Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (2 page)

Basij
. A paramilitary volunteer militia in the Islamic Republic of Iran, active in “morality” policing and suppression of dissidents.

Battle of Badr
(624)
. The first military encounter between the Muslims of Medina and the pagans of Mecca.

Battle of Siffin (657)
. A part of the first Muslim civil war, fought on the banks of the Euphrates between the supporters of Ali and the supporters of Muawiyah.

Battle of the Trench (627)
. An unsuccessful siege of Medina by the pagans of Mecca.

Battle of Uhud (625)
. The second military encounter between the Muslims of Medina and the pagans of Mecca.

Bedouin
. A predominantly desert-dwelling, nomadic, Arab ethnic group.

bey
. An honorific Turkish title for men.

bid’a
. “Innovation”; an unacceptable departure from the alleged tradition of the Prophet Muhammad.

burqa
. An all-enveloping garment worn by some Muslim women.

caliph
. A “successor” to the Prophet Muhammad and thus the leader of the Muslim community for Sunnis. The first four successors were the Rightly Guided Caliphs. The institution itself is called the caliphate.

Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP
or
I˙ttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti
)
. A revolutionary group founded by a branch of the Young Turk movement in 1889; it took total control of the Ottoman Empire after 1913.

Coptic Christians
. A major ethnoreligious group in Egypt.

dhimmi
. Non-Muslims—typically, Jews and Christians—who received “protected” status in Islamic lands.

Directorate of Religious Affairs
(
Diyanet
I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg˘ı
).
The official religious body formed by the Republic of Turkey in 1924 to replace the Ottoman religious institutions. Based on the Hanafi school.

Ecumenical Patriarch
. The Greek patriarch of Constantinople, first among equals in the Eastern Orthodox communion. 

efendi
. An honorific title for men in the Ottoman Empire.

fatwa
. A legal opinion issued by a Muslim religious scholar.

fez
. A red cap worn by Ottoman men before the 1925 Hat Reform in Turkey.

fiqh
. Islamic jurisprudence as developed by jurists. Shariah is the ideal,
fiqh
(
fıkıh
in Turkish) is the actual practice.

Franks (
or sometimes
Francs)
. Western Europeans in the Islamic Middle East, often associated with crusading armies.

Garpçılar
. “Westernists”; a particularly secularist group among the Young Turks of the late Ottoman Empire.

Hadiths
. “Reports, news, sayings”; a collection of literature that claims to communicate the Sunna (tradition) of the Prophet Muhammad.

Halakha
. The legal side of Judaism, as distinct from Haggadah, the nonlegal material.

Hanafi
. Major Sunni Islamic law school, often the most flexible and lenient.

Hanbali
. Major Sunni Islamic law school, often the most rigid. Its modern form is Wahhabism, practiced primarily in Saudi Arabia.

Hejaz
. The west-central region of the Arabian Peninsula, where Mecca and Medina are located.

Herod
. The name of successive kings who ruled the Holy Land before and during the time of Jesus.

Herodian
. A Jewish political faction, the partisans of Herod.

hijra
. The “migration” of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622.

hodja
(
or
hoca
)
. “Teacher”; Turkish term for learned men, often religious but also secular.

hurriyah
. “Freedom” or “liberty” (
hürriyet
in Turkish).

ijtihad
. “Striving, truth-seeking”; independent reasoning in the interpretation of Islamic law.

imam
. Prayer leader in Sunni Islam, often one in an official or governmental post. He plays a more prominent role in Shiism as a successor to the Prophet.

Independence Tribunals
. Arbitrary courts that Turkey’s Kemalist regime established to eliminate political opponents.

intellectualism (
or
rationalism)
. In theology, the idea that God is rational and that His principles can be understood (at least partly) by the human intellect.

iqta
. Land grant from a ruler in return for military or administrative services by a client.

Islahat Edict
(
Islahat Hatt-ı Hümayunu
)
. The Ottoman “Reform” declaration of 1856, which established full legal equality for citizens of all religions.

Islamic Party of Malaysia
(PAS)
. A political party that aims to establish Malaysia as a country based on Islamic law.

Islamism
. A modern political ideology devising an “Islamic state” by borrowing from Islam as a religion but also from other ideologies such as socialism and nationalism.

istihsan
. “Legal preference” for the sake of the common good; a tool used in Islamic jurisprudence.

Jabriyyah
. “Proponents of enforcement”; early Islamic school that denied free will and promoted predestination.

Jadidism
. From the word
jadid
(new), an Islamic renewal movement in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, in contrast to the conservative Qadimism.

jahiliyah
. “Ignorance”; a Muslim term describing the pre-Islamic period in Arabia.

Jahmiya
. An early and little-known Islamic sect with views similar to those of the Mutazilites.

Jamaat-e-Islami
. An Islamist political party in Pakistan founded in 1941.

jihad
. “Struggle” for God; not necessarily but often a military effort for the defense or the advancement of Islam and the Muslim community.

jihadism
. Extremist Islamist movement that focuses on military
jihad
, often by way of terrorism.

Ka’ba
. Literally, “cube”; the cube-shaped main Muslim sanctuary in Mecca, believed to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael as the world’s first monotheist temple.

kadi
(
or
qadi
)
. Religious judge or municipal commissioner (
kadı
in Turkish) in Muslim lands.

kanun
. Sultanic law in the Ottoman Empire used to complement and at times replace Islamic law.

Karaite
. A Jewish sect that accepts only the Torah as religious law and repudiates the Talmud.

Kemalism
. Political ideology—devised by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his followers—that focused on nationalism, secularism, and “statism.”

Kemalist Revolution
. The political and cultural revolution in Turkey between 1925 and 1950 under the rule of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his followers.

Kharijites
. “Dissenters”; a militant sect in early Islam that denounced all other Muslims and waged war on them. Only a moderate form has survived to date, and it is very marginal.

Khilafat Movement
. A political campaign by Muslims in India to influence the British government and to protect the Ottoman caliphate in the aftermath of World War I.

kufr
. “Blasphemy” or “disbelief.” One who is in
kufr
is a
kafir
, an infidel. The term literally means “to hide by covering,” so a
kafir
is one who “hides” the truth even though he has seen it.

laiklik
. The self-styled official secularism of Republican Turkey; adopted from the French word
laïcité
.

madrasa
. “School” in Arabic; more commonly, a place for Muslim learning.

Mahdi
. Muslim messianic figure expected to return in the “end times.” More important in Shiite theology than in Sunni doctrine.

Maliki
. One of the four schools of law in Sunni Islam.

Mecca
. Islam’s holiest city, where the Ka’ba, the object of Muslim pilgrimage, is located.

Mecelle
(
Mecelle-i Ahkâm-ı Adliye
)
. The civil code of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was based on the Hanafi legal tradition but also included many adaptations.

Medina
. Islam’s second-holiest city, where the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad is located.

mihna
. “Trial”; specifically, the inquisition established by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun in the early ninth century.

Milli Görüs¸
. “National Outlook,” Turkey’s main political Islamist movement founded in the late 1960s; it has morphed into various political parties.

mufti
. A specialist in Islamic law who is eligible to deliver a
fatwa
, or legal opinion.

Muhammad
. The Prophet of Islam who received the revelations of the Qur’an. Unlike Jesus in Christianity, Muhammad had no superhuman qualities, according to the Qur’an, although Muslim tradition later attributed to him some superhuman aspects.

mujahid
. One who engages in
jihad
, the holy struggle for God.

mullah
. A Muslim cleric educated in Islamic theology and sacred law.

Murjiites
. “Postponers”; a school of theology in early Islam that promoted pluralism by saying that theological disputes should be “postponed” to the afterlife to be settled by God.

MÜSI˙AD
. The Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association of Turkey, founded in 1990 by conservative Muslim businessmen.

Muslim
. “One who submits” and becomes an adherent of Islam by testifying, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.”

Muslim Brotherhood (
Ikhwan al-Muslimun
)
. The world’s oldest and largest Islamist political group, founded in 1928 in Egypt by schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna.

Mutawwa’in
. “Volunteers” (sing.:
Mutawwa
); a casual term for the government-sanctioned religious police in Saudi Arabia.

Mutazilites
. Followers of a school of theology in early Islam that defended free will and emphasized the legitimate role of reason as well as revelation in the pursuit of truth. Their membership declined after the third century of Islam, but traces of their philosophy survived, most notably, in the Hanafi and Maturidi schools.

Naqshbandis
. Members of a major spiritual order (
tarikat
) in Sufism.