Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

2 0Islam i n World Cult u r e sconflicted with them. Consequently, for generations of independent Muslimreligious scholars, Islamic law has been a powerful potential source of alternativeauthority and opposition to ruling regimes. In the early modern period,h o w e v e r, some Muslim states (such as the Ottoman Empire) began to bring togetherthe administration of the s h a r i ’ a and the offices of the state in new ways,forging paths that have been further pursued in a number of Muslim societiesto this day.Religious Scholars and Institutions of LearningThe histories of the u l a m a have been dynamic and complex across many Muslimsocieties throughout the medieval and modern periods. Some Muslim governmentsattempted to make the u l a m a s u b s e rvient to state interests. In otherMuslim states, the u l a m a policed their own ranks, reacting to perceived internaland external threats to Islam. Yet the space for independent thought andaction by the u l a m a never completely disappeared. This fact was remarkedupon, for example, by the eighteenth-century h a d i t h scholar Shah Wali Allahal-Dihlawi, who had studied in both India and Mecca. In a critique of what hesaw as the growing narrow-mindedness of some of his fellow u l a m a , a l - D i h l a w idescribed the typical scholar of his day as “a prattler and wind-bag who indiscriminatelymemorized the opinions of the jurists whether these were strongor weak and related them in a loud-mouthed harangue.” However, he was alsoquick to add, “I don’t say that this is so in all cases, for God has a group of Hisworshippers unharmed by their failure, who are God’s proof on earth even ifthey have become few” (quoted in Hermansen 1996, 455).A generation later, in Yemen, at least one of those “few” surviving, independent-mindedscholars whom al-Dihlawi might have thought worthy wasable not only to survive but to flourish. When Muhammad ibn Ali al-Shawkaniwas asked to accept the position of overseer of judges for the Qasimi state, heagreed to do so only when assured by the ruler that his judgments would beexecuted “whatever they may be and whomever [they concern], even if theimam himself was implicated” (quoted in Haykel 2003, 69). The continuingpolitical and social importance of the ulama in many parts of the contempora ry Muslim world has been persuasively argued in the recent work ofMuhammad Qasim Zaman, who has noted that, for example, the number ofstudents enrolled in madrasas in the Punjab region of India has increased bymore than a factor of ten over the past four decades (Zaman 2002, 2). This,he contends, speaks for the increasing relevance of the ulama as spokesmenfor Islamic traditions in a world where notions of cultural authenticity havebecome global concerns.Since the eleventh century, u l a m a teaching law according to one of the es-