We don’t yet fully understand the motivation behind the terrible attack at Nice, but it seems that the perpetrator, as well as being mentally ill, was inspired by Islamic fundamentalism. We don’t yet know the background to the attempted coup in Turkey, but it seems that sections of the military are concerned about a shift by the government to a more Islamic society.<\/p>\n
Against this background, this week I started a short course at the City Literary Institute in London with the title “Global Political Islam”<\/em>. Our lecturer is Dr Nomaan Hanif whose family comes from the Indian part of Kashmir although he was born and brought up in the UK.<\/p>\n It was immediately apparent that this is going to be a difficult course, not least because of the problem of language.<\/p>\n Dr Hanif told us that the term “global political Islam” is a western construct based on secular notions of separation of church and state. In fact, there is no such thing as non-political Islam because there is no distinction between politics and religion in traditional Islam. The lecturer admitted that he used the course title as a kind of marketing tool. Then, having said that really there is no such thing as global political Islam, be argued that “it is the fastest growing phenomenon in the world”.<\/p>\n This problem of language is everywhere in a discussion of Islam. Indeed the very word ‘state’ means different things in English and Arabic and no country would claim to be an Islamic state. That term is reserved in Islamic thought for the caliphate that existed in the first 30 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. This is why the name ISIS is so evocative and powerful.<\/p>\n Dr Hanif explained that the Arabic language is fundamental to Islam. It was the language of Mohammed, the Koran and the Hadith (the collected sayings of the Prophet). \u00a0The problem is that the Arabic of the Koran and the Hadith are different. The Koran is said to be the purest form of Arabic and, in meaning, style and grammar, so perfect that it can never be imitated.<\/p>\n Furthermore there is a difference between Sharia Arabic and linguistic Arabic. So a term like ‘jihad’ means a military conquest in the former but simply a personal struggle in the latter. The term ‘peace’ means peace under the submission of Islam in the former and the more western notion of non-violence in the latter. This is one of the reasons why there is a debate about whether Islam is or is not a religion of peace.<\/p>\n This is going to be a tough course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We don’t yet fully understand the motivation behind the terrible attack at Nice, but it seems that the perpetrator, as well as being mentally ill, was inspired by Islamic fundamentalism. We don’t yet know the background to the attempted coup in Turkey, but it seems that sections of the military are concerned about a shift […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20064"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20071,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064\/revisions\/20071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}