The Friday sermon is an important discursive practice, a useful public forum and medium for channeling religious, public, and socio-political announcements. In other words, the Friday sermon is a rhetorical discourse par excellence, for its main objective is persuasion that leads to action. The imam’s persuasive methods take on the shape of an emotional rhetoric that moves and thrills by targeting the hearts and raw emotions of the congregation. But do all imams use the pulpit to the same end: to provide the congregation with social and personal guidance based on the teachings of the Prophet and his disciples? Or do some imams go beyond the social and religious tenets of the sermon and engage in current political debate and go as far as inciting the congregation to act on their counsel? Both brands exist: the first brand of sermons is often seen as representing official government discourse, while the second brand is viewed as representing extremist and militant Islam. Therefore, given the recent rise in militant Islam, and especially in the post 9/11 era, many Arab and Muslim states needed to act in order to contain the radical movements that emanate from certain “progressive” mosques. Morocco is one of these states currently struggling to reign in the fundamentalist Friday sermon and its compelling rhetorical message. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the roles of the imams in Moroccan mosques, especially in the last decade, and the extent to which some imams have used rhetoric to contribute to the rise of radical Islam in Morocco. It is also an attempt at studying the Moroccan government’s response to this challenge and the types of measures the state has taken to maintain its image of a moderate and stable Muslim state. Ultimately, regardless of who wins this contest, the religious landscape in Morocco will never be the same.

Islamic law has changed radically in the last 150 years: this paper focusses on the dramatic transformation of Islamic law during the British colonial period in three cases: India, Malaya and Egypt, and its effects in the postcolonial state. It argues that colonial and local elites negotiated the scope, content and meaning of Islamic law in each case, creating new definitions of Islamic law, family, private/public space, ethnic, religious and gender identities. Original archival research shows that Islamic law is a product of political activity, and that legal norms traveled among colonial sites, limiting Islamic law to a narrow scope of private, ‘religious’ law, and defining contemporary possibilities for change. This project presents a new argument: that Islamic law in the contemporary state is a modern construction with important ramifications for ethnic and religious identity, state institutions and elite power in the Muslim world today. This study challenges the prevailing popular view of Islamic law – and Muslim adherence to Islamic law – as a monolith, offering instead a view of Islamic law as locally specific, intensely political, and richly varied.

Towards A Genealogy of Islamic Finance: A Preface The last three decades saw the birth and a meteoric growth of what is now known as Islamic Banking. From a marginal presence in the late 60s and early 70s, Islamic financial institutions are now operating in over 70 countries and hold assets valued over 200 billion dollars. One of the major debates that surround the growth of this phenomenon is whether such banking is “Islamic” or not. While this may be a worthwhile debate, it is not the object of this paper. This paper seeks to examine whether it is possible to trace a history of change in the way this new body of knowledge is being produced. It looks at two phenomena that may provide clues to answering this question. The first is the rise of a new type of Islamic financial expert. To this end, I examine the shifts of authority that have led to what I argue is a bureaucratization or democratization of fatwa issuing by sharia boards of financial institutions. I try to come up with a better understanding of disciplining mechanisms that govern this process. The second phenomenon is the emergence of an evolving taxonomy of Islamic financial terms in the hope of endowing them with precise legal meaning (such as mudaraba, murabaha, musharaka). I ask whether there is an emerging consensus on what these terms mean and whether the creation of a taxonomy of Islamic financial tools contributes to forming a unified theory of Islamic finance. Investigating these questions will hopefully build towards the creation of a genealogy of Islamic banking. This paper is merely a preface for such a larger project. My paper relies on seminal works by Ibrahim Warde, Clement M. Henry and Monzer Kahf addressing the politics and history of Islamic Finance. I employ Foucauldian concepts of discipline, power, and knowledge to analyze the shifts in authority and terminology formation in the field. Finally, I draw on primary sources recently made available by Islamic Institutions such as the Faisal Bank on the net including lengthy and detailed documents of financial fatwas and guidelines of management and sharia board member composition and selection. I briefly examine the materiality of these new documents and other texts of Islamic finance literature. These reflections provide further evidence of the shift in discourse surrounding Islamic finance. This last step is guided by Brinkley Messick’s inspiring work on textual domination.

Prospects of an “Islamic Reformation” and a “Muslim Luther” have been much discussed in recent years. This “Reformation” rhetoric, however, displays little consistency, encompassing moderate, liberalizing trends as well as their putative opposite, Islamist “fundamentalism.” After briefly surveying the history of “Islamic Reformation” rhetoric, my paper argues for a four-part typology to account for most recent instances of such rhetoric. I show that few who employ the terminology of an “Islamic Reformation” (IR) consider the details of its implicit analogy to the Protestant Reformation, but rather seek to add emotional weight to various prescriptive agendas. Still, some examples demonstrate the potential power of the analogy to clarify important aspects of religious, social, and political change in the modern Islamic world. I explore a broad range of mostly English-language sources, academic and otherwise, to illuminate one specific element of contemporary Western views of Islam and Muslims. I first document several 19th-century assertions that early Islam was subject to a “Reformation.” One 1883 source attributes an “Eastern Reformation” to the work of al-Ash`ari (d. 324/935) while deriding Ash`ari’s supposedly anti-rationalist stance. Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1905) argued that the return to Europe of Christian Crusaders impressed with the “reasonableness” of Islam sparked the Protestant Reformation itself. My typology of contemporary rhetoric begins with sources treating the IR as a liberalizing corrective to perceived illiberal, “fundamentalist” tendencies. Primarily a post 9/11 phenomenon, this type includes Abdullahi an-Na’im’s sophisticated legal reform agenda as well as Irshad Maniji’s and Salman Rusdhie’s calls for a “Reformation” as antidote to “jihadist,” intolerant Islam. My second type is a direct rejection of the first and argues that the IR should be understood instead as “fundamentalist” Islam itself. Samuel Huntington, Fareed Zakaria, and Denesh D’Souza decry the atavistic violence and internecine strife of the IR. Our third type holds that a liberalizing IR is not a cure for but a mortal threat to Islam; this position produces the strange bedfellows of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) and Stanley Fish. Those of my fourth type largely ignore these debates over the “IR as liberalization” to explore the specific potential of the analogy (perhaps in its negation) to illuminate modern Islamic history. Dale Eickelman and Felicitas Opwis demonstrate the value of carefully comparing Muslim and Christian histories of reform. I close by asking what makes the “Reformation” analogy so enticing and generalizing about what can be gained or lost in employing it.