Once Were Radicals (38 page)

jahannum:
An Arabic word meaning ‘Hell'.

jannah:
An Arabic word meaning ‘Heaven'.

jemaat:
Congregation.

jihad:
Literally means ‘to strive'. Muslims claim that military jihad can only refer to a just war, and the
sharia
stipulates strict
rules that prohibit (amongst other things) the killing of civilians and the destruction of crops and places of worship. It is often translated as ‘holy war', though this term appears nowhere in the Koran and other religious texts.

khudahafiz:
A traditional Iranian, Afghan and South Asian greeting which means ‘may God keep you under His protection'.

koran:
Also spelt
Qur'an
, it is the scripture of Muslims, who believe it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel in small bits over a period of twenty-three years, commencing when he was forty years old. The Koran is regarded as the literal word of God. The Koran is in Arabic. It has been translated into many languages, but Muslims don't regard these translations as being a substitute for the Koran itself. The Koran is divided into 114
surahs
(chapters) of varying lengths.

madrassa:
An Arabic word meaning ‘school'. Also used by paranoid pundits to describe a place where young boys are programmed to become part of the giant Islamist conspiracy to take over the world. Apparently both Osama and Obama studied this conspiracy in a
madrassa
.

molvi:
A religious leader, also known as ‘imam'.

mubah:
In religious terms, it means ‘neutral'.

muezzin:
Man chanting the ‘call to prayer'.

nafl:
In religious terms, while this isn't compulsory it would still earn
savaab
or spiritual currency.

qaida:
A book teaching the Arabic alphabet and how Arabic letters are combined to make the sounds of words from the Koran.

rakaat:
A cycle of prayer.

ruku:
A bowing position used in prayer, where people bow down with their hands on their knees.

sharia:
The name of a legal tradition that grew out of the life and example of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, like
Judaism, consists not just of belief and ethics but also law.
Sharia
is a much-maligned term, often used to describe a system of non-anaesthetic amputation where people walk around handless, footless and maybe even headless (though certainly not legless) after committing some heedless breach of the law. Instead of police, imagine bearded blokes and sheilas (women whose burqas perhaps cover their facial hair!) depriving us all of privacy, patrolling the streets searching for spare limbs to amputate. In reality,
sharia
is just one of a family of legal traditions that includes English Common Law and European Civil Law.
Sharia
itself insists it has limited application to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries. In this sense,
sharia
becomes little more than liturgy. And I doubt you'll see too many Muslim refugees and asylum seekers escaping from wacky
sharia
or Islamic states like the Taliban's Afghanistan wanting to see
sharia
implemented in Australia or New Zealand in a huge hurry.

salaat:
Also called
nemaaz
in Urdu, Turkish, Bosnian, Bengali and a host of other languages. It's the ritual worship that Muslims are supposed to engage in five times a day, a combination of physical postures, prayers and deep concentration.

savaab:
A special kind of divine currency which we could use after we die to purchase tickets to heaven.

Sufism:
A word invented by Orientalists to describe the inner spiritual aspects of Islam. Sunni Muslims refer to it as
tasawwuf
or
tariqa
while Shia Muslims call it
irfan
. I prefer the Shia word for obvious reasons.

sunnah:
In religious terms this means something is important but not quite compulsory.

taqiyya:
Amending one's visible religious behaviour for fear of persecution. In the years following the Iranian revolution, many Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi and Sunni writers
attributed this teaching to Iranian Shia propagandists whose alleged agenda was to take control of Muslim countries by stealth. It is now used by anti-Muslim propa gandists to describe the mechanism 1.2 billion Muslims collectively use to hide their collective agenda to take over the whole world via such secret means such as terrorism, poverty, ignorance, civil war, suppressing ethnic and linguistic minorities, putting up with God-awful dictatorial governments who pay lip service to Palestinians and do even less for Muslims in Darfur, etc.

topi:
A Hindi/Urdu word referring to a cap.

ummah:
The international community or brother/sisterhood of Muslims. The sense of
ummah
is the glue that binds Muslims together. At least that's the theory.

waajib:
In religious terms, it means slightly less than compulsory.

English translations of many books authored by twentieth-century political Islam writers mentioned here (Syed Abul Ala Maududi, Dr Ali Shariati, Dr Yusuf Qaradawi, Imam Hasan al-Banna, Muhammad Qutb, Syed Qutb and Ayatollah Murtaza Mutaherri) are all available online. Perhaps the best translations of Maududi are published by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, UK. The Witness Pioneer website (
www.witness-pioneer.org
) carries translations of many authors mentioned in this book. Maryam Jameelah is a native English speaker, and quite a few of her books are available online. Excerpts from books of the English Sufi Shahidullah Faridi are also available at Masud Ahmad Khan's website (
www.masud.co.uk
).

Memoirs, biographies, fiction, history and profiles of Muslim writers I can recommend include:

Randa Abdel-Fattah,
Does My Head Look Big In This?
, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2005.

Imran Ahmed,
Unimagined: A Muslim boy meets the West,
Aurum Press Ltd, London, 2007.

Leila Ahmed,
A Border Passage From Cairo to America: A woman's journey
, Penguin, London, 2000.

Moazzam Begg,
Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's journey to Guantanamo and back
, The Free Press, London, 2006.

Amin Maalouf,
Leo the African
, translated by Peter Sluglett, Abacus, London, 1988.

Amin Maalouf,
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
, translated by Jon Rothschild, Al-Saqi Books, London, 1984.

Rageh Omaar,
Only Half of Me: Being a Muslim in Britain
, Penguin, London, 2006.

Sayed Qutb,
A Child from the Village
, edited and translated by John Colvert and William Shepard, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2004.

 

It's impossible to realistically talk about the politics and culture of a single entity called ‘the Muslim world'. Apart from the label ‘Muslim', what possible common threads can you identify in 1.2 billion people who live in just about every nation on the planet? Still, there are certain conflicts that are commonly associated with Muslims and that keep raising their ugly heads in the news. There is also the spectre of terrorism which is commonly (and in my opinion unfairly) associated with Muslims to the extent that it's almost become a prerequisite for every terrorist to have Muslim faith or ancestry. I recommend the following books—of varying degrees of seriousness—on politics and conflict in the nominally Muslim world:

Peter L. Bergen,
The Osama bin Laden I Know: An oral history of al Qaeda's leader
, Free Press, New York, 2006.

Jason Burke,
On the Road to Kandahar: Travels through conflict in the Islamic world
, Allen Lane, London, 2006.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi,
Who Needs An Islamic State?
, 2nd edn, Malaysia Think Tank, London, 2008.

Noah Feldman,
The Fall and Rise of The Islamic State
, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2008.

Rageh Omaar,
Revolution Day: The human story of the battle for Iraq
, Penguin, London, 2004.

Jeremy Seal,
A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in search of a hat
, Picador, 1995.

 

Books about Muslim communities in Australia and New Zealand I recommend are:

Hanifa Deen,
Caravanserai: Journey among Australian Muslims
, Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2003.

Hanifa Deen,
The Jihad Seminar
, University of Western Australia Press, 2008.

Abdullah Drury,
Islam in New Zealand: The first mosque
, A. Drury, Christchurch, 2006.

Nadia Jamal and Taghred Chandab,
The Glory Garage
, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005.

 

I also recommend the following basic books on Islam and Muslim societies:

Khaled Abou El Fadl,
The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the extremists
, HarperCollins, New York, 2007.

Imam Al-Bayhaqi,
The Seventy-Seven Branches of Faith
, translated by Abdal-Hakim Murad, The Quilliam Press, London, 1990.

Karen Armstrong,
Islam: A short history
, Phoenix Press, London, 2001.

Karen Armstrong,
Muhammad: A biography of the Prophet
, Phoenix Press, London, 2004.

Yahiya Emerick,
The Life and Work of Muhammad
, Alpha Books, New York, 2002.

Farid Esack,
On Being a Muslim: Finding a religious path in the world today
, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 1999.

Farid Esack,
The Qur'an: A short introduction
, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2001.

John J. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed,
Who Speaks for Islam?: What a billion Muslims really think
, Gallup Press, New York, 2007.

Michael Wolfe,
A Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten centuries of writing about the pilgrimage to Mecca
, Grove Press, New York, 1997.

Michael Wolfe,
The Hadj: An American's pilgrimage to Mecca
, Grove Press, New York, 1993.