslim countries, particularly those — including Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — that feel vulnerable to its calls for the overthrow of their governments.

The group was banned by the German Interior Ministry in 2003 for “spreading hate and violence,” under a chapter in Germany’s Constitution that is often used to clamp down on anti-Semitism. Hizb ut-Tahrir is appealing the ban.

Seig Heil.

The interesting thing about these Caliphate-revival movements is that the act of calling for a Caliphate follows, in general, in the tradition of jihad ('striving', that is to say, pursuit of a true state of submission to God; work in the name of Islam): it is fundamentally saying, "things are wrong, and this perhaps is our solution."

But the Caliphate is entirely non-Quranic. It's deeply tied to the Sunni/Shi'ite split; the first Caliph was Abu Bakr, a close chum of the Prophet. The schism was that the Shi'a ('party of Ali') wanted the Prophet's (adopted, albeit) grandson, Ali ibn Abu Talib to suceed him, and felt that the Prophet had indicated as such, whereas the Sunni ('people of Muhammad', or somesuch, in that fine tradition of ambiguous but deeply loaded names) felt succession should follow the Prophet's companions.

So you get to this point of jihad, of that classic spirital questioning, of introspection and possible re-invention: 'we are astray and now what do we do to fix that?' But instead of any of the dramatic reforms that have historically realigned and rejuvinated religions (i.e. the Protestant Reformation, Zen Buddhism, etc), the introspection is relatively short-sighted, the solution is remarkably partisan, and the whole thing just continues.

So the notion is funky:

- It is fundamentally Sunni, in much the way issues within Islam tend to quickly trace back to the Sunni/Shi'a split and the theological/jurisprudent ramifications of who believed what when and what that meant then.

- The Caliphate is not a concept rooted anywhere within the Qur'an or Haditha; it came about after the Prophet died. My emphasis on this point probably betrays my inherently Shi'ite leaning, as my main professor of Islam back in the day had a fairly strong bias himself.

- At its heyday the Caliphate was a remarkably secular institution, with most of religious Islam viewing the ruler as fairly corrupt, etc; there was a very limited period of religious guidance from the Caliphate that then shifted into the gradual transition from Caliphate/Islamic government to Ottoman Turks/ehh. The Caliphate was far from perfect, so why idolize it?


It's hardly my place to say, being neither a scholar of Islam or even a Muslim (I know about enough to get the conjugation of 50-75% of my terms right, and about 25-50% of my concepts right, maybe). But if any reform is to succeed, my impression is that it need be radical and reach deep. When it came about, Islam was radical; it rose out of a deeply hedonistic, relatively anarchic/barbaric tribal sitution that was rife with infanticide, misogyny, raping, pillaging, etc; even on these points where people today say "that part of their Islam is backwards", there is room to argue that taken within its cultural context it was a radical social reform loosely in the direction of more contemporary, western society *, and that the /trend/ set by Mohammad could be continued much further. He used Eucalyptus twigs to clean his teeth; we have toothbrushes.

So I say look at the Arabian penninsula shortly before Mohammad, and shortly after; look at what changes came as a result of Islam, and see where they might lead today. Get the /vector/ of the Prophet; think not 'let's find a good era to go back to' but 'what should the Islam of tomorrow be.'


(*: the exceptiton to this is generally not a tenet of Islam so much as a holdover of the regional culture before Islam; female circumcision, honor killings, etc.)

It doesn't matter at all. If they believe that the Caliphate is Islamic, it's Islamic to them.

This is true in every major religion. The actual word is so large and subject to interpretation that there is far more power in the schools of thought that arise in the culture. We sometimes point to the Inquisition as something that Christianity generated even though today we would see it as the most un-Christian approach possible. This is the same thing.

A ton of Muslims believe that owning a dog is un-Islamic. But when I looked for what written word is telling them that.. well there are none. There are Hadiths that talk about how good it is to be generous, how the Prophet appreciates it if you go out of your way to water a dog dying of thirst. But nothing specifically against dogs at all. So along the line somebody taught that dogs are bad, and the idea spread, and now it's official Islam is certain parts.

Same goes for how women are treated by men in Muslim society. No where in the Koran does it say they should be separated or taught separately, no where. There are many of these traditions that are observed and in many cases taught as being directed by the Koran, which are not. The religion has been taken over by zealots and foisted on the ignorant.

Haven't virtually all of them?

Mixed bag of yes's and no's.....