ReOrient – Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2016

This article examines the active roles played by Muslim activists in agitating for the expansion of the functions of Sharia (Muslim legal and ethical code) within a given country’s constitution and in society at large. Using the Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) – the largest Muslim youth movement in Malaysia – as an illustrative case study, the article examines a process which I term as “demarginalizing the Sharia” by Muslim activists, which connotes an endeavour to reformulate and reassert the position of the Sharia to cover all aspects of the country’s laws. Building upon recent works on Islamic activism and drawing from various strands of social movement theory, this essay attempts to conceptualize and explain the various tactics which Muslim movements such as ABIM had adopted to make the case for the Sharia to wield a wider influence in the public domain. Among the tactics which will be discussed are institutional subversion, ideological collaboration and dramatic contention, all of which have been utilized by Muslim activists since the advent of global Islamic resurgence in the 1970s.

In the fall of 2012, Germany witnessed a heated debate on male circumcision, triggered by a four-year-old Muslim boy who had suffered complications following a circumcision conducted by a doctor in Cologne. Engaging with Charles Hirschkind’s posed question “Is there a secular body?” the article uses this controversy as a starting point to push recent critical scholarship on secularism a little further. It argues that in order to understand the powers of secular governmentality, we need to take more seriously the entanglements between modes of power operative by the secular nation-state and the embodied attachments to the secular, as articulated both in social practices and in epistemological underpinnings of knowledge production bound and enabled by modern nation-state structures. Accordingly, the article suggests that the debates on male circumcision reflect a broader discursive framework in which the ongoing division between proper and improper religious practice is part of the (re)production of a secular body politic and embodied forms of secularity. Its genealogy can be traced back to the nineteenth century and has currently gained a reconfigured currency through the Muslim question in Europe.

This article deals with the imperial dilemmas of the globalized racial Muslim identity in the 1870s and the 1880s. While Pan-Islamic public opinion across multiple European empires singled out the Ottoman Caliphate as the voice and representative of the global Muslim community, the Ottoman Caliph-Sultan was the monarch of millions of Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire. The article discusses the complex imperial politics of the Ottoman Caliphate from the perspectives of Ottoman and British governments, as well as from the perspective of Indian Muslim publics. It argues that the globalization of the ideas of Caliphate and Muslim solidarity in the late nineteenth century need to be understood in the context of the racialization of Muslims via their religion.

Today, a growing number of French Jews embrace the far-right French Front National party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism – how did we get here? How is it that Jews turn to the French authorities for protection against so-called Muslim anti-Semitic violence? How is it that we see a similar pattern across Europe: in Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain? This essay addresses these questions by calling attention to the role played by the absent-present Christian West in creating and aggravating tensions between Jews and Muslims while seemingly fulfilling the role of mediation between the two. The essay suggests that current popular images of Jews and Muslims circulating in Western media ironically echo nineteenth-century European depictions of Semites – both Jews and Muslims as devoted monotheistic fanatics controlled by zeal and despotism and in need of external salvation. The bulk of the essay thus focuses on “Semitism” and examines the role of nineteenth-century European philology in disseminating Western perceptions of Jewish and Muslim inferiority. Finally, the essay advocates a re-appropriation of Semitism as an alternative memory, or rather a re-memory which as such is also a re-membering of Jews and Muslims along their shared historical position as radical Others within the hegemonic, Western, Euro-Christian epistemological order.

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