View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by eCommons@AKU eCommons@AKU Exploring Muslim Contexts ISMC Series 3-2015 Volume 7: Shaping Global Islamic Discourses : The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina and al-Mustafa Masooda Bano Editor Keiko Sakurai Editor Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_emc Recommended Citation Bano, M. , Sakurai, K. (Eds.). (2015). Volume 7: Shaping Global Islamic Discourses : The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina and al-Mustafa Vol. 7, p. 242. Available at: https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_emc/9 Shaping Global Islamic Discourses Exploring Muslim Contexts Series Editor: Farouk Topan Books in the series include Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, “Islamic” and Neo-liberal Alternatives Edited by Robert Springborg The Challenge of Pluralism: Paradigms from Muslim Contexts Edited by Abdou Filali-Ansary and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices Edited by Badouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past Edited by Derryl MacLean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies: Understanding the Past Edited by Sarah Bowen Savant and Helena de Felipe Contemporary Islamic Law in Indonesia: Shariah and Legal Pluralism Arskal Salim Shaping Global Islamic Discourses: The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina and al-Mustafa Edited by Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai www.euppublishing.com/series/ecmc Genealogy and Knowledge in Shaping Global Islamic Muslim Societies Discourses Understanding the Past The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina and al-Mustafa Edited by Sarah Bowen Savant Edited by Masoodaand Helen Banoa deand Felipe Keiko Sakurai in association with THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (International) in the United Kingdom Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations Savant_DeFelipe_Genealogies_Diacriticals.indd 3 19/03/2014 09:27 The opinions expressed in this volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. © Editorial matter and organisation, Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai, 2015 © The chapters, their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Goudy Oldstyle by Servis Filmsetting, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9685 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9687 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0348 1 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai Part One: Making of the Global: Inside the Three Universities 1. The Islamic University of Medina since 1961: The Politics of Religious Mission and the Making of a Modern Salafi Pedagogy 21 Mike Farquhar 2. Making Qom a Centre of Shiʿi Scholarship: Al-Mustafa International University 41 Keiko Sakurai 3. Protector of the “al-Wasatiyya” Islam: Cairo’s al-Azhar University 73 Masooda Bano Part Two: Returning Graduates in Negotiation with the Local 4. Ahlussunnah: A Preaching Network from Kano to Medina and Back 93 Alex Thurston 5. Qom Alumni in Indonesia: Their Role in the Shiʿi Community 117 Zulkifli Shaping Global Islamic Discourses 6. Islamic Modernism, Political Reform and the Arabisation of Education: The Relationship between Moroccan Nationalists and al-Azhar University 142 Ann Wainscott Part Three: Returning Graduates and Transformation of the Local 7. From Mecca to Cairo: Changing Influences on Fatwas in Southeast Asia 167 Yuki Shiozaki 8. “Azharisation” of ʿUlama Training in Malaysia 190 Hiroko Kushimoto About the Contributors 219 Index 221 — vi — Acknowledgements This volume resulted from a workshop held at the University of Oxford in August 2012. The editors would like to thank the authors for their insightful contributions that made this volume possible. They would also like to extend a special thanks to Stéphane Lacroix, who provided extremely valuable advice on this project. His comparative knowledge of both the Saudi and Egyptian religious spheres, and his familiarity with both al-Medina and al-Azhar proved to be a big asset for the project. Thanks are also due to Hilary Kalmbach and Sajjad Rizvi, who along with Stéphane acted as specialist commentators at the workshop. Their comments helped inform individual chapters, while also contributing to the three-university comparative analysis. Ben Young provided excellent support in getting the manuscript ready for publication and Jun’ichi Nishimura from Waseda University provided support on a number of critical fronts. This project was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), KAKENHI Grant No. 24401013, and Japan’s National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) Program for Islamic Area Studies. In addition, Masooda Bano would like to acknowledge the support of her home institution and the ESRC Ideas and Belief Fellowship, which she held between 2009 and 2012, allowing her the time to work on this project. Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai — vii — Introduction Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai Claims abound of Saudi oil money fuelling Salafi Islam across cultural and geo- graphical terrains as far removed as the remote village hamlets of the Swat valley in Pakistan and sprawling megacities such as Jakarta.1 Assumptions that the Iranian state is fighting proxy wars with Sunni Arab states in foreign lands sim- ilarly tend to be promoted to the status of fact.2 In fact, however, there are few empirically grounded studies that explore how those with hegemonic aspirations embed their ideologies in locales to which that thought and its accompanying practices are very foreign. Questions about how ideas are transported from an assumed core to societies viewed to be on the periphery, and how these ideas are embedded, if at all, within the complex socio-economic and political milieus of their new host societies, are more often answered through the creation of hypothetical scenarios than by marshalling scholarly evidence. We still lack academically sound responses to certain critical questions, such as: what enables a particular brand of Islam to gain centrality among competing positions?; to what extent do national governments play an active part in promoting a global Islamic discourse?; and in what ways do the Islamic discourses that acquire global attention challenge local beliefs and practices? This volume is designed to address this gap. It represents a rare attempt to map the complex processes of engagement between an assumed core and the peripheries. The volume illus- trates how this engagement at times dramatically transforms the host societies, while in other cases the absorption of new ideas remains partial – the success of foreign ideas in transforming local contexts remaining contingent on their suitability for the socio-economic and political realities of their host societies. In order to unravel the complex processes that underpin the global trans- mission of Islamic discourses, this volume focuses on the working of the three — 1 — Shaping Global Islamic Discourses most influential international centres of Islamic learning in contemporary times: al-Azhar University in Egypt; the Islamic University of Medina (IUM) in Saudi Arabia; and al-Mustafa International University in Iran. These three universi- ties, located in the politically influential countries in the Middle East and Gulf region, attract students from across the globe. Their graduates carry the ideas acquired during their education back to their home communities, and some also bring with them a reformatory zeal. These Islamic universities are the modern form of Islamic seminaries, which train ʿulama of various ranks, including mujta- hid, scholars entitled to issue legal opinions on matters not explicitly addressed in the Qurʾan.3 The significance of these universities is in their hybrid nature; they produce ʿulama through their curriculum, as inherited from the seminary tradition, while claiming a “modern” space by adapting the formal structures of the Western university. To some this model of mixing features of traditional and modern education systems might have much in common with Fethullah Gülen’s effort to globalise an Islamically conscious modern schooling system in Turkey; however, the Gülen schools fall into a different category, since they offer pre-tertiary education and do not aim to produce ʿulama. This volume argues that we should recognise the distinct potential of these universities in globalising specific Islamic discourses for the precise reason that these institu- tions are state supported, and thus that studying them enables us to examine the complex interplay between states’ desires to exercise global legitimacy and the emergence of global Islamic discourses.4 Al-Medina and al-Mustafa have, in particular, come to act as the central locations for the promotion of Wahhabi-infused Salafism and Iranian-styled Shiʿism, respectively: the former particularly associated with encroachment on alternative religious spaces and erosion of the localised Islam