ABSTRACT
That Islam has many faces is a truism in a world in which it is recognized that individual and collective identities are multiple and trans-local. Yet, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this fact came as a surprise to much of the population of the non-Islamic world. In the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001, the Western media sought to explain the apparent paradox that followers of Islam – literally meaning submission to the good will of God 1 – could perpetrate such acts of violence upon ordinary citizens by qualifying, or questioning, their ‘faith’. Were these individuals not Muslims at all, but just plain ‘terrorists’, using the banner of Islam for essentially extremist political goals? Or, were they indeed ‘Muslims’, albeit deviant – ‘fanatical’, ‘extremist’ or ‘brainwashed’ – ones? And, if the latter, what specific components within Islam allowed it to take such intolerant forms? In seeking their answers, journalists and ‘experts’ uncovered not only different branches of Islam (Shi’a and Sunni) but different juridical schools, or madhhabs, within Sunni Islam (Hanafism, Hanbalism, Shafiism and Malikism), more than one sacred text (Koran, Sunna and Akhbar) and even different interpretations of these. For some analysts, Hanbalism and Wahhabism in particular were synonyms for ‘fundamentalism’, while Hanafism was a flexible and moderate school. But for others Wahhabism was an institutionalized, state religion containing little that might be construed as oppositional or ‘radical’ in contrast, adoption of the Hanafi madhhab held the possibility for individual interpretation, and thus maximum potential for manipulation in the interests of extremist political causes.
