FOREWORD

“THROUGHOUT the Muslim-majority world, advancing levels of education, greater ease of travel, and the rise of new communications media have contributed to the emergence of a public sphere—some call it the “street”—in which large numbers of people, and not just an educated, political, and economic elite, want a say in political and religious issues. The result has been increasing challenges to authoritarianism and fragmentation of authority.

 

Many of the emerging new voices and the leaders of such movements claim to interpret basic religious “texts, and they work in local or transnational contexts to shape religious movements intended to improve the human condition. However, like their counterparts in Poland’s solidarity movement and the liberation theology movements in Latin America, these new intellectuals and interpreters often lack theological and philosophical sophistication. Such leaders have often succeeded in capturing the imagination of large numbers of people, nonetheless.

 

Other spokespersons represent a darker side of the fragmentation of authority. Usama bin Laden and his associates in al-Qa‘ida, including the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, are no match for Thomas Hobbes, Martin Heidegger, or Muhammad Iqbal. They have, however, emerged as the leaders of a tiny but lethal minority, and their interpretations of religious texts are heard throughout the world.

 

Fascination with understanding these new interpreters has deflected attention from the role in the Muslim world of the ‘ulama, religious scholars with intensive training in religious texts and jurisprudence who have long sustained widespread respect as the guardians of the Islamic religious tradition. Such was their influence that successions of colonial regimes, including the British, French, and Dutch, vigorously sought to circumscribe their influence and curtail financial support for the institutions of religious learning in which they were trained. Autocrats throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia likewise sought to silence or co-opt them.

 

The ‘ulama, often misleadingly portrayed as guardians of tradition who play a diminishing role in modern societies and who endeavor to ignore or disqualify anything new, nonetheless play a vital, albeit changing, role in the societies in which they participate.”

 

 

Excerpt From: “The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change” by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton University Press).Foreword by Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori