Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 2 3societies. Indeed, a number of the major Muslim architectural monuments inMiddle Eastern cities were built to house institutions founded on w a q f b e-quests by wealthy women during the period of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires(Ruggles 2000). Such arrangements had the double benefit of providingthe wealthy with a way to secure their property in perpetuity while at the sametime providing important income and resources to the ranks of religiousscholars who constructed the regulations of this system and thus avoided subse rvience to the state.H o w e v e r, the freedom idealized in the classical formulations of w a q f r e g u l a-tions proved not to be completely unassailable, and later Muslim authoritiestook various means to exert control over religious scholarship, which they sawas an important sphere of potential opposition. For example, in the seventeenthcentury, the Ottoman Empire promulgated new “official” legal codesaimed at standardizing Islamic law in their territories (Voll 1982, 19). In theearly nineteenth century, the modernizing programs of Muhammad Ali inEgypt brought more centralized administration and even the outright dissolutionof Muslim institutions that had previously found their sources of fundingand social autonomy in privately endowed w a q f . The financial support ofu l a m a associated with Egyptian m a d r a s as was progressively eroded, first by thetaxation of w a q f in 1809 and then by the state confiscation of w a q f properties in1814 (Marsot 1984, 66, 143). Similar programs were often also taken up by Europeanpowers in the Muslim societies that came under their colonial controlin the late nineteenth century, as well as by the independent postcolonial governmentsof many Muslim countries. Khaled Abou El Fadl has cited thesetrends toward centralized control of w a q f as contributing to the disruption ofcivil discourses of disagreement among traditionally trained Muslim scholarsand to the subsequent rise in popularity of more narrowly imagined religiousauthoritarianisms (Abou El Fadl 2003, 46).In the medieval and early modern periods, the establishment of them a d r a s as and the system of w a q f that supported them had provided mechanismsfor social mobility and cultural continuity during times when the greatMuslim empires of the Middle East and South Asia appeared to be crumbling.Following the devastating disruptions of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasionsof the Middle East and the consequent shattering of large-scale state institutionsin the region, the u l a m a associated with the m a d r a s as provided ameans not only to preserve the traditions of Islam but also to spread them intoareas beyond the limits of earlier Muslim movements into Europe, Africa, andAsia. As m a d r a s a institutions proliferated throughout the expanding Muslimworld, they fostered the formation of networks of u l a m a who read and commentedon the same texts and shared a cosmopolitan cultural tradition thatparalleled that of the royal courts.