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Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements pdf

HANDBOOK OF ISLAMIC SECTS AND MOVEMENTS
Book Title Handbook Of Islamic Sects And Movements
Book AuthorCarole M. Cusack, Muhammad Afzal Upal
Total Pages816
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Handbook of Islamic sects and movements

HANDBOOK OF ISLAMIC SECTS AND MOVEMENTS

Introduction: handbook of Islamic sects and movements

Given the presentation of Islam in popular media, it is not surprising that most Westerners (including some scholars) view the faith as a static, monolithic religion that clings fiercely to its seventh century roots, resisting any attempt at change. This is, of course, far from the truth.

In common with other faith traditions, Islam has been a dynamic force from the start, with adaptations stemming from individual leaders, diverse ethnic populations, and the cultural contexts in which the religion took root.

Christians and Jews, among other representatives of religious traditions, commented on Muḥammad, the prophet and founder of Islam, and identified resemblances between the new monotheistic religion and their own traditions (Hoyland 2000).

 Islamic tradition implicitly recognizes its own diversity; even as some groups label others heretical and denounce the inventions of so-called ‘liar prophets’ or fitna (‘strife’) spread by leaders who have succumbed to ungodly forces, they also acknowledge the relationship between these diverse interpretations and their own creed (van Ess 2001).

In this way, Islamic literature tells the story of Musaylimah Kazzab (whose very name contains the word ‘liar’), who, along with his followers, was killed by troops sent by Abū Bakr shortly after Muḥammad’s death (Makin 2010).

The Khārijites and Muʿtazilites are also mentioned in standard Sunnī and Shīʿa narratives, being portrayed as falling so far outside of mainstream Islam that their ideologies deserve to be wiped out of Islamic thought. Yet, their existence is clearly acknowledged (Timani 2017).

Such innovation in Islamic thought is not restricted to the past. Modern reformers have continued to push the envelope, sometimes being met with comparable disdain from certain Muslim groups as the ‘false prophets of the Prophet Muḥammad’s time. These reformers include the founders of the Aḥmadiyya Muslims Jamāʿat (Chapter 27) and the Bahāʾī Faith (Chapter 33).

 According to traditional Sunnī and Shīʿa accounts, such ‘heretical’ movements have little or no value for scholars interested in understanding ‘authentic Islam.’ Should scholars of Islam researching the current state of Islam confine themselves, then, to studying only those movements which modern-day mainstream Shīʿa and Sunnī Muslims consider to be central to their faith?

Do movements that are deemed less than ‘fully’ Islamic by some Muslims tell us nothing about Islam past, present, or future? The answer for contemporary scholars is clear; Islam is not monolithic, and ideal-typical images of the tradition that focus on texts and theology are partial at best, and misleading at worst (Neitz 2011).

The study of lived religion, vernacular religion, and of the diverse Islams that are occasioned by gender, social status, ethnicity, geographical location, and other variables must of necessity enrich scholarly understanding of the Islamic tradition.

Thus, while traditional anthologies, encyclopedias, and handbooks of Islam to date have excluded the ‘heretical’ movements, related religions (except for Judaism and Christianity), and splinter groups, as well as ignoring political manifestations of the faith, this volume casts a broader net.

 The goal is to present an overview of the wide variety of religious movements that have their origins in the Islamic world so that scholars and those interested in Islamic history can grasp the full extent of the diverse thought that exists under the name of Islam.

We include Sunnī, Shīʿa and Ṣūfi groups, and examinations of movements that were born of the Islamic world but no longer consider them- selves part of the Islamic community (for example, Bahāʾī), and movements that consider themselves Islamic but are rejected as such by many Sunnī and Shīʿa Muslims (such as the Aḥmadiyya Muslim Jamāʿat).

Perhaps it is inevitable for those who are faithful to slightly differing itera- tions of a religious tradition to argue about whose beliefs are most valid. Arguably, no other religious quarrels match the longevity and intensity of the Muslim debate over what constitutes the ‘true’ faith.

Who belongs to the ‘circle of Islam’ (daira-e-Islam) and who is excluded from it? Almost every group has, at one time or another, been accused of being outside the circle of Islam. The her biographical tradition in Islam appears to date back to its early days.

 In Chapter 19, Emin Poljarevic gives historical examples of takfīr including “ibn Taymiyya’s (d. 1328) Mardin fatwā against Syria’s Mongol rulers; the Ṣafavid (Shīʿī) Akhbāriyya’s takfīr of Muslim philosophers in the 1600s; and most notably, during the 1700s, the religious movement of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s en masse ex-communication of the Sunnī Ottoman and Shīʿī religious leaders” (Poljarevic 2020).

As Najam Haider notes, Muslim heresiographers have often used a ḥadīth which in its most commonly employed variant suggests that 72 out of the 73 sects in Islam are hell-bound: “This framework exercised a decisive influence on heresiographers, who sought to document the proliferation of a predetermined number of sects and positioned their own group as the sole representative of the Prophet’s original message.

Such a view did not allow for the doctrinal evolution of any single group. A sect was a cohesive and unchanging unit that held a discrete set of doctrines and beliefs” (Haider 2014: 104).

Viewing sects as static and unchanging is clearly unscientific. Sects are groups of individuals who share a set of beliefs. What is commonly referred to as a sect’s beliefs are a subset of these beliefs. Many sects start out with an individual founder whose ideas evolve and change over time (typically from orthodox to unorthodox). As other individuals join and leave the group, their individually held ideas also change through interactions with each other (Swatos 2007). Thus, a group’s shared beliefs dynamically evolve over time. It is this belief change dynamic that makes these groups so fascinating to study. This also means that religious boundaries are more fluid than heresiographers (and even some scholars) have suggested.

 This includes boundaries between Islamic and non-Islamic movements as well as boundaries between various Islamic sects. Therefore, most of the movements that are considered non-Islamic now started out as strictly Islamic.

For instance, founders of Bahāʾī and Aḥmadiyya Jamāʿat started out holding orthodox Shīʿa and Sunnī Muslim views. Haider suggests that Zaydism may be an even more interesting case, where a sect’s beliefs have oscillated between Shīʿism and Sunnism (Haider 2014: 105). In order to understand these groups in relation to Islam, we need to understand the evolution of their shared beliefs over time.

 For those movements that originated in an Islamic milieu, this can be done by analyzing their shared beliefs in comparison with shared beliefs of Muslims in that historical era.

Given the breadth of this volume and the extent of content not conventionally included in collections such as this, questions arise as to the most effective organization of chapters. The first part of the book has seven chapters focusing on non-violent Sunnī movements.

The second part contains six chapters on Shīʿa and Shīʿa-related movements. The third part has eight chapters on fundamentalist and extremist movements that are primarily Sunnī in orientation, ranging from the mostly non-violent (for example, Hizb ut-Tahrir) to the violent (culminating in Islamic State).

The fourth part covers Ṣūfi movements and Ṣūfi-related movements. The fifth part has six chapters describing two dif- ferent types of movements: first, those that mainstream Muslims do not con- sider part of Islam, but followers of those movements consider themselves to be Muslims; and second, movements that have historical links to Islam but are separate (for example, Yezidis and Druze).

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