Abstracts
and Notes on Contributors
(at
time of publication)
An
Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam
Mohsen
Kadivar
Mohsen
Kadivar, a philosopher, theologian, and dissident, is Professor of
Philosophy
at Tarbiat Modares University in Iran and a Visiting Scholar of Islamic
Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He has published 12 books and over
100 papers in various Iranian journals. Despite 18 months'
imprisonment,
he continues to campaign for reform of the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
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Boundaries
and Right in Islamic Law: Introduction
Talal
Asad
Talal
Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate
Center,
has a particular interest in the Middle East and Islam. He is the
author
of Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity
and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003).
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Apostasy
as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgment
Baber
Johansen
The
jurists of classical Islamic Law defined the interior forum (batin) as
a limit to the religious validity of the sentences of Muslim judges
(and
political authorities), because these have neither access to God's
knowledge
nor to the individual believer’s conscience and motivations. They can
base
their decisions solely on exterior appearances (zahir) and can,
therefore,
neither be sure that their judgments correspond to the facts nor to the
intentions and memories of the individuals concerned. This holds
especially
true for questions of belief and unbelief. From the eighth to the
nineteenth
century, the norms of Islamic law were the result of learned debates
among
independent jurists and their schools of law. In the nineteenth and
twentieth
centuries, it was integrated into the codes enacted by the competent
institutions
of the national states and lost its normative authority in most spheres
of the modern state law. It remained dominant only in personal statute
law, i.e. the rules concerning marriage and divorce, family and
succession.
From the early seventies of the twentieth century, opposition against
the
neglect of religious norms in modern state law was centered on the
demand
for the “codification of Islamic law” (taqnin al-shari’a). Its leaders
were jurists trained in modern law faculties, who wanted to insert the
norms of classical Islamic Law into the codes of the national state
with
which they are familiar. The ethical debates of classical Islamic law,
obviously, did not lend themselves easily to such an approach.
The
jurists movement for the codification of Islamic law gained in momentum
during the eighties when, in a number of states, it succeeded in
assuring
for the classical apostasy rules a place in the modern criminal codes.
In other states, such as Egypt, the highest courts opened the way for
apostasy
trials. The analysis of one apostasy judgment of the highest Egyptian
court
shows that the court understands belief and apostasy as objective facts
that can be separated from the person who professes or denies them. It
is on this question that my lecture focuses. The court effectively
claims
the role of the highest instance in questions of belief and unbelief.
Belief
and apostasy thus become depersonalized objective facts without any
relation
to the intentions of the individuals concerned. The court’s sentence
does
not refer to the believer’s own interior forum (batin): the concept
seems
to be irrelevant to the judges. Their definition of apostasy serves to
control the ideas that can legitimately be discussed in the public
sphere.
It denies bold reinterpretations of Islam, but also a number of
political
persuasions and theories, the right of access to the public space and
assigns
them the private sphere as their legitimate abode. A new concept of
private
and public is thus developed in the detailed reasoning by which the
court
justifies its judgment.
There
is, to my understanding, nothing in the religion of Islam that renders
such a stance necessary. Other courts, in Egypt, develop other ideas of
the principles of Islamic normativity and in other Arab states go so
far
as to develop a concept of privacy that would forbid the debates
discussed
in this lecture. It seems important to underline that the use of
classical
elements in the court’s judgment does not conceal the fact that the
ethical
criteria of classical Muslim law find little place in this jurisdiction
that represents a special version of modern legal positivism.
Baber
Johansen is the Directeur detudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences
Sociales, Paris, where he teaches at the Centre d’etude des normes
juridiques.
He is co-executive editor of the journal “Islamic Law and Society”
(Brill,
1994), and area editor for “Islamic Law in the Oxford Encyclopedia of
Legal
History”. His publications focus on the history and the present of
Islamic
Law.
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Property
and the Private in a Sharia System
Brinkley
Messick
The
case of highland Yemen up to around the middle of the twentieth century
involves a history different from most Muslim societies in that, from
1919,
the Yemeni state was independent. The problem I address concerns the
utility
of thinking about the highland property regime in this era in relation
to the categories of "private" and "public." What sort of antecedents
existed,
at the level of property relations, for later commercial
transformations
that would culminate in such things as Pizza Hut franchises? In
Yemen,
the polity of the period was a type of Islamic state, one based on the
shari`a in ideology and in application and headed by a classical form
of
jurist-leader, a figure known as an imam. Prior to the twentieth
century,
this Yemeni form of a shari`a-based Islamic polity had a thousand year
history in the highlands. Shari`a courts had exclusive competence as
state
tribunals, and judges, trained on old-style law books, heard the full
gamut
of litigation. By contrast, colonial changes in other Muslim societies
typically entailed a sharp alteration and restriction of the sphere of
the shari`a, often limiting application to the domain of "family law"
alone.
At the same time, the highlands had yet to commence the other great
and,
elsewhere, ongoing modern transformation of the shari`a, codification
and
legislation, which would not begin in Yemen until after the Revolution
of 1962.Highland society at mid-century was agrarian, based primarily
on
settled plow cultivation, and the associated property regime was almost
exclusively "private." In Yemen, the "private" property
regime
centered conceptually on milk, a category of individual ownership of
immoveable
property, and on the concept of mal, a commercial commodity. As a form
of private, landed property, milk involved rights that could be
acquired,
alienated and inherited, and the associated agricultural production was
based on lease contracts between landlords and sharecroppers. Pious
endowments
were the basis for one of the great Muslim "public" institutions, which
supported mosques, schools, water systems, etc. Another fundamental
"public"
institution was an extension of the "private" commercial notion of mal
into the state institution of the 'House of Mal,' or Treasury. Other
key
"public" institutions were the imamate itself, a form of Islamic state,
and the shari`a court.
This
shari`a system can be thought of in terms of three levels of legal
texts.
At the highest level, shari`a doctrine, the jurisprudence of the
period,
constituted an ideology of the property regime. The doctrine provided
models
for both the range of substantive undertakings and for court processes,
but the relationship of these models to the property relations and to
litigation
on the ground is a key question. At the lowest level, the routine
documents
of ongoing, uncontested practice proliferated. These included ordinary
sale documents, leases, marriage contracts, endowment instruments,
wills
and estate inheritance instruments. Between high doctrine and low
instruments
were the records of shari`a court judgments, records in which the
conflicts
and contradictions of the property system were expressed, argued and
ruled
upon. In certain problem areas of the law, the ruling imams's personal
doctrinal "choices" were designed to guide court judges in their
rulings.
Brinkley
Messick is Professor of Anthropology, at Columbia University.
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Public
and Private as Viewed through the Work of the Muhtasib
Roy
Mottahedeh and Kristen Stilt
Roy
Mottahedah is Gurney Professor of Islamic History at Harvard
University.
His major work is on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of
the Islamic Middle East. His publications include Loyalty and
Leadership
in an Early Islamic Society and The Mantle of the Prophet:
Religion
and Politics in Iran. He is currently working on the medieval Middle
Eastern literature on "marvels” and is the faculty adviser of a new
journal,
The Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review.
Kristin
Stilt is a Ph.D candidate at the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies,
Harvard University.
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The
Public and Private in Saudi Arabia: Restrictions on the Powers of
Committees
for Ordering the Good and Forbidding the Evil
Frank
E. Vogel
My
paper will explore boundaries and rights, the public and the private,
as
to the enforcement of religious legal rules in societies
self-consciously
founded on Islamic law. I employ as my case-study legal and social
controversies
aroused by the Saudi Hay’at al-amr bi-al-ma`ruf wa-al-nahy `an
al-munkar,
the government agency charged with “ordering the good and forbidding
the
evil.” The paper will first lay out some of the laws fixing the powers
of the Hay’at, including various statutes (or nizams) issued by the
king
but, of equal or greater importance, the received medieval fiqh rules
governing
the muhtasib (the official who undertakes on behalf of the community
the
execution of the Qur’anic obligation of ordering the good and
forbidding
the evil). Focus shall be on an issue much debated in the classical law
and also a long-time bone of contention in Saudi society, namely the
legal
limits on the powers of the Hay’at to investigate and punish immoral
acts
occurring in private. Limits on such powers stem from two sources, both
in the law and in social understandings of that law. One source, the
more
prominent in public debate, concerns revelatory and fiqh and related
social
norms against spying or prying into people’s behavior and against undue
attempts to expose people’s sins. Notably, however, this restriction
affects
only enforcement. The pervasiveness of laws considered to arise from
the
relationship of the individual to God still stands. A solitary immoral
act performed in privacy can still be a sin and a crime, and punishable
if it is somehow legitimately known and proved (such as by a
confession).
The second source of restrictions is more far-reaching, going beyond
issues
of investigation and proof. As held by the majority of scholars, the
Hay’at
may not compel or forbid any actions for which the religious-legal
ruling
(forbidden, obligatory, etc.) is under classical law a matter of
legitimate
difference of scholarly opinion; or inversely, the Hay’at may compel or
forbid only those actions as to which there is a divine command known
to
a certainty either from a revealed text or from the consensus of
scholars.
A commonly noted abuse by the Hay’at in Saudi Arabia has been to
attempt
to enforce rules lacking requisite certainty, such as requiring veiling
of the face. Rules known to a certainty have a pervasive role in
Islamic
constitutional theory. In principle, such rules must be enforced,
regardless
of whether they concern matters other societies may consider individual
or private, such as changing one’s religion. Rules lacking that high
degree
of certainty cannot – without separate justification on grounds other
than
religious text – define sins or crimes or be enforced as general rules
by the state. Though seemingly scholastic and philosophical, this
restriction
is potentially crucial in defining a realm of individual autonomy in
religious
matters and shaping the boundary between public and private in
societies
self-consciously founded in Islamic law. It is important to examine to
what extent the restriction is reflected in legal and social practice
in
such societies.
Frank
E.Vogel is is the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Adjunct Professor
of
Islamic Legal Studies and Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program
at Harvard Law School. His writings include “Islamic Law and Legal
System:
Studies of Saudi Arabia” (Boston: Brill, 2000), and, with Samuel L.
Hayes
III, “Islamic Law and Finance: Religion, Risk and Return” (Kluwer Law
International,
1998).
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The
Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere
Juan
R.I. Cole
The
radical Islamist regime of the Taliban affords an extensive view of the
logic of Muslim fundamentalism regarding the public and private
spheres.
I argue that the Taliban de-privatized several life-spheres,
"publicizing"
religion and the body. The Taliban performed power as public spectacle,
employing public executions, amputations and whippings. Religion, too,
was to be completely public, as Habermas argues it was in Europe before
the 18th century. As soon as they took Kabul,
the
Taliban insisted that all residents had to say their five daily
prayers,
the men in mosques. Likewise, men were given
six
weeks to grow out their beards to a hand's length and to trim their
moustaches
in accordance with a literal reading of sayings about the Prophet
Muhammad's
appearance. The young female memoirist of life in Taliban Kabul,
Latifa,
reported that her middle class father complied with the new rule, but
insisted,
"My beard belongs to the Taliban, not to me!" The rendering public of
religion
made public property of every religious act. His body had a choice, of
being conformed to the movements and shaping of religion, or of being
tortured
because of lack of compliance. This publicization of the believer's
body
resulted in an alienation from individuals of parts of themselves.
Likewise,
the gendered character of the public and private spheres, with women
being
confined to the private, is as visible in Taliban thinking as it is in
Hegel. The expansion of
the public realm of religion and morality by the Taliban had the effect
of shrinking the private sphere and so constraining women further.
Girls'
schools were shuttered and many war widows were reduced to begging and
risking sanctions for being in the street without a male guardian.
Posters
of Bollywood actresses were forbidden, and Kate Winslet was condemned
to
death in absentia for portraying a fornicator in The Titanic. It is
argued
that the goal of perfectly privatizing the female body lay behind these
Draconian measures.
Juan
R.I. Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor.
His current research focuses on the history of al-Qaeda and Egyptian
groups,
as well as groups in Pakistan and the Taliban. He also has an expertise
in Shiite Islam,
the
subject of his most recent book, Sacred Space and Holy War (2002).
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The
Voluntary Adoption of Islamic Stigma Symbols
Nilüfer
Göle
The
ways in which Islam provides new definitions of self and intimacy in
public
is at the intersection of culture and politics. Especially in contexts
of secular and modern publics, the coming out of Islam from the private
to the public sphere takes place with performative acts, such as
veiling
and segregation of sexes, which underpins religious difference and
Muslim
habits but also expresses resistance to assimilative and secular
modernity.
The redesigning of the frontiers between private and public spheres and
the control of gender socialization becomes a central stake for
islamist
politics. Through these micro-practices and gendered frontiers between
private and public spheres, an Islamic social imaginary is at work
generating
new definitions of religious Islamic self in counterdistinction with
liberal
and emancipatory definitions of modern subject.
Nilüfer
Göle is Professor of Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences
Sociales, Paris. She is a leading authority on the political movement
of
today's educated, urbanized, religious Muslim women. She is the author
of The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (1996) and
the
forthcoming volume Islam and Modernity.
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The
Invasion of the Private Sphere in Iran
Mehrangiz
Kar
The
Iranian government is a theocracy—the only one in the world today. The
clergy control all three branches of government. The supreme leader or
velayat-e-faqu’ih is also a cleric. In such a political system all
legislation
and policy making are conducted in accordance with the leaders’
interpretation
of Islamic law or Shari’a. In this paper I will examine the extent to
which
these laws and policies allow the government to intrude into the
private
sphere of life and intervene in the privacy of individual citizens. I
will
use specific examples to illustrate my point that since citizens have
no
control over their government and cannot impact the interpretation of
Shari’a,
their private sphere is always threatened by government action.
Mehrangiz
Kar is an Iranian human rights lawyer, writer, and former editor of the
now-banned Zan literary review. A noted activist, she has published
widely
on women's issues in Iran, including The Quest for Identity: The
Image
of Iranian Women in Prehistory and History (co-edited with Lahiji)
and
Angel
of Justice and Patches of Hell: Women in the Iranian Labor Market
(1994).
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Ethical
Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt.
Saba
Mahmood
Saba
Mahmood received her Ph.D, Anthropology, at Stanford University, 1998,
and currently teaches in the History of Religions Program, Divinity
School
at the University of Chicago. Her work explores dynamics of religious
practice
in post-colonial societies, with a particular focus on Islam. Her work
has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American
Ethnologist,
and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book entitled “Pious
Transgressions: Embodied Disciplines of the Islamic Revival”
(Princeton
University Press, 2003).
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Media
in the Islamic World: Introduction [Click for full article]
Kian
Tajbakhsh
The three papers in this section explore the media’s role in
shaping the public and private spheres in Islamic countries. Each
paper approaches the issue from a different angle and each
focuses upon somewhat distinct national and cultural contexts or
units of analysis. Each paper raises a series of questions, some of
which are addressed and some remain unanswered. In this brief
introduction I will point to two questions in particular. The first is
the question of the tension between the form and the content of
the media in influencing the nature and the potentials of media
technology as a public sphere. To what extent are these two
dimensions marching in different directions in the Islamic world?
Here we would want to explore the extent to which the form of
the new media, particularly the Internet but also newspapers and
satellite television, are pluralistic and decentralized and thus lend
themselves to a democratic public sphere of ideas and communication,
whereas the major content or use of this space is dominated
by individuals and groups with non-democratically oriented
ideologies. The second, more general question concerns the
extent to which the terms public and private mean the same
things in Western democratic and Islamic discourse. Each of the
writers necessarily bases his or her analysis on certain assumption
about the meaning of these terms, but it is possible to argue that
Islamic discourse conceptualizes these terms somewhat differently
than the way they are used in Western academic discourse.
Kian
Tajbakhsh is Senior Research Fellow in the Milano Graduate School, New
School University, New York City and Affiliated Associate Professor,
School
of Social Sciences, Tehran University, Iran. From 1994 until 2001, he
was
Assistant Professor of Urban Policy and Politics at the New School. He
has spent the last two years (2000-2002) in Iran conducting research.
Dr.
Tajbakhsh’s two main research areas (with publications) are:
Decentralization
Reforms and the Creation of Local Government in Iran: “Political
Decentralization
and the Creation of Local Government in Iran,” Social Research, vol.
67,
no. 2 (Summer 2000), and Urban Social Theory: the role of cities and
urbanism
in shaping citizenship in cosmopolitan urban societies.The Promise of
the
City: Space, Identity and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought
(Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2000).
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Media
and Information: The Case of Iran
Geneive
Abdo
Throughout
Iran’s modern history, control of the public sphere has remained in the
hands of the state. With virtually no trace of a civil society, public
opinion has played only a minimal role in influencing state affairs.
The
1979 Islamic revolution could be viewed as a break in this historical
trend,
but public opinion retreated into the background once the clerics
solidified
their power -- and then kept it by invoking religious orthodoxy to
deflect
any challenges. Thus, it should have been no surprise that the press
revolution,
which began in the late 1990s as Mohammad Khatami came to power,
collapsed
a few years later. While an array of newspapers and journals are still
published in Iran today, the persecution of leading editors and
publishers
with pro-reform sympathies has successfully cleared the field of any
real
threat to the status quo.
The
early theorists of the reform movement that came to be identified with
President Khatami saw a free and independent press as a vital part of
an
Islamic Repub lic. For centuries, they argued, the state had used its
control
over the media -- first the publication of books, then newspapers and
finally
radio and television -- to push society toward the rulers’ desired
ends.
In contrast, the reformers saw a free press as the best way to foster
open
debate and political and social pluralism, unleashing forces that would
allow society at large to determine its own fate. In other words, there
could be no pre-determined end, shaped by fiat. Their chosen weapon in
the battle for a civil society was the newspaper, a medium with a rich
history in Iran of social and political activism. Persian newspapers,
particularly
those published abroad and smuggled into Iran in the nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries, had been responsible for remarkable changes in the
political landscape. They introduced liberal social and political ideas
from Europe and provided readers with a new, simplified language in
which
to debate such notions. Most important of all, the early press helped
create
the very idea of society as a political actor in its own right. Within
months of Khatami’s move to the Presidential Palace, his new appointees
in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance unleashed a “press
revolution.”
They quickly streamlined the issuing of publication licenses; countered
Iran’s traditional centralism by encouraging the rise of local and
provincial
newspapers; eased the financial hardships of independent publishers;
and
sought protection under the existing Press Law for controversial
editors
and commentators facing the hostility of the ruling clerics. The result
was a wave of entrepreneurial and journalistic creativity unmatched
since
the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911.
By
the spring of 2000, the hard-line clerics had had enough. They used
their
almost complete control of the public space to shut the door on the
“press
revolution” and to drive their critics, including many learned clerics,
back into private dissent. Dozens of newspapers were closed and
prominent
journalists were prosecuted, most for violating so-called Islamic
norms;
anything like public discourse was forced back into the shadows. The
ease
with which the clerical establishment crushed the free press reflected
the basic weaknesses and miscalculations of the reform movement. The
senior
theologians had established themselves as far back as the
Constitutional
Revolution as the final arbiters of freedom of expression under Islam.
Without a wholesale re-evaluation of the role of the clergy and the
very
concept of freedom in a religious system of government, this power was
destined to go unchecked. The reformers had also put too much emphasis
on a free press, in the absence of any other real building blocks of
civil
society. Newspapers were expected to play the roles of political
parties,
of independent think tanks and, in the case of Jameah and Tous, of
exemplars
of social, political and economic independence. It was a burden the
Iranian
press was simply unable to carry.
Geneive
Abdo is former Tehran correspondent for The Guardian (London) newspaper
and a past Neiman Fellow at Harvard University. She has just completed
her latest book, Answering Only to God, a study of the role of
Islam
in contemporary Iran, due to be published in the winter by Henry Holt.
She is also the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of
1slam (2000).
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New
Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere of Islam
Jon
W. Anderson
Modern
information technologies, beginning with the fax and audiocassettes but
now exemplified in satellite television and the Internet, have opened
the
public discourse of Islam to new voices and, more subtlely, to new
practices.
While media-savvy militants draw the attention of outside observers, a
quieter drama is unfolding. Pious middle classes are extending
conventional
patterns of seeking out religious guidance into new channels,
particularly
the Internet; the continuous search for role models and reference
groups
is meeting increasingly modern ways of providing those - namely, media
and increasingly media that target specific needs of growing middle
classes.
These range from religious instructional material for children to be
used
by parents (where there are no religious schools or as alternatives to
them) to religious advice columnists, both conventional (theological
opinion)
and contemporary (psychological advice) to sermons to selections of
news.
Once 'private' discourses are on public display, and this public world
of Islam is decidedly intimate. Where scholars of print note an
officialization
of discourse that moves into that medium, and programmatic 'islamizers'
of knowledge, politics, etc. generally pursue entextualization
strategies,
electronic communication is moving Islam into the marketplace and
aligning
its practices, both metaphorically in the sense that the range of
public
choice and alternatives expands and literally in the rise of businesses
to service these demands.
Jon
W. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology at the Catholic University of
America. His recent publications include New Media in the Muslim World
(2003, co-edited with Dale F. Eickelman) , Arabizing the Internet
(1998),
and "Globalizing Politics and Religion in the Muslim World" in the
Journal
of Electronic Pu
blishing (1997, http://www.press. umich.edu/jep/
archive/Anderson.html)
.
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The
New Intra-Arab Cultural Space in Form and Content: The Debates Over an
American "Letter"
Hassan
Mneimneh
The
advent of new information technologies (the Internet--email, web, chat
rooms--, satellite television, and wide distribution international
newspapers)
has created a new inter-Arab cultural space, one that is at once
unconstrained
by the ideological prescriptions associated with nationalism, and
beyond
the strict control of governments. This new space is of a diffuse
decentralized
character, reflecting the heterogeneity of the Arab reality that it
serves,
and the fragmentation of Arab culture. It does, however, also represent
the emergence of a new commonality in form, allowing for an
amplification
of the diffusion and discussion of ideas and topics, on a large-scale
participation
basis. The Arab reaction to the "What We're Fighting For" open letter,
signed and circulated by 60 leading American intellectuals is
significant
both for its demonstration of the extension and flexibility of this new
inter-Arab cultural sphere, and for revealing the need of Arab culture
for defining its intellectual outlook in its post-nationalist,
post-leftist,
Islamist-dominated phase. The purpose of this presentation is to
present
the Arab reaction and debate generated by the American open letter, as
a catalyst, as a case study illustrating the importance and potential
of
the new inter-Arab cultural space as both a gauge and a generator of
culture.
Hassan
Mneimneh is a journalist and Co-director, Iraq Documentation Project
based
in Harvard.
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