Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (Nation of Nations)
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Washington and Riyadh seek to re-establish a sense of deterrence by convincing Tehran that it will pay at least as high a price for its actions as it can inflict on its adversaries. The strategy seems to involve multiple forms of pressure to contain, squeeze, exhaust, and ultimately push back Iran. It has an economic dimension via U. Whether it will work is another question. Although recent protests in Iran have introduced a new and unpredictable variable, Tehran and its partners still appear to be in a strong position.
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The Bashar al-Assad regime, backed by Russian air power, is prevailing in Syria. Across Iraq, Iran-linked Shiite militias are entrenching themselves in state institutions. Despite demonstrating its resolve to confront Iran and its partners, Riyadh has been unable to alter the balance of power. The Trump administration confronts similar obstacles. With so many flashpoints , and so little diplomacy, the risk of an escalatory cycle is great: Any move — new U.
A Rohingya refugee boy desperate for aid cries as he climbs on a truck distributing aid for a local NGO near the Balukali refugee camp on Sept. That assault led to a massive refugee exodus, with at least , Rohingya fleeing for Bangladesh. Her government retains its hard-line stance toward the Rohingya and resists concessions on even immediate humanitarian issues. In this, it has the support of the population, which has embraced the Buddhist nationalist and anti-Rohingya rhetoric disseminated through state and social media. Pressure from the U. Security Council is critical, and Western governments are moving toward targeted sanctions, which are a key signal that such actions cannot go unpunished.
The focus is rightly on the right of refugees to return in a voluntary, safe and, dignified manner. All this — indeed, the very presence of a large population of stateless refugees — creates enormous dangers for Bangladesh. Conflict between refugees and a host community that is heavily outnumbered in parts of the southeast and faces rising prices and falling wages is an immediate risk.
There are risks, too, for Myanmar. It or even transnational groups exploiting the Rohingya cause or recruiting among the displaced could launch cross-border attacks, escalating both Muslim-Buddhist tension in Rakhine state and friction between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Any attack outside Rakhine would provoke broader Buddhist-Muslim tension and violence across the country. Acknowledging the crisis, implementing recommendations of the Kofi Annan-led Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, and disavowing divisive narratives would put the Myanmar government — and its people — on a better path.
Yemeni tribesmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, loyal to the Saudi-backed Saudi president, hold a position during clashes with Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies in Beihan, in the Shabwa province, on Dec. With 8 million people on the brink of famine, 1 million declared cholera cases, and over 3 million internally displaced persons, the Yemen war could escalate further in Saleh paid for it with his life; he was killed immediately by his erstwhile partners.
The Houthis will continue to take the fight to the Saudi homefront, firing missiles toward Riyadh and threatening other Gulf states. Negotiations, already a distant prospect, have become more complicated. The Houthis, feeling simultaneously emboldened and embattled, could adopt a more uncompromising stance. The south is divided, owing partly to the widening rift between forces loyal to Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and southern separatists backed by the United Arab Emirates.
There are signs of mounting U. Saudi Arabia and its allies should instead lift the blockade of Yemen and reopen civilian airports. Politically, there should be a new Security Council resolution providing for a balanced settlement. The Saudis are loath to concede anything to a group they consider an Iranian proxy, but were they to embrace a realistic peace initiative, the onus would shift to the Houthis to accept it. In this photograph taken on Dec. The War in Afghanistan looks set to intensify in For now, though, the strategy is almost exclusively military. This strategy faces serious obstacles.
The Taliban currently controls or is contesting more territory than at any time since ; it is better equipped and, even if pressured through conventional fighting, it would retain the ability to mount spectacular urban attacks that erode confidence in the government. Besides, between and , the Taliban withstood more than , U. Military leaders contend that this time will be different because Trump, unlike Obama, has not set a withdrawal date.
That argument holds little water. It also misreads the insurgency: Forthcoming Afghan elections a parliamentary poll is slated for July ; a presidential vote is due in will suck oxygen from the military campaign. Every vote since has ignited some form of crisis, and political discord today is particularly severe, with President Ashraf Ghani accused by his critics of monopolizing power in the hands of a few advisors. The strategy also underplays regional shifts. Given that they are likely to perceive such a presence as a threat to their own interests, it could lead them to increase support for insurgents.
It is true that demonstrating sustained U. As it stands, that strategy sets the stage for more violence while closing avenues for de-escalation. Afghan civilians will pay the price. Syrian soldiers walk past a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad during a government celebration marking the first anniversary of the retaking of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, near the square of Saadallah al-Jabiri on Dec.
But the fighting is not over. Large swaths of the country remain outside regime control, regional and international powers disagree on a settlement, and Syria is an arena for the rivalry between Iran and its enemies. As the Islamic State is ousted from the east, prospects for escalation elsewhere will increase.
In Syria and Iraq, Islamic State remnants have retreated into the desert to await new opportunities. The two aimed to capture territory and resources , but also to build on those gains — the regime by consolidating control; the Kurds by pressing for maximal autonomy.
Thus far, the two sides mostly have avoided confrontation. With the Islamic State gone, the risks will increase. The east is also perilous due to wider U. Iranian gains, particularly the corridor linking regime-held parts of Syria to government-controlled Iraq, could provoke the U. For four months, the siege continued. Ultimately, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem , Sophronius , an ethnic Arab, [20] agreed to surrender Jerusalem to caliph Omar in person. The caliph, then at Medina, agreed to these terms and travelled to Jerusalem to sign the capitulation in the spring of Sophronius also negotiated a pact with Omar, known as the Umariyya Covenant or Covenant of Omar , allowing for religious freedom for Christians in exchange for " jizya ", a tax to be paid by conquered non-Muslims, called " dhimmis ".
Under Muslim Rule, the Christian and Jewish population of Jerusalem in this period enjoyed the usual tolerance given to non-Muslim theists.
Having accepted the surrender, Omar then entered Jerusalem with Sophronius "and courteously discoursed with the patriarch concerning its religious antiquities". The Mosque of Omar , opposite the doors of the Anastasis, with the tall minaret, is known as the place to which he retired for his prayer. Bishop Arculf , whose account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 7th century, De Locis Sanctis , written down by the monk Adamnan, described reasonably pleasant living conditions of Christians in Palestine in the first period of Muslim rule. The caliphs of Damascus were tolerant princes who were on generally good terms with their Christian subjects.
John Damascene held important offices at their court. The Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad , as long as they ruled Syria, were also tolerant to Christians. Harun Abu-Ja-'afar , sent the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to Charlemagne, who built a hospice for Latin pilgrims near the shrine. Rival dynasties and revolutions led to the eventual disunion of the Muslim world.
Palestine once again became a battleground as the various enemies of the Fatimids attacked. At the same time, the Byzantine Greeks continued to attempt to regain their lost territories, including Jerusalem.
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Christians in Jerusalem who sided with the Byzantines were put to death for high treason by the ruling shiite Muslims. As Jerusalem grew in importance to Muslims and pilgrimages increased, tolerance for other religions declined. Christians were persecuted and churches destroyed. The sixth shia Fatimid caliph, Caliph Al-Hakim , , who was believed to be "God made manifest" by the Druze , destroyed the Holy Sepulchre in This powerful provocation helped ignite the flame of fury that led to the First Crusade.
It used to be argued that Zoroastrianism quickly collapsed in the wake of the Islamic conquest of Persia due to its intimate ties to the Sassanid state structure. Through the Muslim conquest of Persia , in the 7th century, Islam spread as far as the North Caucasus , which parts of it notably Dagestan were part of the Sasanid domains. By the 16th century, most of the people of what are nowadays Iran and Azerbaijan had adopted the Shia branch of Islam through the conversion policies of the Safavids.
Islam was readily accepted by Zoroastrians who were employed in industrial and artisan positions because, according to Zoroastrian dogma, such occupations that involved defiling fire made them impure. A number of the inhabitants of Afghanistan accepted Islam through Umayyad missionary efforts, particularly under the reign of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik and Umar ibn AbdulAziz. The population within its areas began firmly accepting Islam in significant numbers, notably in Taraz , now in modern-day Kazakhstan. The first complete translation of the Qur'an into Persian occurred during the reign of Samanids in the 9th century.
According to historians, through the zealous missionary work of Samanid rulers, as many as 30, tents of Turks came to profess Islam and later under the Ghaznavids higher than 55, under the Hanafi school of thought.
American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority
This was followed by the Ghurids and Timurids who further expanded the culture of Islam. Islamic influence first came to be felt in the Indian subcontinent during the early 7th century with the advent of Arab traders. Arab traders used to visit the Malabar region , which was a link between them and the ports of South East Asia to trade even before Islam had been established in Arabia.
In Malabar, Muslims are called Mappila.
In Bengal , Arab merchants helped found the port of Chittagong. Sufi missionaries settled in the region as early as the 8th century. This fact is corroborated, by J. The Arab merchants and traders became the carriers of the new religion and they propagated it wherever they went. Embedded within these lies the concept of Islam as a foreign imposition and Hinduism being a natural condition of the natives who resisted, resulting the failure of the project to Islamicize the Indian subcontinent and is highly embroiled with the politics of the partition and communalism in India.
Muslim missionaries played a key role in the spread of Islam in India with some missionaries even assuming roles as merchants or traders. For example, in the 9th century, the Ismailis sent missionaries across Asia in all directions under various guises, often as traders, Sufis and merchants. Ismailis were instructed to speak potential converts in their own language. Some Ismaili missionaries traveled to India and employed effort to make their religion acceptable to the Hindus.
For instance, they represented Ali as the tenth avatar of Vishnu and wrote hymns as well as a mahdi purana in their effort to win converts. According to Ibn Batuta , the Khaljis encouraged conversion to Islam by making it a custom to have the convert presented to the Sultan who would place a robe on the convert and award him with bracelets of gold. Flag of Delhi Sultanate according to the Catalan Atlas. Even before Islam was established amongst Indonesian communities, Muslim sailors and traders had often visited the shores of modern Indonesia, most of these early sailors and merchants arrived from the Abbasid Caliphate 's newly established ports of Basra and Debal , many of the earliest Muslim accounts of the region note the presence of animals such as Orang-utans , Rhinos and valuable Spice trade commodities such as Cloves , Nutmeg , Galangal and Coconut.
Islam came to the Southeast Asia , first by the way of Muslim traders along the main trade-route between Asia and the Far East , then was further spread by Sufi orders and finally consolidated by the expansion of the territories of converted rulers and their communities. When Marco Polo visited the area in he noted that the urban port state of Perlak was Muslim, [39] Chinese sources record the presence of a Muslim delegation to the emperor from the Kingdom of Samudra Pasai in , [38] other accounts provide instances of Muslim communities present in the Melayu Kingdom for the same time period while others record the presence of Muslim Chinese traders from provinces such as Fujian.
In , Sufi orders carried Islam from here on to Mindanao. As commerce grew in the region with the rest of the Muslim world, Islamic influence extended to the court even as the empires political power waned and so by the time Raja Kertawijaya converted in at the hands of Sufi Sheikh Rahmat, the Sultanate was already of a Muslim character. Another driving force for the change of the ruling class in the region was the concept among the increasing Muslim communities of the region when ruling dynasties to attempt to forge such ties of kinship by marriage.
In the mid 7th century AD, following the Muslim conquest of Persia , Islam penetrated into areas that would later become part of European Russia. The Muslim prisoner was brought [ by whom? Around the 7th and 8th centuries some states of Turkic peoples existed - like the Turkic Khazar Khaganate see Khazar-Arab Wars and the Turkic Turgesh Khaganate , which fought against the caliphate in order to stop Arabization and Islamization in Asia. From the 9th century onwards, the Turks at least individually, if not yet through adoption by their states began to convert to Islam.
Histories merely note the fact of pre- Mongol Central Asia 's Islamization.
Spread of Islam
When the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck visited the encampment of Batu Khan of the Golden Horde , who had recently in the s completed the Mongol invasion of Volga Bulgaria , he noted "I wonder what devil carried the law of Machomet there". Another contemporary institution identified as Muslim, the Qarakhanid dynasty of the Kara-Khanid Khanate , operated much further east, [44] established by Karluks who became Islamized after converting under Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan in the midth century. However, the modern-day history of the Islamization of the region - or rather a conscious affiliation with Islam - dates to the reign of the ulus of the son of Genghis Khan , Jochi , who founded the Golden Horde, [45] which operated from the s to Kazakhs , Uzbeks and some Muslim populations of the Russian Federation trace their Islamic roots to the Golden Horde [44] and while Berke Khan became the first Mongol monarch to officially adopt Islam and even to oppose his kinsman Hulagu Khan [44] in the defense of Jerusalem at the Battle of Ain Jalut , only much later did the change became pivotal when the Mongols converted en masse [46] when a century later Uzbeg Khan lived converted - reportedly at the hands of the Sufi Saint Baba Tukles.
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Some of the Mongolian tribes became Islamized. Following the brutal Mongol invasion of Central Asia under Hulagu Khan and after the Battle of Baghdad , Mongol rule extended across the breadth of almost all Muslim lands in Asia. The Mongols destroyed the caliphate and persecuted Islam , replacing it with Buddhism as the official state religion. In the s, the Mongol ruler of the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia converted to Islam, causing the eastern part of his realm called Moghulistan to rebel. In Egypt , the victorious Muslims granted religious freedom to the Christian community in Alexandria , for example, and the Alexandrians quickly recalled their exiled Monophysite patriarch to rule over them, subject only to the ultimate political authority of the conquerors.
The local Somalis adopted the Islamic faith well before the faith even took root in its place of origin. One sidebar looks at European public opinion toward the surge in refugees from countries like Iraq and Syria; another summarizes trends in government policies toward refugees and migration in individual countries and the EU as a whole. Asylum seekers whose application for asylum has been or is expected to be denied. And hardly any change is projected in any scenario in several Central and Eastern European countries, including Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. Iranian gains, particularly the corridor linking regime-held parts of Syria to government-controlled Iraq, could provoke the U.
In such a fashion the city persisted as a religious community under an Arab Muslim domination more welcome and more tolerant than that of Byzantium. Byzantine rule was ended by the Arabs, who invaded Tunisia from [51] and Morocco in in the course of their drive to expand the power of Islam.
No previous conqueror had tried to assimilate the Berbers, but the Arabs quickly converted them and enlisted their aid in further conquests. Without their help, for example, Andalusia could never have been incorporated into the Islamic state. At first only Berbers nearer the coast were involved, but by the 11th century Muslim affiliation had begun to spread far into the Sahara. A Christian community is recorded in in Qal'a in central Algeria. In addition, calendar reforms adopted in Europe at this time were disseminated amongst the indigenous Christians of Tunis, which would have not been possible had there been an absence of contact with Rome.
During the reign of Umar II , the then governor of Africa, Ismail ibn Abdullah, was said to have won the Berbers to Islam by his just administration, and other early notable missionaries include Abdallah ibn Yasin who started a movement which caused thousands of Berbers to accept Islam.
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The history of commercial and intellectual contact between the inhabitants of the Somali coast and the Arabian Peninsula may help explain the Somali people 's connection with Muhammad. The early Muslims fled to the port city of Zeila in modern-day northern Somalia to seek protection from the Quraysh at the court of the Aksumite Emperor in present-day Ethiopia.
Some of the Muslims that were granted protection are said to have then settled in several parts of the Horn region to promote the religion. The victory of the Muslims over the Quraysh in the 7th century had a significant impact on local merchants and sailors, as their trading partners in Arabia had then all adopted Islam , and the major trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea came under the sway of the Muslim Caliphs.
Through commerce, Islam spread amongst the Somali population in the coastal cities. Islam is a Foreign Country: New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. This text is under a Creative Commons license: European journal of American studies. Contents - Previous document - Next document. Index terms Top of page. Full text PDF Send by e-mail. Follow us RSS feed. European journal of American studies Briefly: