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"The Genesis of Islamic Economics: A Chapter in the Politics of Muslim Identity " / Justifying Cultural Separatism

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Timur Kuran, "The Genesis of Islamic Economics: A Chapter in the Politics of
Muslim Identity, Social Research, Vol. 64, no. 2 (Summer 1997)

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kuran.htm

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

[...] http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kuran.htm
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Je bent een rund als je niet met Allah stunt!

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