Transcript CAIR PowerPoint Template

Overview of 10 part course
on
Understanding Political Islam
Goals of the Course
This course will explore the historical
development of statecraft in Muslim
societies and how text, interpretation
and real-politick have influenced the
course of that development. We will
review a brief history of the Islamic
State first before delving into the
birth and development of Islamic Law.
The decline of the practice of Islamic
Law will be explored next; this will be
followed by studying the rise of
political Islam as a consequence.
Finally, current experiments with
constitutional reform will be
investigated in www.cair.com
their Sunni and Shi’a Slide 2
Components of the Course
ISLAM 701 A Brief History of the
Islamic State
ISLAM 702 The Birth of Islamic Law
ISLAM 703 The Decline of Islamic Law
ISLAM 704 The Rise of Islamism
ISLAM 705 Sunni vs Shia experience with
Constitutional Reform
Slide 3
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ISLAM 701 A Brief History of
the Islamic State
Is the Islamic State Dead
What is the Islamic State
When did the Islamic State Fail
The Rise of the Islamic State
Slide 4
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ISLAM 702 The Birth of
Islamic Law
Governance bodies in the traditional
Islamic State
How did the Jurist Class arise
The Birth of the Islamic Legal System
The Scholars and the Caliphs
The Scholars vs. the Caliphs
Slide 5
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ISLAM 703 The Decline of Islamic Law
Decline of Islamic Law is tied to the decline
of the Ottoman Empire
Loss of Greece and the defeat of the Ottoman
Navy by British, French and Russian ships at
the Battle of Navarino in 1827 and the loss of
Algeria to French invasion in 1830
Abdelmajid I took power in 1839; elites had
become convinced that the empire needed
internal reform
Ottoman elites, some educated in the West,
correlated the emerging Western successes in
part to the effective and improved internal
administration
Western bureaucracy with its sharply defined
and hierarchical responsibilities and precise
record keeping had become an envied component
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of Western governance
Slide 6
ISLAM 704 The Rise of Islamism
The Classical Islamic State declined and the
Scholars who were the balancing component
never put up an appropriate resistance
The Executive branch became all powerful in the
post-Ottoman Islamic State
The unified Ottoman Empire broke up into 22
separate countries with varying structures
political structures
The call to restore the Islamic State has been
led in the Sunni world by Islamic sociopolitical organizations. In the Shia world, it
has been led by scholars
Western scholarship and now increasingly Muslim
scholarship has called this phenomenon Islamism
or Political Islam
Slide 7
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ISLAM 705 Sunni vs Shia experience
with Constitutional reform
Sunni Islamism calls for the Shariah and its
justice to be dominant without conferring
authority over the law on the scholars who were
its traditional keepers.
Who are then the keepers of law?
Sunni Islamists literature has not been able to
answer the question about where the authority
rests to interpret God’s law. This was the
domain of the scholars
In addition, popular sovereignty has resulted
in Islamists coming to power and hence they
have gradually adopted democracy as a platform
of reform and as a tool to gain power
But the question of the authority of
interpretation still needs articulation
Slide 8
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