The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an economic doctrine that calls itself "Islamic economics." Of all economists of the Muslim faith, only a small minority, known as "Islamic economists," identify with some variant of this new doctrine. Yet the doctrine is socially significant, if only because it advances the sprawling and headline-grabbing movement known as "political Islam," "Islamic fundamentalism," or simply "Islamism."
The declared purpose of Islamic economics is to identify and establish an economic order that conforms to Islamic scripture and traditions.(1) Its core positions took shape in the 1940s, and three decades later efforts to implement them were under way in dozens of countries.(2) In Pakistan, Malaysia, and elsewhere, governments are now running centralized Islamic redistribution systems known as zakat. More than sixty countries have Islamic banks that claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking. Invoking religious principles, several countries, among them Pakistan and Iran, have gone so far as to outlaw every form of interest; they are forcing all banks, including foreign subsidiaries, to adopt, at least formally, ostensibly Islamic methods of deposit taking and loan making. Attempts are also under way to disseminate religious norms of price setting, bargaining, and wage determination. And for every such initiative, others are on the drawing board.
From these developments one might infer that Islamic economics arose to advance an economic agenda. In fact, the doctrine emerged in late-colonial India as an instrument of identity creation and protection; at least initially, the economics of Islamic economics was merely incidental to its Islamic character. The purpose of the present paper is to substantiate this claim.
Almost no research exists on the origins of Islamic economics. Part of the reason, no doubt, lies in the rhetoric of the doctrine: Islamic economics claims to reflect the fixed, transparent, and eternal teachings of Islam, thus making questions about its origins seem equivalent to investigating the origins of Islam itself. By this account, Islamic economics has existed since the dawn of Islam, and the role of the modern Islamic economist has simply been to rediscover forgotten teachings. Whatever the exact connection between the substance of Islamic economics and the precepts of Islam, this view is fallacious. Some of the economic ideas and practices that are now characterized as inherently Islamic are new creations; and others, while not new, acquired religious significance only recently. Moreover, even the concept of Islamic economics is a product of the twentieth century. So it is hardly obvious why the doctrine exists, to say nothing of why it has generated Islamic norms, banks, and redistribution systems.
Compounding the puzzle about the existence of Islamic economics is the Islamic world's generally low level of economic development, at least relative to Europe and North America. Given the prevailing pattern, it is not self-evident why Muslims, however devout, would look to Islam for solutions to their economic problems. True, the heritage of Islam offers principles, policies, and practices of relevance to modern economic problems; and in the religion's early centuries Muslim-ruled lands made remarkable economic progress. But if these scarcely disputed facts justify and explain Islamic economics, why did the doctrine not emerge earlier? If the answer is that it is the Islamic world's persistent underdevelopment that has led to a search for alternative economic programs, there is the point that the Islamic world passed its economic prime almost a millennium ago. The need for economic reforms has bean present for many centuries, yet Islamic economics is barely a few decades old.
Justifying Cultural Separatism
Islamic economics emerged toward the end of India's colonial period as part of a broad campaign to preserve the religious identity and traditional culture of the country's sizable Muslim minority, more than a fifth of the total population. In the 1930s, against a background of mounting agitation for Indian independence, increasing numbers of Muslims came to believe that a Hindu-dominated India would subject them to hostility and discrimination.(3) Their worries were compounded by the ongoing build-up in the indebtedness of Muslim farmers, mostly to Hindu moneylenders who were prepared to expropriate the lands of defaulters (Darling, 1947, Chs. 1, 10). Although the British had erected obstacles to expropriation, it was uncertain that a Hindu-led government would uphold the protections (Ansari, 1991, pp. 184-85; Talbot, 1993, pp. 23940). Responding to such anxieties, certain Muslim leaders began arguing that the Muslims of India formed a distinct nation entitled to a state of their own. Before long, the idea of Pakistan was born, and within a decade and a half the new state became a reality.
Yet there were Muslim notables who resisted the idea of a separate state. They argued that Muslims needed not political independence but cultural autonomy and, further, that the two goals were incompatible. Foremost among these leaders was Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi (1903-79), the founder of Jama'at-i Islami (Party of Islam), first in India and then in Pakistan. Mawdudi objected to a national homeland for India's Muslims on the grounds that they were a "brotherhood" entrusted with "a comprehensive system of life to offer the world." Were they to practice Islam faithfully, the matter of a national homeland would become "absolutely immaterial" (Mawdudi, [1944] 1981, p. 36). He did not deny the existence of threats to Indian Islam, but his favored solution was cultural reassertion rather than political separation. Specifically, he wanted his community to turn inward and revive the traditions that once brought it power, glory, and prosperity. As part of the required rediscovery, he promoted the idea of Islamic economics. We do not know who introduced the concept into Indo-Islamic discourse, but this much is clear: it gained currency through Mawdudi's sermons, speeches, and publications. In addition to "Islamic economics," Mawdudi coined or popularized many other terms that quickly became key elements of Islamist discourse, including "Islamic ideology," "Islamic politics," "Islamic constitution," and "Islamic way of life" (Mumtaz Ahmad, 1991, p. 464).
In his voluminous writings,(4) Mawdudi argued that if India's Muslims were to survive as a community, they would have to treat Islam as their "way of life," not merely as a system of faith and worship. "True Muslims," he wrote, "merge their personalities and existences into Islam." They subordinate all their roles "to the one role of being Muslims." As "fathers, sons, husbands or wives, businessmen, landlords, laborers, and employers," they live as Muslims (Mawdudi [1940] 1990, p. 115). A minority of Muslims were "completely immersed in Islam." Religion fully controlled "their heads and hearts, their bellies and private parts." But the majority were barely practicing their religion. "They believe in Allah," he observed, "offer their prayers to Him, solemnly tell their beads in praise of Him, [and] partially abstain from what is forbidden." Beyond certain limited realms, however, they lead lives that have "no smack of religion whatsoever." Their "likes and dislikes, daily transactions, business activities, [and] social relations" have nothing to do with Islam, being based solely on "personal considerations and self-interest" (Mawdudi, [1945] 1981, pp. 38-40; see also [1940] 1990, Chs. 2-4, 7-9). The latter group, the "partial Muslims," had never accomplished anything of value, claimed Mawdudi. On the contrary, by relegating Islam mostly to the private domains of daily life, they had weakened their community and fueled the ascent of the "infidels" (Mawdudi, [1945] 1981, p. 40). And their limited adherence to Islamic norms, he felt, posed a greater danger to Indian Islam than the looming transfer of political power to the Hindus. In any case, he went on, a Muslim community could lose its religious identity even within a polity calling itself Islamic. The creation of Pakistan, he feared, would instill in its citizens the illusion of communal safety, thus accelerating the diminution of Islam's relevance to daily life.
Such reasoning convinced Mawdudi and his companions that the Muslim nationalists were proposing the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Whereas the nationalists wanted territorial partition to achieve political independence, what was needed was cultural reassertion to ensure religious survival. And to reinvigorate their culture, Muslims needed to make a point of keeping their religiosity continuously in public view (Mawdudi, [1948] 1981, pp. 65-68). In every domain of activity, they had to be conscious of how their behaviors differed from those of non-Muslims, making themselves easily distinguishable as Muslims. Economic activity is carried out partly, if not mostly, outside the home. In principle, therefore, it could serve the cause of heightening Islam's visibility. For example, if Muslim traders were to follow Islamic contracting procedures, and if Muslim consumers were to make choices in ways distinctly Islamic, Islam would gain salience, enabling new generations to grow up in an environment where Islam appeared highly relevant to everyday decisions. A factor making it especially important for Muslims to keep their economic behaviors "Islamic" was, Mawdudi felt, the growing significance of economics. "New complications have been introduced in the production, distribution, and acquisition of the necessities of life," he observed. "As a result of this, there is such a plethora of discussion and scientific research about economic problems that ... the other problems of mankind seem to have paled into insignificance."(5)
Bringing economics within the purview of religion was central, then, to Mawdudi's broader goal of defining a self-contained Islamic order. Whatever one thinks of his agenda, he was onto something real: with technological progress, economics was indeed becoming increasingly important to daily life everywhere. In a technologically primitive and static world, where family background determines one's career, where one plants and sells crops in the ways of one's grandparents, where one has little to spend on nonsubsistence goods, and where markets offer little variety, economics may be vital to physical survival but economic decision making does not absorb much attention. By contrast, in a technologically advanced world, where job choices have to be made, where women pursue and interrupt careers outside the home, where investment choices require monitoring, and where markets offer abundant choice, economic decision making absorbs considerable time. It follows that if economic choice is considered a secular activity, economic advances will make Muslim existence look increasingly secular. But if it is considered a religious activity, then economic development need not reduce Islam's perceived role in the lives of Muslims.
Westernization and Muslim Disunity
Why did the Muslim nationalists not see the dangers that Mawdudi identified? His own explanation was that many had attended colleges, like Aligarh University, founded expressly to equip Muslims with Western knowledge. Brainwashed to think like Westerners, the nationalists were trying to refashion Islam in the image of irreligious Western materialism. In relation to the matter of a homeland, for example, they were making a fetish out of issues not even raised in the Koran, such as federalism, parliamentary democracy, and limitations on the franchise (related by Brohi, 1979, p. 291). Yet, the ideology of "Muslim nationalism" was a contradiction in terms. How, asked Mawdudi, could nationalism be compatible with a universal religion that transcends local identities? He went so far as to indicate that the envisioned state would not be worth serving. Pakistan would be "pagan" and its leaders "Pharaohs and Nimrods," he once claimed (quoted by Aziz Ahmad, 1967, pp. 373-374). But once Pakistan came into being, he simply accepted the new reality and expanded his mission to include making the state itself Islamic (Mawdudi, [1950] 1981, [1952] 1960). Distinguishing between a "Muslim state," whose citizenry happens to be largely Muslim, and an "Islamic state," which follows Islamic principles, he began fighting against what he considered Western influences on Pakistan's social, economic, and political systems.
Over time, Mawdudi's anti-Western rhetoric would become less strident and his positions more nuanced. Around the time of India's partition, however, his central concern was the impact of the West--the civilization, once called Western Christendom, that comprises Western Europe and North America, plus their cultural offshoots elsewhere. In addition to altering the way Muslims think, the West was changing their relationships with each other. Growing numbers of Muslims, he observed, were admiring Western literature, adopting Western customs, playing Western sports, and dressing like Westerners. Becoming socialized to consider Western culture superior to their own, they were judging Islam by Western criteria, when they should be judging the West by Islamic criteria. They were looking down on their brethren, making it seem that the Muslim community has two segments, one modern and progressive, the other traditional and backward. And, accentuating the communal division, they enjoyed an advantage in obtaining civil service jobs for which English literacy had become a prerequisite.
But if the Muslim community was splitting, the culprits, as Mawdudi saw it, were not only his fellow Muslims who saw Westernization as an instrument of personal advancement. The West itself was using its recent material advances to make Muslim achievements seem unimpressive. "Your honor, which no one dared to touch," he told a congregation, "is now being trampled upon" (Mawdudi [1940] 1990, p. 56). There existed, in fact, Western statesmen and intellectuals who were open about their low opinion of non-Western cultures; and some of them had singled out Islam as particularly uncivilized and irrational. For example, the Islamicist Duncan Black Macdonald ([1909] 1965, pp. 6-10) had said: "The essential difference in the oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things ... The Oriental feels no need to explain everything; he simply ignores the incompatible; and he does so conscientiously, for he sees only one thing at a time." True to this view, Macdonald ([1911] 1971, pp. 254-55) believed that to make peace with the twentieth century, Muslims would have to abandon Islam. And he approved of efforts to limit Islam's social role. The Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire were on the right track, he felt, as they were "prepared to assimilate the civilization of Christendom, prepared to make the attempt, at least, to bring the Muslim peoples within the circle of modern life." They were ready, he perceived, to modernize Islam. And where Islam stood in the way of their program, they knew that it was Islam that had to yield.
Today, such statements are generally considered crude and simpleminded. In the days before India's partition, however, they were commonplace, as Edward Said has shown in his polemic against Orientalism (1978). For Mawdudi and his followers, they constituted evidence that Westernizing Muslims had put themselves in the service of a new crusade against Islam. Khurshid Ahmad (1957, p. 8), a member of Mawdudi's inner circle and later a prominent contributor to Islamic economics, cites Lord Macaulay, the British statesman, as saying: "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern--a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect." The clear implication, it seemed, was that Islam had to be defended.
The Logic of Cultural Separatism
Mawdudi had been raised in a family suspicious of modern knowledge, and he had not received a formal Western education (Nasr, 1996, Ch. 1). These factors probably contributed to his apprehensions about the West, making him overlook the West's diversity and equate Western cultural expansionism with the West itself. But whatever his motivations and perceptions, he was right that contacts with the West were making increasing numbers of India's Muslims reject their own heritage. At the time he arrived on the political stage, his fellow Muslims were overwhelmingly illiterate; according to the 1931 census of India, only 6.4 percent of those aged five or above could read, and the educated minority usually attended traditional schools that emphasized religion and avoided modern science.(6) The community was mostly destitute, and it boasted disproportionately few of India's major entrepreneurs.(7) Dissatisfied with these conditions, ambitious Muslims, like growing numbers of India's non-Muslims, and like millions of poor people in other parts of the world, were discovering that the key to prosperity lay in adopting new technologies and developing new habits of mind.
Mawdudi was right, too, that India's Muslims were behind other major groups in making the requisite adaptations. Whereas 1.2 percent of all Indians aged five or above were literate in English in 1931, only 0.9 percent of the Muslims were. And, as of two decades earlier, 1.5 percent of all Indians were in professions requiring more than an elementary education, but just 1.3 percent of the Muslims. The latter comparison is especially striking, because the advanced professions were predominantly urban, giving entry advantages to Muslims, who were more urbanized than the population as a whole.(8) Two historical factors contributed to these patterns. Indian Islam drew its adherents primarily from the lower end of the caste system. And the Muslims were statistically overrepresented among the artisans whose skills became essentially worthless with industrialization.
Finally, Mawdudi was also justified in believing that Westernization was weakening the control that religion exerted on personal worldviews and interpersonal relationships. His writings anticipated Thomas Luckmann's (1967) "religious privatization" thesis--that as Western religion got pushed from public to private domains it became less of a restraint on individual religiosity and lifestyles (see also Casanova, 1994, Chs.1-2). Indeed, in Europe and North America the adherents of the typical religious denomination were exercising ever greater discretion over how they would practice their religion. If being an Episcopalian once meant that one attended Episcopal services every Sunday, it was now possible to attend occasionally, or not at all. Moreover, such diversity within denominations was becoming as acceptable as diversity across denominations had become in earlier centuries. And, as a consequence, religion was losing its importance as a determinant of marriage, residential choice, and employment (Johnson, 1980). Based on the West's ongoing evolution, then, it was reasonable for Mawdudi to predict that the Westernization of India's Muslim community would weaken official Islam's control over the minds and behaviors of individual Muslims. It was reasonable, too, for him to expect the practice of Indian Islam to become increasingly diversified, although his rhetoric exaggerated the likely effects.
His favored response--to reverse Islamic privatization by making Muslims display religiosity in a wider array of public settings--rested on a universal principle of group solidarity. In every society, movements eager to preserve or rebuild group solidarity put emphasis on visible markers of group identity. Such markers limit contacts across group boundaries and encourage those within (Hardin, 1995, Ch. 4; Hechter, 1987). An extreme form of their use involves the stigmatizing behavioral codes of religious sects popularly known as cults. Many sects require their members to behave in ways that nonmembers find strange and repulsive. The requirement binds the members to each other, as no one else accepts them (Iannaccone, 1992).
In late-colonial India, Mawdudi was not the first to promote Islamic norms to cult*ate Muslim solidarity. The Muslim nationalists had encouraged Muslims to distinguish themselves by wearing the fur hat that came to be known as the "Jinnah cap"--partly in response to Hindu identification with the "homespun" headgear known as the "Gandhi cap" (Aziz, 1967, p. 148). Nor was a campaign to enforce Islamic behaviors a break with Islamic history. Traditionally, Islam had insisted more on orthopraxy (behavioral correctness) than on orthodoxy (doctrinal correctness). As a case in point, the regular recitation of sacred texts was generally considered more important than comprehension of their meaning (Denny, 1989, p. 90); even in non-Arab lands, the call to prayer and the prayers themselves were almost always in Arabic, a language few understood.(9) It is significant that no major Islamic language has a word meaning orthodox, and also that the designation for Islam's largest major branch is "sunni," which means orthoprax. A good Muslim is usually not someone whose beliefs conform to an accepted doctrine, as Protestant Christianity defines a good Christian. It is someone whose commitment to Islam is evident through observable behaviors. The Islamic counterpart to the Christian concept of heresy is bid'a, which means "deviation" and has traditionally been interpreted to mean "behavioral nonconformism" (Smith, 1957, p. 20).
The originality of Mawdudi's program lay, then, not in his insistence on Islamic orthopraxy, but rather in his efforts to update the content of this orthopraxy to meet a new challenge. He did not try simply to restore or reinvigorate decaying customs. Nor did he limit the scope of his agenda to domains of activity that Islam was regulating already. Sensing that Europe's Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution were having irreversible and universal effects, he sought to redefine Islamic orthopraxy in a way that would allow, even encourage, certain adaptations without a loss of communal identity. Economic change was central to modernization. So, unless Muslims were taught how to make their economic adjustments in ways recognizably Islamic, identity loss would be inescapable. One of the pressing challenges facing the Islamic world, Mawdudi thus reasoned, was to specify, by developing Islamic economics, the economic components of a new Islamic orthopraxy. Although Mawdudi presented the agenda as a return to Islam, it was, in an important sense, a manifestation of Westernization. The idea of a distinct discipline of economics originated in Europe; no such category of knowledge existed in the intellectual heritage of Islam. Commentaries now classified as Muslim economic thought were not, except recently under Western influence, considered a separate branch of intellectual discourse.
Previous Campaigns of Renewal
The novelty of the concept of Islamic economics is evident in the intellectual evolution of Mohammad Iqbal (1876-1938), the Indian poet-philosopher who, a generation before Mawdudi, became a dominant voice for Islamic reassertion. In 1902, before becoming an Islamist, Iqbal published a book called Ilmul Iqtesad (Science of Economics). Given the subsequent evolution of his thought, the most striking aspect of this work is its irreligious character. A few years later, by the time Iqbal had embraced Islamism, he no longer considered economics a key instrument of change. Not that he had lost sight of the Islamic world's economic backwardness. In 1909, he observed that India's Muslims had "undergone dreadful deterioration. If one sees the pale, faded faces on Muhammadan boys in schools and colleges, one will find the painful verification of my statement." Yet, his proposed solution to this crisis of underdevelopment lacked an economic dimension. He wanted his fellow Muslims to stop "out-Hinduing the Hindu" and to reinvigorate the traditions that had brought their ancestors glory and prosperity (Iqbal, [1909] 1964, pp. 43, 54).
One might infer from Iqbal's prescription that on economic matters, too, the solution lay in the rediscovery of old Islamic principles. However, the concept of a specifically Islamic form of economics is absent from Iqbal's work. Significantly, the major bibliographies of Islamic economics (Siddiqi, 1981; Islamic Research and Training Institute, 1993) list none of his writings. Iqbal's disinterest in developing an Islamic form of economics is shared by other figures who, in one way or another, made significant contributions to Islamic thought in the decades before Mawdudi came on stage. The speeches and writings of such activists as Muhammad Abduh, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan reveal no interest in the Islamization of economics.(10)
Nor did the development of Islamic economics ever become an objective of pan-Islamism--the diffuse international movement that, starting in the late-nineteenth century, sought to unite the world's Muslims under one flag. The pan-Islamists were alarmed by the military advances of Europeans, and especially by threats to Muslim holy places. They thus promoted the ideal of supra-national Muslim solidarity to resist the Europeans more effectively.(11) A few showed some interest in economic matters. For example, certain pan-Islamists worried about the economic exploitation that accompanied loss of political independence, and a few favored an economic war against non-Muslim rulers, including the withholding of taxes (Landau, 1990, pp. 119-20). But the notion of identifying or rediscovering economic practices that were distinctly Islamic was absent from their campaigns--to say nothing of cultivating an economic doctrine grounded in Islamic teachings.
While the Muslim activists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may not have included the development of Islamic economics in their agendas, collectively they paved the way for Mawdudi's initiatives. By calling for a return to Islam, however much they differed in what they meant by this, they prepared the masses for Mawdudi's broad Islamization campaign. Mawdudi's argument that Islam is a comprehensive way of life was hardly new. What makes him stand out is that he took this view seriously and sought to identify its concrete implications. At the time that Mawdudi set to work, vast numbers of Muslims, in India and elsewhere, were acutely aware of the Islamic world's political powerlessness and economic backwardness in relation to the West. They had developed various responses, including ones diametrically opposed to Islamization. One response, secularist modernism, was to accept the advantages of Western civilization, privatize Islam in the image of unobtrusive Protestant Christianity, and attempt to join the West. This response became the official policy of modern Turkey under its first two presidents, Ataturk and Inonu: the post-Ottoman regime sought to import Western civilization in toto, and part of its strategy was to drive Islam to the periphery of social life, shifting the primary loyalty of Turks from religion to nation. A second response, less radical in appearance, was Muslim modernism, exemplified by the movement for Pakistan. It pursued Westernization without recognizing any conflict between this objective and that of promoting an Islamic identity. One of its hallmarks was to identify Islamic precedents for reforms formulated to meet secular goals. Unlike secularist modernism, which essentially rejects the sacredness of Islamic scripture, Muslim modernism pays lip service to the comprehensiveness of Islamic wisdom, pretending that Islam is its ultimate source of authority. The difference is one of stylistic and tactical choice, however, not a matter of substance. For reasons unrelated to religion, either type of movement may decide to promote, say, restrictions on imports. The first will justify its policy through secular theories of economic development. The second will do the same, but offer also a more or less vague religious rationale.
Secularist and Muslim modernism both entailed Westernization, differing only in how openly they rejected Islamic authority. By contrast, two other responses were resolutely against Westernization, and each treated Islam as the primary source of wisdom. Its extreme variant, conservative Islamism, simply rejected Western civilization and embraced familiar cultural forms without pursuing change. By Mawdudi's time, it was more popular among the masses, including low-level religious functionaries, than among religious leaders of his own stature. Mawdudi's response, which may be called reformist Islamism, was to seek a religious revival that promotes modernization without Westernization. He differed from the conservative Islamists in perceiving an urgency to meet the Western challenge creatively. And he differed from all modernists in insisting that the reforms have an Islamic character. He refused to pursue reforms with an eye toward satisfying world opinion.(12)
Sources of Variation
Mawdudi claimed to speak for all Muslims, except the Western-educated minority he considered "partial Muslims." In truth, he never enjoyed the support of a majority of India's Muslims, to say nothing of widespread support from Muslims outside India. As we have seen, Muslims responded to the Western challenge in various ways. One reason, already noted, lies in differences in upbringing, education, and crosscultural exposure. A Westernizing society would put people with traditional backgrounds at a disadvantage. Although they might make certain adaptations, they would find it difficult to achieve the privileges available to people with Western educations and contacts. A related factor is that certain individuals had a vested interest in preserving traditional patterns of authority; preachers, for example, had reason to believe that in a Westernized India or Pakistan some of their powers would shift to modern professionals. Just as local producers of textiles might fear competition from foreign-made textiles, local religious functionaries felt threatened by competition from foreign sources of cultural authority.
Still another source of variation lay in the capacity to cope with cultural clashes. People differ in their ability to synthesize elements from different cultures, as they do in the ability to prevent conflicts through compartmentalization. Consider the Muslim requirement to fast from dawn to dusk during Ramadan. Especially when Ramadan falls in summer, fasting workers may experience a fall in productivity. Those with high professional standards may feel morally torn, therefore, between fulfilling a sacred obligation and the duty to be productive. Such individuals will be more receptive, holding all else constant, to responses that entail choosing one culture over the other (Kuran, in press).
Mawdudi was aware of the inner conflicts that Muslims commonly experienced; he understood that many Muslims felt torn between East and West, old and new, tradition and adaptation. If the West's influence were controlled, he reasoned, such tensions would subside. The task would require providing distinctly Islamic alternatives to behaviors Muslims had come to define as Western. If work enjoyed religious meaning, and work and worship were perceived as parts of a continuum, the modern Muslim would have a unified personality, rather than a bifurcated one. Mawdudi's agenda shared a key characteristic with the agenda of secularist modernism: the aim of discarding certain cultural influences to prevent cognitive and moral dualism. Moreover, its instrument for fostering Islamization, an updated Islamic orthopraxy, was equivalent to the secularist campaign to weaken Islamic culture by encouraging the adoption of Western appearances and lifestyles.
Turkey's headgear law of 1925, which forced Muslim-Turkish men to discard the fez in favor of Western headgear, aimed at cultural reconstruction. The law may seem comic or trivial, and it tramples on what is arguably a basic liberty. Nonetheless, it was of great significance at the time. "Dress, and especially headgear," it has been observed, "was the visible and outward token by which a Muslim indicated his allegiance to the community of Islam and his rejection of others ... The fez proclaimed at once his refusal to conform to the West and his readiness to abase his unimpeded brow before God" (Lewis, 1968, p. 267). The Turk adopting a Western appearance would be identifying publicly with the West; and he would be removing from view a major symbol of his Islamic heritage. Other Turkish reforms of the 1920s, including the abandonment of the Arabic script for the Latin, were also intended to solidify Turkey's visible identification with the West. In neighboring Iran, likewise, the lifestyle reforms that Reza Shah Pahlavi undertook in the 1920s and 1930s were aimed at giving immediate visibility to Iran's Westernization (Chehabi, 1993; Banani, 1961, Chs. 2-3). Mawdudi's agenda, like these Westernization campaigns, was based on the insight that the coexistence of Western and Islamic cultural influences fueled personal tensions and social instability. It differed, of course, in its choice of which cultural influence was to be eliminated.
Both secularists and reform-minded Islamists were conscious of past reforms that generated mental dualism, like the educational reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Rulers of the era, including those of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, sought to equip Muslims with the advantages of Western knowledge without altering the traditional educational system. Specifically, they set up Western secondary schools without reforming the primary curriculum. The result was a bifurcation of the knowledge and values of educated Muslims. One side of them considered Islam as central to every question; the other ignored Islam altogether. One side accepted the traditional Islamic values, with an emphasis on community, authority, and stability; the other glorified values of the European Enlightenment, including freedom, innovation, and progress. Mental dualism could be avoided through a unified system of education, itself situated within a unified culture.(13) But there was more than one possible form of unification. Ataturk's Turkey and Reza Shah's Iran had chosen one strategy; two decades later, Mawdudi was pursuing an alternative.
The Imagined Umma
Mawdudi shared with the secular modernists also a commitment to focusing people's historical and emotional attachments on one particular civilization. Ataturk and Reza Shah, seeking to enhance identification with the West rather than Islam, led efforts to recover, embellish, teach, and celebrate the pre-Islamic histories of their nations, with particular emphasis on the West's Middle Eastern cultural roots. Each hoped to foster a new self-awareness that would distance their peoples from the broader Islamic world (Lewis, 1975). For his part, Mawdudi appealed to the old notion of the universal Muslim community, the umma that operates according to traditional principles of Islamic solidarity. Essentially undifferentiated except by gender, the umma is supposed to transcend tribal, national, regional, and local ties. Having its own laws, values, and convictions, it is to be the individual Muslim's principal source of identity and the focus of his loyalty.
To strengthen consciousness of the umma, Mawdudi drew attention to the similarities and historical bonds among the world's Muslim peoples. He also discounted their cultural, linguistic, historical, and political differences, making it seem that such distinctions would lose significance, even dissolve, if only Muslims were willing to restore the vitality of their umma (Mawdudi, [1940] 1990, pp. 125-34). In his historical writings, examples of Muslim diversity and discord appear as aberrations. What is similar in the cultures of different regions is Islamic and thus authentic and important; what is different is foreign, accidental, and superficial. Likewise, harmony among Muslims is natural, disharmony a sign that they are not living by the dictates of Islam (Mawdudi, [1947] 1976, esp. pp. 9-15; [1940] 1963, Ch. 1).
Mawdudi's umma was not a real community identifiable through ongoing and observable interactions of members who know one another personally. It was an "imagined community,(14) because its typical member could know, and be known to, very few of its millions of other members. Indeed, the concept was sharply at variance with prevailing social realities.(15) Economic relations among Muslim nations were minimal; they all traded primarily with Europe. Also, many Muslims were exhibiting strong commitments to ethnically, linguistically, and regionally defined communities far smaller than the Islamic umma. As a case in point, just decades before the establishment of Jama'at-i Islami, Indians fighting to save the caliphate in Istanbul got frustrated first by Arabs who fought Turkish rule in the hope of creating a new Arab Empire, and then by Turkish leaders who abolished the caliphate and committed Turkey to secularism. Equally revealing, during Mawdudi's own career, there was never any unity even among the minority of India's Muslims who wanted the Islamic umma reinvigorated. There existed various interpretations of Islam as well as serious disagreements over tactics and strategy (Agwani, 1986, esp. Ch. 5; Mumtaz Ahmad, 1991). Nor were the differences among regionally separated Muslims typically minor compared to those among Muslims and non-Muslims living together. India's Muslims, like the Hindus among whom they lived, upheld hereditary divisions of caste. In their embrace of innate inequality, they stood closer to Hindus than to Muslim Arabs, who, like Christian Arabs, subscribed to the principle that people are born equal (Imtiaz Ahmad, ea., 1978).
In addition to minimizing the political, cultural, and historical obstacles to strengthening the Islamic umma, Mawdudi ignored the technological impediments. Specifically, he made no allowance for falling transportation and communication costs. Such technology-driven trends would produce two conflicting results. On the one hand, they would allow better contacts among geographically distant Muslims, thus facilitating the unity and homogeneity of the umma. On the other, they would stimulate Muslim exposure to non-Muslim influences, making the umma's desired isolation progressively harder to achieve. Insofar as the latter effect was dominant, Muslim and non-Muslim lifestyles would continue to converge, and individual Muslims would find it ever easier to develop cross-civilizational loyalties. But to address such possibilities would have complicated Mawdudi's message and perhaps weakened its appeal. However well he may have understood the forces producing a global village, his political mission required him to treat them as controllable.
To recapitulate, Islamic economics emerged in India at a time when its Muslims were intensely preoccupied with defining themselves. Were they Indians entitled to equal rights of citizenship in a secular state? Should they respond to Europe's formidable material advances by absorbing its knowledge without any restrictions? The Jama'at-i Islami's position was that Muslims should endeavor to strengthen their communal identity by pursuing lifestyles that would distinguish them from non-Muslims. To avoid ambiguity in what behavior was properly Islamic, Mawdudi and his colleagues ventured to update the norms of Islamic orthopraxy. Among the fruits of their efforts was Islamic economics. They tried also to promote affinities between members of the global community of Muslims. Muslims were to interact mostly with one another, minimizing their relations with outsiders.
The Myth of Islam's "Golden Age"
The problem of group identity is hardly unique to Islam. Every society harbors individuals with confused identities, as well as movements seeking to define and tighten group boundaries. Cohesive groups provide their members familiarity, trust, easy communication, and emotional comfort. These benefits create a natural constituency for activists promoting identity-related platforms. If the Jama'at-i Islami and the Muslim League became significant political players in prepartition India, this was partly because, in their different ways, each spoke to concerns involving group identity. Yet individual political commitments always reflect motives richer than identity construction. Mawdudi's early works sought to establish that Islamic solidarity and uniformity would yield Muslims benefits beyond security of identity, including material benefits.
To convince an audience of a social agenda's material advantages, one may appeal to theory, evidence, or both. The communist movements of the early twentieth century relied almost exclusively on theory: invoking "scientific laws" articulated by Marx and Engels, they tried to make a classless society seem both desirable and possible. As I have observed elsewhere (Kuran, 1986), neither Mawdudi nor his followers provided as ambitious a theory to support the claim that Muslims would live better within a segregated Islamic umma than they would within a multireligious society. Mawdudi's chief instrument of persuasion was what he considered the evidence of Islam's "Golden Age," the thirty-nine-year period that spanned the Prophet Muhammad's leadership of the original umma and the tenure of the four "rightly guided" caliphs who succeeded him at the community's helm.(16) He presented the Golden Age as a period of efficiency, justice, cooperation, and self-sacrifice. It was a vast improvement over the era of ignorance (jahiliya) that preceded it, he proposed, and never have its achievements been replicated.
Mawdudi went on to argue that after the fourth caliph "governmental reins, once again, passed into impious hands ... fine arts like dancing, music, and painting, which are strictly un-Islamic, found patronage." There have been several attempts to reconstruct Islam, he held: at various times and places, uncompromising agents of revival (mujaddid) have worked toward "cleansing Islam ... and making it flourish more or less in its original pure form." Their successes always proved short-lived, however, because they neglected to produce a "universal ideological movement" relevant to "all walks and spheres of life." He considered his own mission a fresh attempt at Islamic renewal, one that would succeed where others had failed because it was comprehensive (Mawdudi, [1940] 1963, pp. 26, 29, 34).
Cognitive psychologists observe that losses loom larger in individual calculations than equivalent gains (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Tversky and Kahneman, 1991). Their findings suggest that, all else being equal, people are more responsive to a promise of improvement when it is framed as eliminating a loss than when it is presented as providing a new gain. Accordingly, reformers commonly use historical reference points that make experienced changes look like degeneration (Lowenthal, 1985, esp. pp. 21-28, 369-76). In focusing on a period revered by Muslims, then, Mawdudi was using a tactic that has been employed to great advantage in countless settings. Whatever the accuracy of his interpretation of Islamic history, his vision of the Golden Age fostered a sense of loss. It was also easily communicated, because it was long part of Islamic discourse, and Islamists of previous generations, including India's own Iqbal, had worked to keep it alive.
Scientific evidence on Arabian living conditions during the earliest period of Islam is actually scant. Standards of living were doubtless primitive, however; most Arabians lived under harsh conditions at levels close to subsistence (Rodinson, [1966] 1973, pp. 28-30; Crone, 1987). Not until later times, the Umayyad and Abbasid eras that Mawdudi dismisses as times of decadence, did Middle Eastern living standards reach levels that were advanced for the period. Moreover, the early Islamic community was not exactly a paragon of harmony and cooperation. Three of the first four caliphs met their ends at the hands of fellow Muslims, an indication of sharp disagreement. And by the end of the Golden Age tensions ran so deep as to produce the Sunni-Shi'i split that, fourteen centuries later, remains a source of discord (Shaban, 1971, Chs. 1-4; Hodgson, 1974, pp. 146-217). Yet, literal accuracy about early Islamic history would have defeated Mawdudi's purpose, which was to make Muslims attribute their problems to the degeneration of Islamic society under "un-Islamic" influences. Had his sermons and essays pursued historical accuracy, he might well have been ignored.
The histories of various Muslim peoples feature extended periods of steady economic growth, scientific creativity, and artistic fluorescence. One need only think about the high periods of the Abbasid Caliphate, Muslim Spain, Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal India. But none of these periods received much attention in Mawdudi's writings, for they collided with his basic thesis. To invoke the glories of these cosmopolitan states would have undermined the argument that Muslims do best when they withdraw into their own communal shells. It might also have refuted the alleged perfection of the Golden Age: if developments in these periods represented protracted changes for the better, then the Golden Age was surpassable and, hence, imperfect.
A Clash of Civilizations?
The campaign to make Muslims avoid non-Muslim influences and seek inspiration solely from Islam impinges on Samuel Huntington's thesis that the dominant source of global conflict is now culture rather than ideology or economics. The centerpiece of contemporary international politics, says Huntington (1993, p. 23), has become "the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations."(17) Whatever the empirical validity of his argument, it matches the thinking prevalent within the Jama'at-i Islami at its founding. As far as Mawdudi and his companions were concerned, Islam and the West could not coexist, and the two were locked in combat for the identity and loyalty of Muslims.
Huntington's thesis has been criticized for underestimating the homogenizing effect of economic development and also people's receptivity to cross-cultural influences. It is true that urbanization, industrialization, and modern education are attenuating differences between non-Western and Western lifestyles. Even so, such transformations have fueled noisy movements of cultural resistance. Precisely because they are so disruptive to traditional lifestyles, campaigns to protect local values and institutions are commonplace everywhere. The movement led by Jama'at-i Islami was predicated on the perception that Islamic civilization would lose its distinguishing features without sustained efforts to counteract non-Muslim influences.
Another criticism has been that civilizations are difficult to define. Their boundaries are indeed somewhat arbitrary, and every major civilization harbors much diversity. Yet these facts do not keep cultural protectionists of various stripes from acting as if the civilizations they would preserve are well-defined entities. As a case in point, Mawdudi ignored the differences between the aspirations of individual Muslims. At the time he was writing, there were vast differences between the lifestyles of secularized Muslims in Istanbul and those of devout Punjabis, and between consumption patterns in a Bengali village and those of an Arabian palace. Nevertheless, he claimed to speak for all Muslims, whatever their backgrounds and circumstances. This is especially significant in view of the ambiguities of defining who is a Muslim. In 1954, following disturbances that arose when Pakistan's Ahmadiyya sect declared Mirza Ghulam Ahmad a prophet, a committee was formed to investigate the question. Just as Israeli rabbis argue interminably on the definition of a Jew, religious leaders could not agree on what makes a Muslim (Jalal, 1995, p. 82; Binder, 1961, Chs. 9-11).
The notion of civilizational conflict is sometimes dismissed on the grounds that it stems from a "Eurocentric" thought process. There exist, of course, many Westerners who subscribe to some variant of the clash-of-civilizations thesis.(18) In no way, however, does this negate the Jama'at-i Islami's home-grown conviction that Islam is party to a war of civilizations. Nor does it negate the emergence of Islamic economics as a weapon of civilizational resistance. Unsurprisingly, the theme of clashing civilizations appears in all early contributions to Islamic economics. Outside the Indian subcontinent, the first major contribution came from Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) of Egypt, who concentrated on matters of social justice. Under Mawdudi's influence, Qutb characterized Islam as a comprehensive and self-sufficient system. True Islam, he wrote, "does not try and has not tried to copy" other systems; nor does it "establish any connection or similarity with them."(19) Like Mawdudi, he commonly honored this goal in the breach: prominent themes of his writings, like full employment and even social justice itself, betray Western influences. However, following the pattern established by earlier Islamists, he presented these concepts as intrinsically Islamic, partly through twisted interpretations of the Koran (Akhavi, 1994). Whatever the validity of his interpretations, they supported the view that Islam offers a comprehensive system in conflict with the West.
The theme of civilizational conflict is prominent also in the works of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1931-80), an Iraqi cleric who produced highly regarded expositions of Islamic economics and played a leading role in the religious opposition to his country's secular regime. His major work, Iqtisaduna: Our Economics ([1961] 1982-84), extends Mawdudi's contrast between the Islamic economic system and its main rivals, capitalism and socialism.(20) Sadr was especially eager to prove Islam's superiority to socialism, because, at the time he wrote, Arab socialism was gaining appeal: he devoted eight times as much space to refuting socialism than he did to discrediting capitalism (Sadr, vol. 1, pt. 1).
The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 has been characterized as a "cultural earthquake" (Shayegan, [1989] 1992, p. 108). Indeed, its leaders stressed that its primary aim was to restore Islam's role in providing group identity, social cohesion, and moral guidance. The revolution was not made, once quipped its mastermind, the Ayatollah Khomeini, to make watermelons more plentiful (Bakhash, 1989, p. 16). Khomeini repeatedly spoke out against poverty and exploitation, and he supported certain economic reforms. But he subordinated economic objectives to the general goal of restoring the centrality of Islam in private and public life. Communism and the West were both at war with Islam, he believed, and they had already brainwashed many Muslims. Iran's challenge was much broader, therefore, than the matter of choosing an economic direction (Khomeini, 1985, pp. 329-43).
These examples, to which more could be added, show that in various countries Islamists themselves have long defined their struggle in terms of a civilizational clash precipitated by Western aggression. Huntington's central point was not news to them; it merely confirmed what they had maintained for decades, although they portrayed as self-defense what Huntington considers Islamist hostility. The cases also illustrate that the economic initiatives of the Islamists have been perceived as components of a broad counteroffensive against Westernization. By no means do all Muslims share Huntington's perception; to varying degrees many hope or believe that the prevailing tensions will subside. By the same token, the Islamists are not alone in considering themselves engaged in a civilizational war. Diverse secularists agree that a bitter war is under way among two incompatible civilizations. A columnist for Al-Ahram, Egypt's generally anti-Islamist semiofficial daily, wrote in 1993 that his country's politics involved a "struggle between two contrasting cultural models ... one Western in outlook, the other Islamic."(21) Nor do secularists and Islamists necessarily disagree on the cultural significance of Islamic economics. Ugur Mumcu, a widely read columnist for the fiercely secular Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, saw the advent of Islamic banking as part of a sinister ploy to advance Islamic fundamentalism and force Muslim nations into a despotic union established on Medieval principles.(22)
It is clear that many Muslims, including Islamists and secularists, have considered Islam and the West to be at war over the hearts and minds of Muslims. Have they had a valid point? And, insofar as the answer is yes, has economics been among the battlegrounds? If the term "clash of civilizations" refers to a conflict that substantial numbers of participants define in civilizational terms, the evidence does indeed point to a long standing civilizational struggle. Moreover, economics has become one of the battlegrounds, for there are Muslims who consider Western economic thought, policies, and institutions a threat to their cultural identity, along with others anxious about efforts to give economics an Islamic cast. These observations do not presuppose that every Westerner or every Muslim is party to a civilizational clash. One can speak of a military conflict between two countries when only a minority of each country's citizens are actively engaged in battle, the rest pursuing their daily routines without interruption. Likewise, one can speak of a clash of civilizations even if the noncombatants outnumber the committed combatants.
"Clash of civilizations" may mean, alternatively, that the members of a designated group are having trouble synthesizing, or selecting among, the civilizations with which they are in contact. Contemporary Muslims have not been particularly resistant to technologies or products originating in the West. The diffusion of foreign-generated machinery, appliances, and pharmaceuticals is never instantaneous, but, at least in recent times, major innovations have spread to Muslim countries quickly by historical standards.(23) Nor is there reason to believe that Islamists are opposed to modern science and technology, or that they refrain from adopting new technologies (Tibi, 1993). The Ayatollah Khomeini disseminated his Friday sermons through audio cassettes; and when he returned from exile to assume Iran's helm, he did so on a jumbo jet. Hence, looking merely at production and consumption patterns, one will find no evidence of an incompatibility between Islam and the West, or between Islam and modernization.
Yet the occurrence of much cross-civilizational diffusion in production and consumption does not mean that the relevant decision makers perceive their choices as costless. Even if their choices are voluntary, they might feel distressed over what they have to give up; to experience guilt and resentment is part of being human. For example, a person who drives to work in a French-built car, lunches at McDonalds, and watches televised sports may end his day feeling anxious that his lifestyle resembles that of a Parisian. A common theme in Islamist discourse, we saw earlier, is that pious Muslims feel distressed over the choices they make in becoming modern. Mawdudi's writings developed this theme from the beginning, as have other social commentators from all over the Islamic world. In a book banned in Iran under the Pahlavis, the Iranian social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad ([1964] 1982) coined the word "Westoxification" to describe what he perceived as widespread social alienation resulting from contacts with the West. In the same vein, many of Turkey's new Islamists argue that Western civilization has created a consumer culture that breeds perpetual disappointment and unsatiation. Believers also suffer, they say, from an inability to keep true to their values in the face of innumerable temptations to get richer and step up consumption. Failing to lead what they consider a properly Islamic life, they become distressed.(24) The same theme had been articulated decades earlier by the early opponents of Turkish Westernization. The Islamist poet Necip Fazil Kisakurek (1974, pp. 68-71) explains in his memoirs that he became disillusioned by Westernization upon recognizing that it made him feel culturally displaced. He rediscovered Islam, he recalls, in searching for what Rimbaud, the French poet, calls la vrai vie absente--the missing genuine life.(25)
The notion of a clash of civilizations is consistent, then, with a rapid diffusion of new technologies and goods. In fact, such diffusion may be among its basic causes.
Identity Confusion and Its Repercussions
Implicit in the foregoing argument has been that individuals derive a measure of inner satisfaction from a secure and unambiguous identity. Since our focus is on economic thought and behavior, it is worth recognizing that many influential schools of modern economics downplay, if not ignore, matters of identity. Indeed, much of economics treats the benefits of identity as nil and its social role as negligible, thus avoiding the need to address how people cope with identity-related concerns. In reality, the need for a well-defined identity competes with needs that every school of economics recognizes, like food, shelter, and financial security. Moreover, just as a person whose house suffers damage will undertake repairs, people whose identity has lost focus or become depreciated will try to redefine themselves and establish a clearer sense of who they are. The repair task may involve, we have seen, efforts to reformulate economics itself.
That concerns over identity account for the emergence of Islamic economics does not mean, of course, that these fully accoUnt for its subsequent evolution. Once the doctrine had been outlined, various actors found it a convenient vehicle for advancing political and economic aims unrelated to identity. A milestone in the evolution of Islamic economics was reached with the Arab oil boom of the 1970s. Led by Saudi Arabia, the boom's major Arab beneficiaries felt obliged to step up their support for pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements, and Islamic economics was among the causes that received vast assistance. Accordingly, the first Islamic commercial banks started operation in 1975, as did the Islamic Development Bank, established to transfer petrodollars to predominantly Muslim developing countries through interest-free instruments. The period of the oil boom saw also the enhancement of the institutional infrastructure of Islamic economics. New institutes of Islamic economics came into being, and departments of Islamic economics were started in various parts of the Islamic world. Also, journals of Islamic economics began publication, and well-funded international conferences of Islamic economics became a regular occurrence.
Once Islamic economics acquired the trappings of an academic discipline, it gained new complexities. Researchers steeped in Islamic economics went looking for new problems to address, and various applications of Islamic economic principles, including Islamic redistribution and Islamic banking, stimulated new debates. To this day, however, Islamic economics has remained preoccupied with defining the modern Muslim identity. One cannot make sense, therefore, of either contemporary Islamic economic thought or the current applications of Islamic economics without paying attention to the factors that stimulated its genesis half a century ago. The major stimulus to the emergence of Islamic economics was the perception of Mawdudi and his political associates that the Indo-Muslim community was losing its identity.
Notes
(1) Recent expositions include Chapra, 1992; and Naqvi, 1994. For critiques of the literature, see Behdad, 1989, 1994; Kuran, 1986, 1989, 1993; and Haneef, 1995.
(2) For critical overviews of the practice of Islamic economics, see Rahnema and Nomani, 1990; Kuran, 1993, 1995; Richards and Waterbury, 1996, Ch. 14; and Malik, 1996, Chs. 3-4.
(3) The fears were not baseless. Some Hindu politicians envisioned a centralized Hindu raj, and they considered the terms "Hindu" and "Indian" as synonymous. Moreover, certain Hindu-dominated local governments had treated Muslims as undesirable aliens. See Aziz, 1967, esp. Chs. 2-3; Sayeed, 1968, Chs. 3-5; and Nagarkar, 1975, esp. Chs. 4-6, 14. As tensions between Muslims and Hindus mounted, certain leaders on both sides fanned hostilities by reviving memories of old grievances.
(4) For examples of Mawdudi's writings and addresses published in prepartition India, see Jihad in Islam ([1939], 1976), Let Us Be Muslims ([1940], 1990), Islam and Ignorance ([1941] 1976), and Islamic Way of Life ([1948], 1950). Scholarly analyses of Mawdudi's thought include: Nasr, 1996; Aziz Ahmad, 1967; Lerman, 1981; and Binder, 1961, pt. 1.
(5) Mawdudi The Economic Problem of Man and Its Solution ([1941], 1978, p. 1). The essence of Mawdudi's conception of Islamic economics may be found in pp. 30-40 of this book. See also Mawdudi, [1940] 1990, Chs. 17-23; [1951] 1981.
(6) The figures for 1931 that are reported in this paragraph and the next come from the Census of India, 1931, vol. 1:1, pp. 61, 328-29; and vol. 1:2, pp. 426-27. And those for 1911 are from the Census of India, 1911, vol. 1:1, p. 53; and vol. 1:2, pp. 322-30. Figures for 1911 are used whenever the information is lacking for 1931. For an analysis of the reported patterns, see Mishra, 1962.
(7) This discrepancy is reflected in census figures on occupations specializing in trade. In 1911, 3.5 percent of India's Muslims were traders, as compared with 5.1 percent of all Indians.
(8) At the time, 12.3 percent of all Muslims lived in towns, as against 9.5 percent of the total population. By 1931, the differential had narrowed a bit: 13.5 percent for Muslims, as opposed to 11.1 percent for all Indians The trend suggests that as a group Muslims were relatively unsuccessful in obtaining urban employment.
(9) Contemporary Islamists consider Ataturk's directive that the call to prayer in Turkish mosques be in Turkish an attack on Islam itself. The directive was rescinded after Ataturk's death.
(10) There is an immense literature on these leaders and the movements they directed. The major analyses include Gibb, 1947; Hourani, [1962] 1983; Smith, 1957; and Rahman, 1982.
(11) Landau, 1990. Modern pan-Islamism started with efforts by the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II to strengthen Islamic solidarity against the European powers. After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, it drew in large numbers of Indians, who mobilized to save the caliphate, assist Muslim nations under European domination, and mediate conflicts between Turks and Arabs. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Republic of Turkey abolished the caliphate, Indian pan-Islamism entered a dormant phase, and it was soon eclipsed by Muslim nationalism. In the rest of the Islamic world, too, no major pan-Islamic initiatives were launched during the three decades following World War I.
(12) During a controversy in the mid-1950s, the Jama'at-i Islami criticized the nationalist-dominated government for trying to reinterpret Islam radically as a means of improving Pakistan's global image. An "ordinary Muslim," wrote a Jama'at publication, would greet this proposed reconstruction with a "flat rejection." The thinking behind this reaction apparently belonged to Mawdudi. See Brohi, 1979, pp. 299-300.
(13) The educational reforms of Egypt are critiqued by Heyworth-Dunne, 1939; and those of the late Ottoman Empire by Berkes, 1964, esp. Ch. 4; and Engin, 1939-43. For a comparative critique of such efforts, see Rahman, 1982, Ch. 2.
(14) The concept is developed by Anderson, 1991.
(15) This characterization applies equally to many other modern formulations of the umma. For detailed critiques, see Roy, [1992] 1994, Ch. 4, and al-Ahsan, 1992.
(16) Mawdudi, [1940] 1963, Ch. 1. Unlike most Islamists, Mawdudi saw some flaws in a subperiod of the Golden Age: "[the third caliph] `Uthman ... did not possess the qualities of leadership to the extent that his great fore-runners had been endowed with. Consequently, `Ignorance' found its way into the Islamic social system during his Caliphate" (p. 26). But even many of his close supporters objected to this qualification.
(17) For a fuller version of the thesis, see Huntington, 1996. Its implications for Islam are critiqued by Mottahadeh, 1995.
(18) Huntington's Clash of Civilizations contains a vast array of references. An influential contribution has been Quigley, 1979. For an example pertaining specifically to the Islamic world, see Lewis, 1993, esp. Chs. 1,8, 11.
(19) Qutb, [1948] 1970, p. 90. For an analysis of this view, see Shepard, 1989. See also Kepel, [1984] 1985, Ch. 2; and Sivan, 1985, Chs. 2-3.
(20) For critical overviews of Sadr's philosophy, see Katouzian, 1983; and Mallat, 1993, Chs. 4-5.
(21) Fahmi Howeidi, Al-Ahram Weekly, July 1-7, 1993, p. 7.
(22) Mumcu, 1987, pp. 171-96; 1988, pp. 48-50, 151-53. Mumcu was assassinated in 1993, following threats on his life. Three years later, an arrested Islamist militant provided evidence implicating the Iranian government. Turkish-Iranian relations then worsened, and the Turkish government briefly considered reprisals. See Hurriyet, March 12, 1996, and later dates.
(23) This is reflected in growth rates for the Middle East and North Africa for the period 1950-1990. The average growth rate of real GNP per capita has been 2.6 percent a year in this region, as compared with 2.5 percent for developing countries as a whole. (Easterlin, 1996, table 3.1.)
(24) See, for example, Ozel, 1985; and Ozdenoren, 1990. Many additional examples are given by Cakir, 1990.
(25) The reference to Rimbaud belongs to Kisakurek himself. For insights into how the quest for a secure identity has propelled the rise of Turkish Islamism, see Mardin, 1993.
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(*) This paper was written while I was John Olin Visiting Professor at the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. I am indebted to Sewed Vali Reza Nasr for helpful comments on a draft, and to Pranab Bardhan and Faisal Devji
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