Synopses & Reviews
Mohammed Charfi tackles the central question facing all Arab-Muslim nations: is Islam compatible with contemporary notions of democracy, legality and the State? A century ago, thinkers like Abdoh and Tahar Haddad called for an approach to religion compatible with modern realities, yet the twenty-first century is witnessing a sad regression in the independence of the law from holy writ. Charfi advocates a profound revision of Islamic thought. He stresses the importance of education, which from the 1970's onwards has been left in the hands of propagandists whose identity and source of authority is bound up with a particular interpretation of Islam.
Synopsis
Mohammed Charfi tackles the central question facing all Arab-Muslim nations: is Islam compatible with contemporary notions of democracy, legality and the State? A century ago, thinkers like Abdoh and Tahar Haddad called for an approach to religion compatible with modern realities, yet the twenty-first century is witnessing a sad regression in the independence of the law from holy writ. Charfi advocates a profound revision of Islamic thought. He stresses the importance of education, which from the 1970's onwards has been left in the hands of propagandists whose identity and source of authority is bound up with a particular interpretation of Islam.
Synopsis
How to make Islam compatible with contemporary notions of democracy, legality and the state?
In this brilliantly argued book, Mohamed Charfi tackles this pressing question facing all Arab-Muslim nations today. Contemporary Arab governments have yet to conceive the very idea of democracy in terms of today's criteria, and until they do so, the debate between traditionalists and democrats cannot progress. Charfi rejects the position of those who downplay Islamist violence and legitimise fundamentalist positions. But, although he is attuned to the relationship between some forms of Islamism and popular dispossession, he remains convinced that fundamentalist constructions are deeply damaging for all people, not least for women.
Charfi believes passionately that those Arabs who campaign for freedom and democracy are not deracinated supporters of Western constructs. Rather, they are treading the same precarious but necessary path as thinkers such as Mohammed Abdoh and Tahar Haddad who called for a new understanding of Islam and modernity over 100 years ago. Sadly, however, the 21st century is witnessing a regression in the independence of the law from holy writ.
Charfi advocates a profound revision of Islamic thought. He insists on a new reading of Islamic history and Islamic law and presses for a society that allows for dissent, secularism and freedom of belief. Above all, he stresses the overriding importance of educational reform - an area where he himself played a pivotal role in pioneering when minister of education in his own country, Tunisia, in the early 1990s.
This book is an important example of the courageous voices from within the Muslim world that are calling for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between religion and society quite independently of, and with a very different agenda from, the external pressures emanating from the United States.
About the Author
Mohamed Charfi is professor emeritus in law at the University of Tunis and a representative of the Tunisian democratic, secular opposition. He was president of the Tunisian League for the Defence of Human Rights, and served as Tunisia's minister of education from 1989-1994.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Hesitant modernity - Modernity not accepted - Making peace with modernity
1. Islamic Fundamentalism
Violence and Obscurantism - Conservatives and Reformers - Militant Conservatism - The Programme of the Fundamentalists - Muslims and Islamists
2. Islam and Law
Discrimination against Women - The Sharia against Freedom of Conscience - Non-Muslims - Apostasy a crime? - The political use of apostasy - Corporal Punishment - The Hodud - Comments - The Sharia and Human Rights - How Islam Came To Be Identified with a Legal System - The sunna - The Koran - The role of the ulema - A human creation - The crushing of the Mutazilites - The end of ijtihad - Talfik - Hermeneutics - The Eternal and the Specific - Freeing the Law
3. Islamd and the State
The Koran and the Caliphate - Sunna and Caliphate - The Koranic definition of the Prophet's mission - Achievement of the Prophet's mission - The Caliphate - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - The Handling of Religious Affairs -
4. Educatiion and Modernity
The Evolution of Education in Tunisia - The first reforms - Independence - The deviation - Islamism and Education in the Arab Countries - Towards a Reform of Education - Identity - Religion - Self-knowledge and knowledge of others - The scientific approach - Quantity and quality -
Conclusion
Notes