Understanding Islamic Society

[ramana]

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ ... 123326.ece
No Waqf Board has authority to expel community from a religion: Smriti Irani amid Ahmadiyya row
Ms. Irani said, "I only want to say that all Waqf Boards come under the Act of Parliament.
July 26, 2023
Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday said no Waqf Board in the country has the authority to expel a person or a community from a religion, remarks that come amid a row over the Andhra Pradesh Waqf Board passing a resolution describing the Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims.
Prominent Muslim organisation Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind on Tuesday backed the Andhra Pradesh Waqf Board's stance on the Ahmadiyya community, claiming that this is the "unanimous position" of all Muslims.
Asked about the issue, Ms. Irani said, "I only want to say that all Waqf Boards come under the Act of Parliament. No Waqf Board can act contrary to the dignity of Parliament and violate laws made by it. No Waqf Board has permission that it changes a fatwa into a government order." "No Waqf Board has authority, under the Act of Parliament, that it expels a person or a community from a religion. We have sought a reply from the Andhra Pradesh chief secretary. We have requested him to put the facts before us because the Ahmadiyya Muslim community had appealed to the Minority Affairs Ministry," she told reporters outside Parliament.
.....
Gautam
Also see:
https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... d-8860211/
Ahamadiyyas are not Muslims: Jamiat backs Andhra Waqf Board
In 2012, the Andhra Pradesh State Waqf Board passed a resolution declaring the entire Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims
Esha Roy
.....

She is correct. Need to bring back Zawabit ie the Ruler must rule.

[RoyG]

There is something more perverse in what she is saying. Waqf is basically an extension of goi through legislation. If the GoI wants it could formally nationalize all the land under a governmental body. This is what I think the government intends to do at some point. Capture Hindu land through an Islamic body and basically transfer title without paying for it. This is why the PMO and the babu class don’t do anything about it.

[ricky_v]

https://aeon.co/essays/sharif-hussein-a ... rab-empire

Tens of millions of Muslims today claim this heritage. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator until 2003, was one of them, for example. The rulers of Morocco, too, are ashraf. (The Saudi kings are emphatically not.)

In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, extremist Israeli government.

Abdullah II cited his great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein. It was from Hussein’s time, sometime at the end of the First World War, according to Abdullah II, that the Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites originates.

Wikipedia in English, for instance, tells us that the custodianship of the Muslim sites in Jerusalem by the Hashemites follows from a ‘verbal agreement’ of Hussein with the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine in 1924. The Indonesian version of Wikipedia repeats the claims of the English article. The Arabic version, however, tells us about the financial help Hussein gave for restoring the holy sites of Jerusalem and subsequent donations by the Hashemite dynasty for further improvements to the holy city.

Sharif Hussein is a legendary figure of the 1910s and ’20s. For some – certainly for Abdullah II – Hussein was the nationalist leader of the ‘Arab revolt’ during the First World War who won the war for the Arabs. In an alliance with Britain, he revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916 in order to establish a giant independent state that he called the ‘Arab Kingdom’. Others see him in less heroic terms. They blame him for ‘stabbing the Ottomans in the back’, the inability to stop the partitions decided by Europeans, and the Zionist settlement of Palestine – so, in a way, for losing the war.

The loyalty of the Meccan descendants of the Prophet meant the symbolic recognition of the Ottoman caliphate. Since their conquest in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans usually appointed a sharif to serve as the emir of Mecca, its local ruler. From the mid-19th century, the descendants of the Prophet became closer and closer to Istanbul, literally. Hussein was born in Istanbul because his family branch in exile competed for the emirate of the holy city. He knew Turkish, his wife was Turkish-speaking, and his sons received Ottoman education. Hussein, known in the Ottoman administration as Şerif Ali Paşazade Hüseyin Bey (in Turkish transliteration), became quite an Ottomanised descendant of the Prophet.



From the 1870s, the descendants of the Prophet received political roles in the Ottoman imperial capital. Many other more ordinary Arabs from the provinces also became part of the modernising imperial bureaucracy. Hussein and his sons (and the rival sharifian Meccan family members), circulating between Mecca and Istanbul, benefitted from this modern experiment fusing Islam with imperial patriotism. It’s helpful to think of this as an ‘unelected system of representation’, for the sultan suspended the imperial constitution in 1878 and substituted the parliament with these new practices. The ashraf ‘represented’ their regions (in a way, Hussein’s family stood for Mecca and the Hijaz region) but also in general the Muslim community. Many ashraf sat on imperial councils, travelled on steamships and the new railway lines, and so provided a symbolic cover for the empire. After the coup d’état usually known as the Young Turk Revolution to restore the constitution in 1908, Hussein’s sons became elected members of the new imperial assembly. And from 1908, Hussein held the imperial office of the emir of Mecca.

In the 1910s, Hussein and his sons made cautious contact with the British consul in Cairo. Intriguing, in early 1914 Hussein’s son Abdullah asked the British consul to consider a British protectorate over the emirate of Mecca like the British did with the subdued Afghan emir.


By the 1910s, many faith- and ethnicity-based groups in the Ottoman Empire demanded reforms to transform the empire into a federation. Bourgeois Arabs were no exception as some Syrians started to imagine a decentralised Ottoman Empire with Arab autonomy. Other Arab groups – for instance, the religious entrepreneur-journalist Sheikh Rashid Rida and his activists, with some European encouragement – imagined a new empire as a Muslim association of emirs, and some other sheikhs even advocated for an Arab caliph instead of an Ottoman one. In many of these 1910s plans, the ashraf had a role and Hussein, as the ruler of Mecca, personally could expect a potential caliphate. European commentators imagined this would-be Arab caliphate as a type of papacy, restricted to the holy cities in the Hijaz. This would have ended the age-old Ottoman system of combining the emperor and caliph titles. In short, the spirit of the time was to create autonomous polities in some sort of federation as a better way to accommodate economic and political demands of ethnic groups, and to challenge the Ottoman leadership of Sunni Islam.

After an exchange of letters with the British High Commissioner in Cairo (this correspondence came to be known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence), Hussein declared his revolt – the ‘Arab revolt’ – against the Ottoman government in June 1916. Ever since, there has been a debate over what the British promised exactly, what a promise means in informal diplomacy, and whether the British betrayed their promises later.


Despite the assurances about a large Arab polity in the correspondence with McMahon, no Allied planners really expected that the emir of Mecca would want something more than a small emirate with the holy cities in the Hijaz. When, in October 1916, Hussein and his sons announced their claim to a giant polity, with Hussein as ‘King of the Arabs’, it took the Allied Powers by surprise. The ‘Arab Kingdom’ was an idea about a new empire stretching from the Levant (what is today Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon) to the Iraqi regions, even Arabia, thus including most of the Arabic-speaking Asian Ottoman provinces (but not the North African ones). Overcoming their surprise, in January 1917 and later repeatedly, the Allied Powers recognised Hussein as king only over the Hijaz, a small portion of Arabia. But this new ruler and his sons were not satisfied with a kingdom of the Hijaz. They maintained their claims to a much larger state, a new Muslim-Arab empire. This is why, when the sharifian troops entered Ottoman Damascus in October 1918 under the orders of his second son Faisal, many Damascenes understood that they are now in the ‘Arab Kingdom’, being the subjects of Hussein, a new Muslim sultan.

During 1918 and 1919, the sharifian advocates of the Arab Kingdom projected Islam and Arab ethnicity as the founding norms of a new political order. From early 1918, the official journal in Mecca and his sons called Hussein ‘the Commander of the Faithful’ in Arabic (amir al-mu’minin) while the new king craved for the title of caliph. Both the sharifian and British propaganda started to advertise Prophetic descent as an important quality for Muslim rulership. The Arab Kingdom was to be ruled by Hussein and his sons, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, Prophetic genealogy and ethnicity were to serve as the constitutional foundations of Hussein’s Arab Kingdom. We can call this idea of a state a ‘genealogical empire’.

[ramana]

T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom captures all this quite well.
Also the "Lawrence of Arabia" the movie with Peter O'Toole, has Alec Guinness as Sharif Hussein.

[ramana]

The India Office supported the Al-Saud and his iqwan forces who ultimately won from Sharif Hussein's band.
In response, London office set up Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq under Hussein's sons.
Only Jordan retained the Hussein lineage.
Egypt and Iraq had military coups.

[ricky_v]

i am currently reading the loom of time by robert kaplan, covering the area from egypt /ethiopia to afghanistan, reading a kaplan after long time actually, after the revenge of geography; kaplan is one of the most intriguing geopolitical author in contemporary times, this book so far is also quite good, though it is at an intersection of serious history scholarship, recollection of previous visits and events, interviews, travelogues and whimsy,

certain things are interesting, he mentions that ethiopia has always been an empire and that goes to explain the basis of eritrean independence and the tigrayan conflict

an excerpt from the section on saudi arabia:

In all of the nearly seven hundred pages of the Penguin paperback edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it is the six pages of chapter 3 that account for the most memorable intellectual argument. These six pages were inspired by perceptions first realized by Doughty, but translated by Lawrence into language more popular for its time than Doughty’s, derivative as the latter’s was of a sixteenth-century bible. Doughty’s image of a desert Semite “sitting in cloaca to the eyes, and whose brow touches heaven” was greatly elaborated on by Lawrence into these memorable passages:

…In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form…. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings…. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice…. they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity.[7]

[NRao]