Restoring a Lost Identity: Models of Education in Modern Islamic Thought

Education occupied a central position in modern Islamic thought. It aimed at purifying faith, but also at nurturing activism in the service of Islam and the community. Education was required to be holistic, strengthening both soul and body. It embraced all aspects of life and was conveyed by diverse means, ranging from communal involvement to political revolution. The broad scope of this education was impelled by the comprehensiveness of the Islamic religion, but also by the multifaceted nature of Westernization itself. The corrupting presence of hedonistic culture backed by indigenous regimes heightened the functional aspect of the pedagogic realm in Islamic discourse more than ever before. Re-education was perceived as the main lever for achieving cultural authenticity and as a core component of identity politics. The paper offers a contextualized reading of education in Islamic thought, an issue largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, which has focused more on socio-political aspects of the modern Islamic revival.     

Redeeming Sunni Islam: Al-Qa‘ida's Polemic against the Muslim Brethren

The appearance of al-Qa‘ida at the beginning of the 1990s challenged the modern Islamic discourse by bringing the struggle against the ‘new Crusaders’—the United States and Europe—to centre stage. Impelled by frustration with the meagre record of Sunni radicalism in achieving substantive political change, and by its own aspiration for leadership, the organisation singled out the non-violent, influential Muslim Brethren as a main rival and a prime target for polemics. The formative basis for this polemic was provided by an essay written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Hisad al-murr [The Bitter Harvest], around 1989. The essay, which has not been dealt with in the research literature until now, constitutes a biting attack against the Brethren. It undermines their historical legacy and goes so far as to shatter the image of their charismatic founder, Hasan al-Banna. More broadly, al-Zawahiri's essay reveals the close affinity between historical memory and politics, and illuminates the clash within modern Islam.     

Evaluating the forensic informativeness of mtDNA haplogroup H sub-typing on a Eurasian scale

The impact of phylogeographic information on mtDNA forensics has been limited to the quality control of published sequences and databases. In this work we use the information already available on Eurasian mtDNA phylogeography to guide the choice of coding-region SNPs for haplogroup H. This sub-typing is particularly important in forensics since, even when sequencing both HVRI and HVRII, the discriminating power is low in some Eurasian populations. We show that a small set (eight) of coding-region SNPs resolves a substantial proportion of the identical haplotypes, as defined by control-region variation alone. Moreover, this SNP set, while substantially increasing the discriminating efficiency in most Eurasian populations by roughly equal amounts, discloses population-specific profiles.