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Colonial scholarship deliberately campaigned to discredit waqf, not merely to describe it

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@hallaq_restating_2018, loc. 231, @hallaq_restating_2018, loc. 238, @ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 262

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Colonial scholarship deliberately campaigned to discredit waqf, not merely to describe it

Evidence

But they also demanded, and received the promise, that the waqf system—which barred real property from entering the open market—would be abolished. Over the next two decades, more specifically between 1860 and 1880, the pressure was intensified by both the British and the French, whose scholars—doubling as colonialist officers—were already propounding the idea, in academia and outside it, that waqfs reflected a primitive mode, that they belonged to the age of decadence when the “Church” controlled much wealth, and that they stood in the way of economic development, which is to say, progress. All this amounted to a campaign, in Europe, in French Algeria, and in the Ottoman Empire, to the effect that waqf was a cause of cultural malaise and material decline. As a result, the so-called reformers moved aggressively against the waqf, thus sustaining the drive that eventually led to its abolition in the new Turkish Republic and elsewhere. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 231 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

To accomplish their goal, the French legal specialists produced a flood of argument to the effect that a fundamental distinction existed between family and public waqfs—a distinction that had never acquired the same meaning, or a sharp separation, in the ShariÊża. Capitalizing on the centrality of the Quran to Muslim belief and practice, they vehemently insisted that the family waqf was a later innovation (bidÊża) in Islam, also playing on this latter concept as a topic that had received some attention in the Muslim legal tradition itself, in which some jurists had rejected certain legal rules as unwarranted creations. On these grounds, they concluded, through the best scholarly method they could muster, that family endowments circumvented the Quranic law of inheritance that operates by the principle of shares. It was not relevant to their argument to clarify that Muslims had a good reason to develop waqfs in the service of inheritance law within the family, because the Quranic shares’ system tended to fragment family property. Nor was it relevant to note, as scholarship is supposed to do in the interest of balance, that the waqf not only was a space for property devolution but had the much larger function of redistribution of wealth, a mechanism that reflected Islam’s great emphasis on egalitarian “economics.” Nor yet was it relevant, if it was understood at all, that this institution was crucial for the formation of a civil society the likes of which modernity has never known. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 238 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

By the rime the theoretical category of ‘Colonial Discourse Analysis’ arose, however, this perfectly necessary rereading of the Western archive was extended to produce the more or less dubious claim thar the whole of it was an archive of bad faith and ‘Orientalist’ deformation. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 262 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: French colonial scholars misrepresented the family waqf to justify abolishing it. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of
, 238; Subaltern studies read colonial documents against the grain to expose their rhetorical distortions; Colonial Discourse Analysis overstated the whole Western archive as bad faith — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 262 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

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