Puritan Islam

In this unique analysis of Muslim population shifts in the Western world, geographer Barry A. Vann provides fresh insights into the theological factors that play into these demographic trends. Vann examines the “imagined geographies” of Muslims with a puritan orientation. People with this mind-set are little inclined to accept a pluralistic, multicultural, live-and-let-live concept of society. And conflicts between conflicting value systems are almost inevitable. Vann notes that this purist approach to Islam is certainly not universal among Muslims, and there are many varying interpretations that are more moderate in outlook. Nonetheless, the undeniable theological background of all Muslim communities colors their values and attitudes, and must be taken into consideration when attempting to understand the potential conflicts between contiguous Muslim and non-Muslim groups. Given the fact that the population of Muslim immigrants is growing in traditionally Christian and increasingly secular countries of the Western world while the resident populations are either stagnant or declining, Vann’s insightful analysis of the ways in which Islam influences perceptions of community and geography is of great relevance.

Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents: Aḥmad al-Āqḥiṣarī and the Qaḍīzādelis considers the emergence of a new activist Sufism in the Muslim world from the sixteenth century onwards, which emphasized personal responsibility for putting God's guidance into practice. Mustapha Sheikh focuses specifically on developments at the centre of the Ottoman Empire, but also considers both how they might have been influenced by the wider connections and engagements of learned and holy men and how their influence might have been spread from the Ottoman Empire to South Asia in particular. The immediate focus is on the Qāḍīzādeli movement which flourished in Istanbul from the 1620s to the 1680s and which inveighed against corrupt scholars and heterodox Sufis. Up to now this movement has been seen as proto-Wahhābī, proto-fundamentalist or otherwise retrograde. By studying the relationship between Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Āqḥiṣārī's magisterial Majālis al-abrār and Qāḍīzādeli beliefs, Sheikh places both author and the movement in an Ottoman, Ḥanafī, and Sufi milieu. Moreover, the study suggests that the impact of the Majālis al-abrār on the Qāḍīzādelis had the outcome in the second half of the seventeenth century of increasing the violence of their activists, a development which ultimately led to their downfall.

This book is a valuable contribution to the study of messianism and millenarianism in the history of Muslim Spain and pre-Modern Morocco presented in a broader framework of research on Muslim eschatological beliefs and Islamic ideas on legitimate power.

It elucidates how the concept of puritan Islam becomes a powerful source for the Islamic organisations to preach, propagate and network the gospel of Islamic terrorism and how and why the moderate voices from the Islamic communities have failed to respond to these challenges.

In The Wahhabis seen through European Eyes (1772-1830) Giovanni Bonacina offers an account of the early reactions in Europe to the rise of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia. Commonly pictured nowadays as a form of Muslim fundamentalism, the Wahhabis appeared to many European witnesses as the creators of a deistic revolution with serious political consequences for the Ottoman ancien regime. They were seen either in the light of contemporary events in France, or as Islamic theological reformers in the mould of Calvin, opposing an established church and devotional traditions. These audacious but fascinating attempts to interpret the unknown by way of the better known are illustrated in Bonacina’s book.

This book offers a comparative and cross-cultural history of Islamic reform and European colonialism as both dependent and independent factors in shaping the multiple ways of becoming modern in Indonesia and Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century.