War and Peace in Islam : The Uses and Abuses of Jihad (P/B)

LET US BE MUSLIMS is a new edited English version of Sayyid Mawdudi’s Urdu Khutubat. It is no ordinary book, says Khurram Murad in his long Introduction, for it has stirred more hearts and impelled more lives to change their course than any of his more erudite works. In these Friday congregational addresses, Sayyid Mawdudi expounds such familiar themes as Iman, Islam, the Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, Pilgrimage and Jihad. But, in an unusually beautiful, powerfully reasoned, eloquent and passionate, and yet simple and lucid style,

“Sayyid Abul A’la Al-Mawdudui (1903-1979), one of the chief architects of contemporary Islamic resurgence, was the an outstanding Islamic thinker and writer of his time. He devoted his life to expound the meaning and message of Islam and to organise a collective movement to establish the Islamic Order. In this struggle, he had to pass through all kinds of sufferings.
Between 1948-67, he spent a total of five years in different prisons of Pakistan. In 1953, he was also sentenced to death by a Martial Law court for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet, this sentence being later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1941, he founded Jama’at-I Islami, of which he remained Amir, until 1972 and which is one of the most prominent Islamic movements of our day. He authored more than one hundred works on Islam, both scholarly and popular, and his writings have been translated into forty languages.”

This original work was first presented as a Ph.D. thesis in 1994 at the University of Wales. It is a well-balanced combination of library as well as
field research which systematically and critically assesses the theory and practice of exorcism among orthodox Muslims.

The field research is comprised of interviews with seventeen exorcists from seven countries. The results are analysed in the main text, and the interviews themselves are reproduced in a sizeable appendix. This book is a unique contribution to the understanding of a subject little known among western scholars.

This work is specifically aimed at filling a gap in modern research on the Islamic concept of exorcism and the supernatural world related to it, based upon the sources considered authentic by Islamic authorities and augmented by field research. The possession of humans by jinns and their expulsion are thoroughly discussed. A comparative study is made with Christian exorcist tradition and the medical professions point of view. Case studies of leading Muslim exorcists from Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan and India are included.