Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Irfan Ahmad
If Jews opposed Muhammad, they did so not because he negated the teaching of Moses but because he confirmed the truth of Christianity as well. Likewise, if Christians opposed Muhammad they did so because he also endorsed the teaching of Moses.
Very questionable.
he presented problems facing minorities in Europe (and the United States and United Kingdom) and the failure of democracy to satisfactorily address them. Citing works in English, he showed how majoritarian democracies with a unitary, hegemonic notion of nation dominated minorities and gradually eliminated their distinctiveness.
Arguably, Maududi was one of the first to plead for the introduction of the people’s right to recall an elected representative. “To make democracy effective, the method of referendum should be adopted and voters should also have the right,” Maududi
want to mention another key element of Maududi’s reading of Islam. For him, Islam was not a religion as generally understood in the modern West as well as by those considered traditionalists and modernists among Muslims themselves. He saw it as a civilization and a system of life—logical, harmonious, and practical.
In Maududi’s reading, to the people of Palestine, ʿIsāʿ ʿlaihissalām (Christ) gave the invitation of ḥukumat-e-ilāhiya. The seven-page appendix gives numerous citations from the New Testament to drive home this specific point. To this end, Maududi cited several passages, which I list in the same order as in the original (by Maududi): Mark (32–28:12), Luke (8:4), Matthew (10:9:6), Matthew (39–34:11, 24:16, 22–21, 10, 18–16:10), Luke (33–26, 14), Matthew (41–39: 15, 28:110, 19–20: 6, 24–33: 6, 7:7, 28–30:11), Luke (25–26:22), Matthew (28:23, 15–21, 22), and Luke (23:1–23). By citing these
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Here my aim is not only to show that individuals critique Maududi and his thought but equally to demonstrate how the work of critique is undertaken. How ideas, sentiments, mental conditions, types of knowledge, forms of authority, language capacity, motivations, the (un)sayable, notions about private and public, facial expression, hairstyle, conceptions of home, intellectual suppositions, political power, readings of past and future, tears, joy, and much else inform and are played out in the enterprise of critique.
An understanding of critique that fails to take into account this whole array of factors will be superficial at best.
To Maududi, while their meanings were correctly understood at the time of the Qurʾān’s revelation and in the generation after Prophet Muhammad, in subsequent centuries the real meanings of those terms got lost.
Power is a gift (ʿt̤yā) from Allah, Khan observed, not the mission of Muslims
Clearly, women held coveted, high positions of power in different parts of the world in the precolonial era. For example, in the eighth century Khayzuran governed the Muslim polity under the reign of Abbasid caliphs. During the eleventh century, Malika Asma Bint Shihab al-Sulayhiyya and Malika Arwa Bint Ahmad al-Sulayhiyya occupied the throne in Yemen. Two centuries later, in the thirteenth century, Razia Sultana ruled in India. In the fourteenth century, three women (Sultana Khadija, Sultana Miriam, and Sultana Fatima) ruled over the Maldives. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
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Maududi used Islam to at once contest and shape, if not institute, tradition.
Mohammad Akram Nadwi.
(Muqaddimah)
Ḳhudāī Ḳhidmatgār movement revolve around its founder, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988),
“Religion is also like a movement.”
To join the Ḳhudāī Ḳhidmatgār, one was required to take an oath: “I am Ḳhudāī Ḳhidmatgār. Since God needs no ḳhidmat, therefore, to serve God’s creation is to serve the oneness of God. I will thus serve God’s creation selflessly and for the sake of God alone.”
Structurally, the organization resembled an army, and its members had titles similar to army officers. But they carried no weapons, only the weapon of service and peace
Women also joined. Their participation mattered to Ghaffar Khan. In August 1928, before the formation of the Ḳhudāī Ḳhidmatgār, 2,000 women had already participated in a public meeting. Flouting local customs, Ghaffar Khan sent his daughter to study at Allahabad University, the “Oxford of India.” In one account, she was the first woman from the Frontier to receive a university education. Ghaffar Khan also did not favor the prevalent practice of veiling (pardāh). Women in his own household broke away from many traditional customs; his sister actively participated in the movement.
“God’s creatures” included nonhumans and people of all faiths.
Interreligious brotherhood and the promotion of “Hindu-Muslim unity” were indeed crucial, and Ghaffar Khan stressed them in nearly all his speeches.
“I will not resort to violence, nor will I take revenge against anyone. No matter who inflicts oppression and excesses [z̤ulm v zeyādtī] on me, I will forgive him”
By 1931, however, 25,000 new members had joined, and the movement had more sympathizers. In 1938, the membership had shot up to over 100,000. At their peak, the Ḳhudāī Ḳhidmatgār had over 1 million members
Soroush suggests, “religion is sacred and heavenly, but the understanding of religion is human and earthly.”
Judaism is not a religion at all. . . . [It] stands in absolutely no essential connection to . . . ecclesiastical faith [Christianity]”
Islam (Almond 2009, 49). Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta’s Reading Kant’s Geography (2011)
(Saadi 1949, 632):
Mahmood Mamdani (2012) thoughtfully put it in his book Define and Rule.
Ganeri 2003; Sen 2005; Jaiswal 2000; Matilal 1989; Sangari 1990; and Heesterman 1985.
Pollock 2005; and Thapar 1975.
Thomassen 2010.
Qasim Zaman’s (2012)
Ghaffar Khan’s view converged with Maududi’s and others (Ahmad 2009b, chap. 2).
Abaza, Mona. 2007. The Dialectics of Enlightenment, Barbarism and Islam.
Abu-Lughod, Lila.
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind.
Ashenden, Samantha, and David Owen, eds. 1999. Foucault Contra Habermas. London: Sage.
Barnett, S. J. 2003. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity.
Bayes, John H., and Nayereh Tohidi, eds. 2001. Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Societies. New York: Palgrave.
Bernal, Martin.
Brague, Rémi. 2002. Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization.
Caputo, John. 2013. Truth: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin.
David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, 12–30. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Acts of Religion.
Dillon, Michael. 1996. Politics of Security:
Eze, Emmanuel. 2002. “What Remains of Enlightenment?” Human Studies 25 (3): 281–88.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 1999. “Ambedkar, Buddhism, and the Concept of Religion.” In Untouchables: Dalits in Modern India, edited by S. M. Michael, 57–71. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.
Godlove, Terry. 2014. Kant and the Meaning of Religion: The Critical Philosophy and Modern Religious Thought. New York: IB Tauris.
Gorski, Philip, David. K. Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. 2012. The Post-secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society.
Hallaq, Wael. 1984. “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1): 3–41.
Honneth, Alex. 2009. Pathology of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory.
