Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-329).

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. John L. Iskander, committee chair; Richard C. Martin, Louis A. Ruprecht, committee members. Electronic text (75 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-75).

This dissertation is a study of the early 20th-century Pan-Islamist reform movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, tracing its origins and trans-imperial development with a focus on the years 1901-1914. Its central figure is the theologian and print entrepreneur Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević (1870-1938), who returned to his Austro-Hungarian-occupied home province from extended studies in the Ottoman lands at the start of this period with an ambitious agenda of communal reform. Čaušević’s project centered on tying his native land and its Muslim inhabitants to the wider “Islamic World”—a novel geo-cultural construct he portrayed as a viable model for communal modernization. Over the subsequent decade, he and his followers founded a printing press, standardized the writing of Bosnian in a modified Arabic script, organized the country’s Ulema, and linked these initiatives together in a string of successful Arabic-script, Ulema-led, and theologically modernist print publications. By 1914, Čaušević’s supporters even brought him to a position of institutional power as Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Reis-ul-Ulema (A: raʾīs al-ʿulamāʾ), the country’s highest Islamic religious authority and a figure of regional influence between two empires. Methodologically, the project functions on two primary levels. The first is a close reading of the reform movement’s multilingual and multi-scriptural periodical press and publishing scene, situating this fin-de-siècle Muslim print culture in its late imperial and trans-regional context. The second is a prosopographical approach to the polyglot generation of writers and theologians who stood behind it, emphasizing networks of collaboration, education, and kinship that tied them both to the wider world and previous generations of Bosnian scholars. The dissertation ultimately argues that Čaušević and his movement emerged from and represented a locally grounded tradition of Muslim cosmopolitan reform, which insisted on religious instruction in the Bosnian vernacular not at the expense of the classical languages of higher Islamic learning or the Ottoman (and later Habsburg) imperial order, but rather as a foundation that would enable Muslims to pursue the former and buttress the latter as well. In making this case, the project contributes to the wider historiography on empires and nationalism in Eastern and Southeast Europe, reconsidering the role of multilingualism in imperial demise and moving beyond the prevailing top-down focus on Muslims and other ethno-religious minorities as beleaguered subjects of nationalizing states. At the same time, it serves as a Bosnian case study for outstanding concerns in global Islamic intellectual history, arguing that the late and post-Ottoman Balkans played an active and underappreciated role in the formation of transnational Pan-Islamist thought during the late imperial period.

Modern Chinese Muslims’ increasing connections with the Islamic world conditioned and were conditioned by their elites’ integrationist politics in China. Chinese Muslims (the “Hui”) faced a predicament during the Qing and Ottoman empire-to-nation transitions, seeking both increased contact with Muslims outside China and greater physical and sociopolitical security within the new Chinese nation-state. On the one hand, new communication and transport technologies allowed them unprecedented opportunities for transnational dialogue after centuries of real and perceived isolation. On the other, the Qing’s violent suppression of Muslim uprisings in the late nineteenth century loomed over them, as did the inescapable Han-centrism of Chinese nationalism, the ongoing intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Han, and the general territorial instability of China’s Republican era (1911-49). As a result, Islamic modernism—a set of positions emphasizing both reason and orthodoxy, and arguing that true or original Islam is compatible with science, education, democracy, women’s rights, and other “modern” norms—took on new meanings in the context of Chinese nation-making. In an emerging dynamic, ethos, and discourse of “transnationalist integrationism,” leading Chinese Muslims transformed Islamic modernism, a supposedly foreign body of thought meant to promote unity and renewal, into a reservoir of concepts and arguments to explain and justify the place of Islam and Muslims in China, and in so doing made it an integral component of Chinese state- and nation-building. “Islamic Modernism in China” argues that Chinese Muslims’ transregional engagement with Islamic modernism did not subvert but enabled the Chinese government’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims, and ultimately facilitated the nationalization of Muslim identity in modern China. From Qing collapse through the Second World War, urban coastal Chinese Muslim religious and political elites imported, read, debated, disseminated, and translated classic Islamic texts and modern Muslim print media, while establishing their own modernist schools and publications. Yet those same figures, through those same practices and institutions, increasingly wielded an image of Islamic authority and authenticity in support of the nationalist Guomindang government’s efforts to develop, integrate, and Sinicize China’s frontiers, including the predominantly Sufi Muslim communities of the Northwest. In the 1930s and early 1940s, integrationist Chinese Muslim elites further mobilized modernist narratives of Islam’s rationality, peacefulness, and past and present “contributions” to China. For example, they responded to Islamophobic misperceptions about halal by arguing that Islamic medicine was an important part of Chinese medicine. They also dispatched nationalistic goodwill delegations to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China’s own frontiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), to pursue cultural cooperation and spread anti-Japanese propaganda. At the same time, in contrast to this instrumentalized Islam, certain Chinese Muslim scholars studying in Cairo instead articulated an expansive, democratized version of the Islamic concept of independent human reason (ijtihad) as the basis for a more inclusive vision of both Chinese nationalism and the global Islamic community (umma). The opportunity to pursue this or any other alternative to mere integrationism soon evaporated, however, as the renewed Chinese Civil War (1945-49) split the Chinese Muslim elites across the Mainland, Taiwan, and a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Thereafter, the Chinese Muslim elites largely became marginalized from high politics in the era of Cold-War and decolonization. Many of their once-contingent narratives of history and identity, however, have nevertheless been normalized as the canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day, quietly informing China’s minority policies, foreign relations, and rhetoric of the “New Silk Road.” “Islamic Modernism in China” is a history of the subsumption of modern forms of mobility by modern structures of power. It narrates an assertion of difference in the context of multiple, partially overlapping integrations: the integration of a Han-centric idea of the Chinese nation-state, of an Arabo-centric idea of the Islamic world, and of a Eurocentric system of global infrastructures, institutions, networks, and knowledge. It de-parochializes the modern history of Chinese Muslims, showing how they epitomized aspirations and challenges common to Muslim minorities across many large non-Muslim societies and, to an extent, to modern Muslims everywhere. Using a wide range of new or under-studied archival and published sources in Chinese and Arabic, it connects questions of the meaning and scope of Islam, Islamic community, and Islamic modernism (scholarship on which tends to prioritize the Arab Middle East and relations with the West) to questions of religion and state in modern China (scholarship on which tends to prioritize popular spirituality and the official Confucian system, as well as relations with the West). As such, it presents Sino-Islamic transregional interactions beyond the lens of Western influence, yet also uncovers new trajectories by which Western concepts (“religion,” the “nation-state,” the “Islamic world”) became universalized. Overall, it moves beyond a circulation-based understanding of global encounters, and instead maps the contingent ways in which forms of mobility became pressed into the service of hegemonic processes of state- and nation-building: how flows of people and ideas created borders rather than simply crossing them.

This thesis, based on 14 months of fieldwork, examines middle-class Lahore, a milieu that is not only anxious about the growing religious violence in the country but also feels disappointed by the state and its false promises of progress. The ethnography explores how such tensions shape ideas on personal and public piety which, in turn, influence conceptions of modernity and a ‘successful life’. I examine the growing presence of a form of religiosity that emphasises the personal study of the Quran and other Islamic texts. The rising popularity of Quran schools and study circles, talks by television-based Islamic scholars, and discussions in homes are indicative of a sensibility which encourages individuals to discover the ‘real’ and ‘rational’ Islam by understanding the Quran for themselves. Although this religiosity centres around the individual and the cultivation of personal ethics, it also has a significant public aspect. Many believe that acquired Islamic ethics will not only help attain success in this life and the hereafter but also solve societal problems such as corruption, nepotism and economic disorder. Although such ideas have developed alongside a belief that the state is incompetent, they nevertheless reproduce many state-produced discourses on religion, morality and modernity. At a broader level, my thesis is concerned with how middle-class Pakistan perceives itself and its position in the world. I argue that prevailing ideas on Islam have been shaped by increased communication with the South Asian diaspora abroad and have developed in response to two struggles. First, the emerging middle-class uses this religiosity to contest the moral and economic domination of the established old-money elite. Second, anxieties about the gaze of an abstracted outsider – usually the West on the Muslim world – shape middle-class representations of self.

Cette thèse explore la question du réformisme musulman dans un contexte colonial. Afin d’en embrasser toutes lesdimensions, culturelles, sociales et politiques, elle envisage le phénomène transnational du réformisme à une échellelocale, à partir de la région du Mzab, dans le Sud algérien, en se fondant sur des écrits en langue arabe des oulémasibadites et des sources coloniales en langue française.Entre les années 1920 et 1960, des oulémas ibadites du Mzab s’approprient le mot d’ordre de la réforme (iṣlāḥ) pour donner un sens aux profonds changements que connaît la région depuis les années 1880 et son passage sous souveraineté française. Par ce slogan de la réforme, ceux qui se nomment « réformistes » s’emparent du magistère religieux et le transforment. Ils redéfinissent l’« orthodoxie » ibadite et redessinent les contours de leur communauté.Envisager l’Algérie à partir de l’une de ses sociétés sahariennes offre aussi une alternative au cadre d’analyse colonial. Cette thèse montre que les espaces de référence et de circulation des acteurs se construisent entre plusieurs échelles qui vont du local, la vallée du Mzab, à l’ensemble du monde majoritairement arabophone et musulman.Cette histoire ne provient pas que de l’interaction avec le fait colonial. Elle résulte également de l’autonomie historique des acteurs algériens. / This thesis explores the issue of Islamic reformism in a colonial context. In order to grasp every dimension of this issue, on a cultural, social and political level, this research considers the transnational phenomenon of reformism at a local scale, from the Mzab region in Southern Algeria, through sources written in Arabic by Ibadi scholars (‘ulāma) and in French by the colonising powers.From the 1920s to the 1960s, Ibadi scholars in the Mzab took over the slogan of Reform (Iṣlāḥ) to make sense of the profound changes affecting the area since the 1880s and its passage under French sovereignty. Through this slogan of reform, those who call themselves “reformists” seize the religious authority and transform it. They redefine Ibadi "orthodoxy" and redraw the boundaries of their community. Studying Algeria through one of its Saharan societies also offers an alternative to the analytical frame of colonial studies. This thesis shows that the people/historical actors circulate and think in different scales, ranging from local, the Mzab valley, to the entire Arabic-speaking and Muslim world. This history doesnot come merely from the interaction with colonialism. It also results from the historical autonomy of the Algerian agents.

The Arab Middle East began indigenous nation building relatively late in the twentieth century. Issues of legitimacy, identity, and conflicts with the West have plagued Arab nations. Arab states have espoused universal ideologies as solutions to the problems of Arab nation building. The two ideologies of Pan-Arabism and Islamic modernism provided universal solutions to the Arab states. Both Pan-Arabism and Islamic modernism gained validity in political polemics aimed against colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, and the West. Both ideologies promised simple solutions to complex questions of building modern Arab society. Irrespective of ideology, Arab states have always acted in self-interest to perceived external threats. The West has perpetuated universal solutions to Arab nation building through continued intervention in the Middle East. The Arabs perpetuated universal solutions to Arab- nation building as panacea to the problems of becoming modern nations.

Cette thèse retrace l’histoire de l’Association des Oulémas Musulmans Algériens (AOMA), de sa fondation en contexte colonial (1931) à sa réactivation dans l’Algérie des années 1990. Par sa définition de l’identité arabe et musulmane de l’Algérie, l’AOMA a joué un rôle fondamental dans la construction de l’État algérien, malgré la disparition de sa structure formelle entre 1962 et 1991. Les activités éducatives et religieuses de l’Association, son positionnement dans la guerre d’indépendance ont conditionné l’insertion de ses membres dans l’Algérie postcoloniale. L’étude des parcours des membres dirigeants de l’AOMA donne à voir les adaptations et les stratégies d’appropriation de l’héritage de l’Association. Si certains cadres de l’AOMA participèrent au gouvernement du parti unique FLN et construisirent les bases de l’islam d’État, d’autres furent des figures de la contestation du pouvoir socialiste au nom de l’islam, qui fut reprise par les mouvements islamistes naissants des années 1980.Fondée sur des sources en langues arabe et française, qui vont des archives étatiques de la période coloniale aux mémoires d’acteurs de l’AOMA, des journaux de l’Association aux revues du Ministère des Affaires Religieuses en passant par des entretiens, et sur un important travail de terrain, cette thèse se propose de questionner les clichés courants sur l’Algérie contemporaine liés à l’héritage de l’AOMA. À travers la définition de la nation et de l’islam par les Oulémas, ce sont les enjeux culturels, l’arabisation, la définition de l’islam et de sa place dans l’Algérie postcoloniale sont étudiés dans un souci constant de les resituer par rapport à l’histoire du monde arabe et musulman. / This dissertation recounts the history of the Association of the Algerian Muslim Ulama (AAMU), from its birth in a colonial context (1931) until its reactivation in the 1990’s. By its definition of the Arab and Muslim identity of Algeria, the AAMU played a crucial role in the construction of the Algerian state, despite the disappearing of its formal structure as an organization between 1962 and 1991. The educative and religious activities of the Association, its position during the War for Independence, conditioned the integration of its members in postcolonial Algeria. The study of the AAMU executive members’ paths in the aftermath of the Independence shows the adaptations and strategies to claim for the legacy of the Association. If some of the executive members of the Association got involved in the FLN-ruled state and built the cornerstone of State Islam, some others became prominent figures of the opposition to the socialist state in the name of Islam, that the growing Islamist movement took over in the 1980’s. Based on various primary sources, both in Arabic and French languages, from archives of the colonial state to memoirs of AAMU members, from the Association’s newspapers to the journal of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, including oral sources, this dissertation offers to question the widespread clichés on contemporary Algeria linked to the AAMU. Through the Ulama’s definition of the nation and Islam, it is the history of postcolonial Algeria that is at stake. We study cultural issues, arabization, definition of Islam and its place in the society in a constant concern of contextualising through the frame of the wider Arab and Muslim world.

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This thesis is a translation of a chapter that examines the role of Muslim women in politics during the early Islamic period and their engagement with religious and political discourses. This subject raises a combination of provocative challenges for Islamic discourse as Muslim women have had a complex relationship with their religious tradition dating back to the very inception of Islam. Despite Qur’ānic injunctions and Prophetic affirmations of the egalitarian status of Muslim women, social inequality and injustice directed at women remains a persistent problem in Muslim society. In the translated text Abū Shaqqah goes about re-invoking the normative tradition in order to affirm the role of Muslim women in politics. Furthermore the translation is prefaced by a critical introduction outlining the contours of the 20th century landscape, which attempts to describe the struggle of Muslim women in Abū Shaqqah’s time. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)