This study examined the context of the Medieval Islamic qadi Ibn Taymiyyah in 14th century Bahri Mamluk Syria and Egypt and his incarcerations and death in prison by order of Sultan Nasser al-Muhammad Qalawun for ijtihad. This study demonstrated Ibn Taymiyyah practiced ijtihad, held the rank of mujtahid, and incurred the wrath of the Sultan. The evidence indicates that Taymiyyah’s independent reasoning held specific social, legal, and political threats to Qalawun, the Bahri Mamluk Sultan, during his third reign. The significant role Taymiyyah’s ijtihad played in the Sultan’s imprisonment calls for a review of previous scholarship emphasizing the role of jealousy by the religious elite and affection for Taymiyyah by the Sultan as significant factors in his conflicts. / Department of History

This dissertation is primarily a story of anticolonial thought, during a time when social cohesion was being threatened by foreign encroachment. It explores political and social thought from Iraq in the period from 1909-1925, during the period of transition from Ottoman rule over the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra to the formation of the Iraqi nation-state under the British Mandate. The thinkers whose works I explore in the journals al-‘Irfan, al-‘Ilm, and al-Yaqin, many of whom situated themselves in the pan-Islamic reform tradition of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, posited Islamic unity as a bulwark against such intervention, and they believed fostering the values and practices necessary to achieve that unity was imperative. Nahda and reform, for them, was the project which sought to achieve those ends. They were influenced by the developments of the Ottoman and Iranian Constitutional Revolutions, and believed constitutionalism could save Muslims from tyranny and autocratic rule. They saw their time as one in which morals had been corrupted, a reference to faltering political systems, unjust economic distribution, and a lack of communitarian social structures and social cohesion. Their proposed response, the notion of reform in the Islamic tradition as a process of the continuous enactment of virtue, reinstituting Islamic values, or correcting harmful innovations, was one and the same as the practice of nahda as instituting what is demanded by the public interest. This notion of a public interest aimed at a quasi-socialist, Islamic welfare state in which the concept of freedom involved duties and obligations to one’s community. These thinkers were witnessing some of the failures of the modern state and critiqued attributes and actions of modern politicians. They developed different conceptions of the end goals of a polity, articulated primarily by thinking through the relationship between the individual and the community. It is those relationships that dictated the nature of moral and ethical life, manifested most clearly in the social, political, and economic realms, all of which were deeply intertwined and inextricable in their ideal form. They believed that the growing assumptions amongst their contemporaries that these fields could be siloed, i.e. that a politician could achieve the true ends of politics while disregarding moral values and practices, played a significant role in the division of the umma and decline of Islamic civilization, a weakness which left the community vulnerable to foreign threats. Such forms of political rule were also described as a suppression of the truth, so part of the project of reform involved fostering a certain degree of shared understanding around what constitutes ‘ilm, or knowledge, and truth. Each of the chapters represents one aspect of how these thinkers jointly believed the project of nahda would be enacted: unity (chapter 1), enjoining good (chapter 2), establishing truth and ‘ilm (chapter 3), and preventing stagnation through ijtihad (chapter 4).

Text in English and Arabic / In pre-colonial Africa, the Southwestern Sahara which includes Mauritania, Mali and Senegal belonged to what was then referred to as the Sudan and extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Red Sea. The advent of Islam and the Arabic language to West Africa in the 11th century heralded an intellectual marathon whose literary output still fascinates us today. At a time when Europe was emerging from the dark ages and Africa was for most Europeans a terra incognita, indigenous African scholars were composing treatises as diverse as mathematics, agriculture and the Islamic sciences. A twentieth century Mauritanian, Arabic monograph, Irshād al- Muqallidīn ʿinda ikhtilāf al-Mujtahidīn1, written circa 1910/1332, by a yet unknown Mauritanian jurist of the Mālikī School, Bāba bin al-Shaykh Sīdī al- Shinqīṭī al-Ntishā-ī (d.1920/1342), a member of the muchacclaimed Shinqīṭī fraternity of scholars, is a fine example of African literary accomplishment. This manuscript hereinafter referred to as the Irshād, is written within the legal framework of Islamic jurisprudence (usūl al-fiqh). A science that relies for the most part on the intellectual and interpretive competence of the independent jurist, or mujtahid, in the application of the methodologies employed in the extraction of legal norms from the primary sources of the sharīʿah. The subject matter of the Irshād deals with the question of juristic differences. Juristic differences invariably arise when a mujtahid exercises his academic freedom to clarify or resolve conundrums in the law and to postulate legal norms. Other independent jurists (mujtahidūn) may posit different legal norms because of the exercise of their individual interpretive skills. These differences, when they are deemed juristically irreconcilable, are called ikhtilāfāt (pl. of ikhtilāf). The author of the Irshād explores a corollary of the ikhtilāf narrative and posits the hypothesis that there ought not to be ikhtilāf in the sharīʿah. The proposed research will comprise an annotated translation of the monograph followed by a synopsis and commentary on its dominant themes. / Religious Studies and Arabic / D. Litt. et Phil. (Islamic Studies)