Localizing Islam in the West: Mazrui’s Journey from the Study of African Politics to Global Cultures Ahmed Ali Salem Abstract Ali Mazrui attempted to correct many misunderstandings of Islam in the West and demonstrate its closeness to and impact upon west- ern civilization in several ways. For example, Islam is a fellow monotheistic religion, has preserved and added to the Greco-Roman legacy, preceded mercantilism and capitalism in hailing free trade and hard work, and modeled the western view of a tripartite world in the second half of the twentieth century. Mazrui’s interest in studying Islam was originally part of his general exploration of post- colonial Africa. Although trained in mainstream political science, which emphasizes materialism, he quickly realized that culture is a powerful key to understanding politics. From this cultural optic, Mazrui began to interpretatively revive Islam as a powerful factor in African politics and highlight its values as capable of improving African conditions. His most celebrated work, namely, the 1986 tel- evision series “Africa: The Triple Heritage,” was in part a call to reconsider Islam as a major foundation of African societies. His cul- tural studies helped him gain new constituencies among the larger Muslim community and then go global. His global studies upheld Islam against both Marxism and racism, which helped him escape the narrowness of Afro-centrism and broaden his concept of pan- Ahmed Ali Salem, an associate professor at the Institute for Islamic World Studies at Zayed Uni- versity, UAE, has a Ph.D. (political science) and an M.A. (African studies) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.A. from the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences. He has authored and edited fifty books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference and seminar papers in both Arabic and English. His research interests include theories and meth- ods in international relations, Islamic reform thought and movements, Islamic-Western and Arab- African relations, and conflicts and cooperation in Africa and the Arab world. Africanism to include not only sub-Saharan Africans and their Arab neighbors to the north, but also the Arab neighbors to the east and diasporic Africans as well. In this paper, I use many of Mazrui’s publications that discuss various Islamic issues in Africa, the West, and globally. Introduction Ali Mazrui died on October 12, 2014, but was survived by invaluable knowl- edge and students committed to building on his insights. He is highly esteemed as a towering scholar of African politics and culture, which he was, but only a few recognize his scholarly contributions to localize Islam in the West through a meaningful presentation of Islamic civilization and values to sometimes rather misinformed westerners. Thus, I argue, he promoted a better understanding of Islam in the West. However, I would first like to address the origins of his in- terest in the study of Islam, arguing that it was a part of two larger transitions in his scholarly career: first, from an exclusive focus on politics to a broader one on culture, and second, from a limited focus on Africa to one on the globe. His cultural and global works culminated in his long directorship of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at State University of New York at Binghamton from 1991 until a few weeks before his death. In a previous work, I counted over 100 of Mazrui’s publications on vari- ous Islamic issues in Africa and around the world.1 I use many of these sources and many others in this paper, which is arranged in three sections: (1) Islam in Mazrui’s journey from political science to cultural studies, (2) Islam in his journey from African to global studies, and (3) his scholarly contributions to localizing Islam in the West. Islam in Mazrui’s Journey from Political Science to Cultural Studies Mazrui studied political science, particularly international relations, at British and American universities, where he obtained the graduate degrees that would open up to him the hitherto closed gates of Africa’s higher education institu- tions. Specifically, he was appointed professor and then department head at Uganda’s Makerere University, which he could not join as a student. Mazrui did not subscribe to the discipline’s mainstream in either theoret- ical or methodological terms. In terms of theory, he hardly used grand theories – a fashionable trend in the scientific study of politics at western academies since the 1960s’ behavioral revolution in the social sciences,2 which turned Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 45 political scientists away from their social roles as public intellectuals.3 His writings include no abstract theory testing or building, nor any attempt to reach law-like, universal generalizations. Instead, he opted deliberately to focus on Africa’s conditions and problems with the goal of contributing to their resolu- tion.4 As a result, and unfortunately for the profession, he never became a star in any professional political science circles,5 and his ideas, although thought- provoking, were barely debated in the field’s journals and conferences. Nor were his postcolonial ideas often discussed by postcolonial theorists.6 How- ever, they did provide fertile grounds for discussion for those involved with African studies. In terms of methodology, Mazrui was unquestionably a master compara- tivist, although he did not restrict his works to that subfield of political science conventionally called “comparative politics,” which excludes international re- lations. Nor did he use quantitative analysis or frame his comparisons according to certain prescribed models, such as “most-similar” or “most-different” cases.7 Instead, Mazrui invented unique and artistic taxonomies and typologies. But since they were hardly guided by conventional classifications, they never en- tered the profession. He also coined new terms and used mundane language, instead of the peculiar jargons that alienate non-specialists – his main ad- dressees, indeed.8 More significantly, Mazrui never embraced the materialism and logical positivism9 that prevailed in political science at the peak of behaviorism and decisively excluded norms, cultures, and other ideational elements as unob- servable, immeasurable, and thus irrelevant.10 He had a different point of view, one that not only held culture as relevant, but also as more important than eco- nomics and security, in terms of serving as a powerful key to understand pol- itics.11 It was from this cultural optic that he began to interpretatively revive Islam as a powerful factor in African politics. Mazrui’s first encounter with Islam as a cultural force in international politics occurred in his analysis of the place of Africa in Egypt’s four circles of foreign policy under Nasser, namely, the Arab, African, Islamic, and global circles in this order.12 He soon posited Islamic impacts on Africa’s domestic politics, bearings on sub-Saharan culture,13 and political culture more specif- ically.114 Thus, he called for employing Islamic values in establishing a stable democracy in Sudan after the 1964 popular revolution that overthrew military rule15 and balancing cultures in Uganda that experienced cultural confronta- tions under Idi Amin (r. 1971-79).16 After the Cold War, Mazrui continued to call for using Islamic values to achieve such desirable goals as democratizing 46 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 Kenya,17 empowering the Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa,18 and paci- fying Somalia.19 He noted that Islam is the fastest growing religion in sub-Saharan Africa and that the area’s Muslims are no less in number than those in North Africa, reminding us that Nigeria has more Muslims than Egypt, the most populous Arab country.20 He also found Muslims to be the most numerous religious group in Africa, thus making the latter “the first continent in the world to have a Muslim plurality, if not an outright Muslim majority.”21 In this respect, Islam is a unifying force, as it is shared by North Africans and the Black peoples who live south of the Sahara.22 Mazrui’s most celebrated work, namely, the television series “The African: A Triple Heritage,”23 was in part a reconsideration of Islam’s impact on Africa. His main argument is that African identity is the result of a unique combination of indigenous, Islamic, and western impacts.24 This idea has de- veloped into a whole school of thought, to which Mazrui continued to con- tribute intensely; hence, his rich writings on its manifestations in spirituality,25 language,26 art,27 play,28 state,29 the slave trade,30 and even the struggle against the spread of AIDS in Africa.31 In short, culture was a double-edged sword in Mazrui’s scholarship, an exit gate from mainstream political science and an entry gate into the world of Islam and its impact on Africa. It helped him gain new constituencies among the larger global Muslim community and go global. Islam in Mazrui’s Journey from African Studies to Global Studies Unlike Mazrui’s unambiguous detachment from mainstream political science, he never detached himself from African studies. Rather, he remained one of Africa’s most prolific writers on its pains and prospects, and was therefore in- vited to speak about them at such prestigious events as the BBC Reith Lectures in 1979, in which he addressed “The African Condition.” Nevertheless, he was unwelcome in some African studies circles, mostly for ideological rea- sons, but sometimes for racial ones as well. Islam was a part of Mazrui’s re- sponses to both challenges, and this expanded his interests from African studies to global studies.32 On the ideological front, Mazrui was a firm liberalist at a time when west- ern or western-style educated elites in Africa, including nationalist leaders and social scientists, were mostly outspoken Marxists or at least leaning to the Left. Indeed, liberalism was the most enduring impact of his study of political Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 47 science in the West.33 Mazrui annoyed his fellow African political scientists and anticolonial comrades by attacking Marxism not only as an alien ideology in Africa, but also as malignant when compared to liberalism. The liberation of Africa, he asserted, would remain incomplete if it were not coupled with the liberation of Africans.34 Mazrui maintained this liberalist view not only in the face of Marxists, but also in his critique of certain Islamic juristic opinions, as discussed below. Although liberalism originated in the West, Mazrui was by no means sell- ing out to the West. To the contrary, on many occasions he criticized it for failing to uphold liberalism, such as the United States’ censorship of his meta- phorical description of Karl Marx as “the last of the great Jewish prophets” in his 1986 television series. Mazrui’s liberalist commitment notwithstanding, he promoted Islam as Africa’s best anticolonial force. Like Marxism, Islam’s communalistic and anti-accumulative spirit stimulates radicalism; but unlike Marxism, Islam can easily combine economic and political radicalism on the one hand and social conservatism on the other hand.35 Also unlike Marxism, Islam is capable of producing both rebellious leaders and committed followers willing to die as martyrs, either combatively or submissively, for the sake of just causes.36 Thus, Mazrui presented Islam as Africa’s most powerful anticolonial force.37 For example, Islam enabled East Africans to preserve Kiswahili in the face of encroaching colonial languages, especially English,38 even as it was being secularized at the hands of missionaries, traders, and state bureaucrats.39 Islamic education also played an important role in “decolonizing modernity” in Africa.40 In addition, Islam presented a serious challenge to the colonially imposed domination of Christianity in Africa’s public affairs. Islam’s near- besieging of Christianity, he argued, is the price that the latter had to pay as a result of its strong connection to European colonialism.41 In the post-Cold War era, Islam continued to furnish a foundation for re- sisting extra-regional involvement in Africa. For example, many Muslims in Africa resisted the UN-supported policy of reduced fertility because they suspected that it was a western plan to preempt their empowerment.42 More- over, Mazrui stressed that the sweeping trend to adopt legal codes from the Shari‘ah in northern Nigeria at the beginning of this century was not only “a passionate protest against the political and economic marginalization of northern Muslims,” but also “a form of cultural resistance to Western educa- tion and the wider forces of globalization.”43 Mazrui found Islam to be a reliable resistance force both inside and out- side of Africa. For example, it was a major source of inspiration in the Pales- 48 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 tinian struggle against the Israeli occupation, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war,44 and the popular revolution in Iran, which he hailed as an anti-imperialist move- ment and defended in public fora against the United States military interven- tion, namely, Carter’s 1980 failed hostage rescue mission.45 The ideological challenge to Mazrui faded significantly after the Cold War, and African leftists began to highlight and even celebrate his contribu- tions, as manifested, for example, in recent works of the Council for the De- velopment of Social Science Research in Africa.46 More persisting, however, was the racial challenge. Racism in African studies is based on two opposing notions: Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. On the one hand, Eurocentrism un- derpinned the field at its inception47 and resurfaced during the 1980s in the “neoclassical developmentalism” that dominated the Africanist discourse and portrayed Africa as wracked by coups, chaos, carnage, drought, diseases, state corruption, and coercion.48 Afrocentrism, on the other hand, emerged as a re- sponse to the former and established itself on the nostalgic literatures that ro- manticized and glorified Africa, produced by diasporic and sub-Saharan philosophers, poets and activists, such as Cheikh Anta Diop (d. 1986), Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), and W. E. B. Du Bois (d. 1963), respectively.49 Mazrui was, of course, an unyielding foe of Eurocentrism, but never sub- scribed to Afrocentrism. This became a source of suffering for him, especially when his Afrocentric critics despised him openly as an Arab, as if he were not sufficiently African.50 He, however, regarded his Arab ancestry as a testimony to his embodiment of Africa’s triple heritage, and thus a source of pride.51 Arabs provided Africa with more than migrants such as Mazrui’s ancestors; they carried Islam to Africa and linked the continent to both Arabia and the massive world of the Indian Ocean, which was an “Islamic sea” for centuries.52 They also transmitted the Arabic words that did so much to enrich such in- digenous African languages as Kiswahili, Hausa, and Somali, making them more effective linguistic unifiers of Africans.53 In modern times, Arabs have been Africa’s economic supporters and anti- imperialist partners; hence, Mazrui’s repeated call for Arab-African rap- prochement and cooperation. On the one hand, this rapprochement is needed because the colonialists succeeded, at least partly, in dividing Africans and Arabs and portraying the latter as just other colonialists of Africa. One result of this was Africans killing Arabs, such as during the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar against the ruling Omani elite.54 On the other hand, Arab-African cooperation is particularly meaningful in the current post-Cold War order that victimizes Africans economically and Arabs militarily.55 Common vic- timization is not the only basis of that cooperation; rather, Mazrui suggests Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 49 50 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 a common identity as a more solid foundation. Arabia, he noted, had been an integral part of Africa before the Red Sea separated it geographically. He invited both Arabs and Africans to bridge this split politically; hence, his unique concept of Afrabia.56 Mazrui also noted that Islam is highly appreciated by many people of African origin in North America and the Caribbean because they see it as a movement of religiosity and pan-Africanism.57 In the United States in partic- ular, Islam has become the ideology of notable African-American groups fighting White supremacy, such as the Nation of Islam, an influential group in American politics.58 For this group, Islam was not only a religion but also the firm foundation of Black nationalism. In short, Mazrui upheld Islam against both Marxism and racism, and Islam, in turn, helped him escape the narrowness of Afrocentrism and broaden his concept of pan-Africanism to include not only sub-Saharan Africans and their Arab neighbors to the north, but also their Arab neighbors to the east and diasporic Africans as well. Mazrui’s Contributions to Localizing Global Islam in the West For Mazrui, Islam is a universal religion and way of life. Its universality entails the obligation on Muslims to spread it globally, and he did his part in this regard by converting a few followers of indigenous African religions, bequeathing his name to them as a religious “father,” and keeping in relative contact with them until he left East Africa to pursue his higher education in England.59 In the West, where he lived most of his life, his missionary activities took a different form: Having noted that Islam was spreading steadily and, at the same time, that many westerners were highly prejudiced against it, not the least because of the centuries-long tradition of misrepresenting Islam and Muslims,60 Mazrui made it his mission to combat Islamophobia (which, he thought, replaced negropho- bia in the West) and localize Islam there by demonstrating its closeness to and impact upon modern western culture, as well as its usefulness to contemporary western societies. Hence, his definition of the term Islamic studies.61 On the one hand, he made the following observations during the mid- 1990s: Islam is the fastest growing religion in North America. In France, Islam is becoming the second most important religion numerically after Catholicism. Culturally and politically, some Muslims in Britain have been experimenting with an Islamic parliament of their own, and others are demanding state sub- sidies for Muslim denominational schools. In the Federal Republic of Ger- many it has been belatedly realized that the importation of Turkish workers in the 1970s was also an invitation to the muezzin and the minaret to estab- lish themselves in German cities. Australia has discovered that it is a neigh- bor to the largest Muslim country in the world in population (Indonesia). Australia has also discovered an Islamic presence in its town body-politic.62 On the other hand, Mazrui found western literatures on Islam guilty of two sins: omission and commission. While omission refers to ignoring fundamental facts about Islam, thus inhibiting an accurate understanding of it, commission denotes the distortion of Islamic beliefs, practices, and history, thus igniting westerners against Muslims.63 Mazrui, who sought to present Islam to them on its own terms and from the Muslim viewpoint, made five arguments. First, Muslims historically preserved the Greco-Roman legacy upon which the West established its modern civilization. Had they not done so, the West could have remained in its Dark Ages and European modernity may not have emerged. Mazrui, however, stressed that Muslims did not only transmit that legacy but added to it, made their own philosophical and scientific con- tributions, and established a God-focused civilization dissimilar to the later, gold-focused civilization of the Anglo-Saxons.64 Second, Islam is similar to Judaism and Christianity in its Semitic, and particularly Abrahamic, origin. It completed, not contradicted, these religions and preserved their monotheistic core. It is therefore three religions in one.65 Moreover, Islam was the first Protestant movement, as Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) preceded Martin Luther (d. 1546) and John Calvin (d. 1564) in uncovering the distortions of Christianity and called for reforming it by reviving its true basics.66 Islam and Protestantism share a number of values and practices, such as rejecting all forms of intermediary between God and worshippers, and clerical hierarchy and corruption. Islam takes this a step fur- ther by rejecting the divinity of Jesus, who is otherwise dignified as an honored prophet.67 Third, Islam hailed free trade and hard work well before capitalism did. Mazrui argued that Islam harmonized the belief of predestination and the ob- ligation to work hard. The Prophet advised each believer to behave as if he or she were going to live forever, and as if he or she were going to die tomorrow … [He] believed in a free-trade, or mercantile economy in which commodities and money would experience unimpeded interaction in a free market. He has been op- posed to price control of any sort. He seems to have trusted the forces of supply and demand to act as the only barometer on the basis of which price was to determine its rightful level.68 Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 51 But Islamic capitalism is distinct in two respects. On the one hand, Islam obliges the rich to pay the poor an annual zakat, or a percentage of their wealth. “Zakat is among the earliest forms of structured personal taxation in human history, modest as it is in percentage terms.”69 On the other hand, it regulates, on ethical bases, distribution and consumption, not only production.70 The Islamic version of mercantilism was also superior to that of Europe. Prophet Muhammad was a trader and praised honest traders, but warned against cheating and exploiting the needs of the poor. He distinguished clearly between legitimate profit and illegitimate interest.71 Nevertheless, Muslims did not adhere to this model for long, as their economy regressed into a form of what Marx called the “Asian mode of production,” although with little neg- ative impact on their flourishing civilization.72 The only European mode of production that Islam has never known is feudalism, because Islamic laws of inheritance made it impossible for large estates to continue to be owned by one person for a long time.73 Fourth, aspects of Islamic culture that westerners regard as medieval have prevailed in their own culture until fairly recently.74 For example, westerners were bewildered by the depth of Muslim anger against Salman Rushdie’s Islam-defaming novel The Satanic Verses (1988), and, in defense of the free- dom of expression, protested the ban imposed by Muslim countries, although they used to ban morally repugnant novels well into the 1960s. Western intellectuals argued that as an artist, Rushdie had the sacred right and even duty to go wherever his imagination led him in his writing. Yet until the 1960s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was regarded as morally repugnant under British law for daring to depict an affair between a married member of the gentry and a worker on the estate.75 Mazrui’s own metaphorical description of Marx as “the last of the great Jewish prophets” in his 1986 television series was censored in the United States. Another notable example of Islamic cultural elements prevailing in mod- ern western culture is the latter’s worldview, during the Cold War, which, as Mazrui argued, was modeled on the medieval Islamic worldview according to which the world comprised three abodes: the Abode of Islam (i.e., domains under Muslim sovereignty), the Abode of Agreement (i.e., domains of non- Muslim sovereigns in treaty relations with Muslims), and the Abode of War (i.e., all other domains). After World War II, the West appropriated Islam’s traditional tripartite view of the world and simply substituted itself for Islam. For much of the cold war, the world comprised the following categories: Dar al Gharb or Dar al 52 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 Maghrib (the Abode of the West) instead of Dar al Islam; Dar al Harb (the Abode of War, essentially the communist world); and Dar al Sulh or Dar al ‘Ahd (the Abode of Peaceful Coexistence, the Third World). The Third World paid tribute to the West in the form of the debt burden and other forms of economic exploitation in a modern version of the tribute paid by the Dar al Sulh to medieval Muslim rulers.76 Fifth, Islam’s values and way of life are far more humane than most west- erners realize, and should therefore be appreciated. Muslims are often criticized for not producing the best, but they are seldom congratulated for having standards of behavior which have averted the worst. There are really no Muslim equivalents of systematic Nazi extermi- nation camps, nor Muslim conquest by genocide on the scale perpetrated by Europeans in the Americas and Australia, nor Muslim versions of rigid apartheid once approved by the South African Dutch Reformed Church, nor Muslim equivalents of the brutal racism of Japan before the end of World War II, nor Muslim equivalents of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cam- bodia, nor a Muslim equivalent of the racist lynching culture of the old South in the United States, nor a Muslim version of Stalinist terror in the name of Five Year Plans. Nor can Islam be blamed for the only world wars in human history.77 Thus, Mazrui invited western societies to take advantage of Islamic teach- ings in order to rid themselves of moral evils and social crises. For example, Islam provides avenues of sobriety that can minimize drunkenness and drug addiction – two main ills of contemporary western societies. He stressed the importance of this value to the West in the light of predominant individualism that prevents the state from infringing upon individuals’ rights, even if they pose a danger to themselves or to others.78 Muslims in the West are in an excellent position to help their communities benefit from Islamic values. They should engage neighbors, friends, and civil societies in constructive dialogues on Islam-based practical solutions to local problems, not only abstract concepts and principles. On the other hand, they are invited to benefit from western liberal values and spread them to other Muslims – another mission of Mazrui’s Islamic studies. According to Mazrui’s ijtihād (independent, informed interpretation of Islam), liberal values on issues of women, slaves, and other historically op- pressed people are truly Islamic. He argued, for example, that polygamy is, in fact, forbidden, rather than forgiven, by the Qur’an, because the latter per- mits polygamy only if a man can treat all of his wives absolutely equally, which is humanly impossible.79 The gender revolution in Islam, however, was Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 53 aborted because, he argued, the doors of ijtihād were closed. As a result, “the harem developed and became more secluded as a more aristocratic version of Islam developed.”80 But he was confident that new technology, and the world- wide web in particular, would in time blow all discriminations against women totally out of social existence. The new technology will pass a death sentence on the tradition of the harem... The traditional forms of seclusion of women will not long survive a technology in which women can declare their presence and in time assert their rights.81 For another example of Mazrui’s liberalist ijtihād, he argued that Islam favors not only the emancipation of slaves but also the abolishment of the in- stitution itself. However, Muslims failed to accomplish this target at an early period of their history for the same reason they failed to declare polygamy il- legal – they turned loyalist and aristocratic. This royalization under the Umayyads and the Abbasids gave class and sta- tus among Muslims a new lease on life. Slavery became part of the interplay between servitude and privilege in the succeeding millennium of Muslim history. A new ijtihad against servitude, a new fatwa against slavery, had to wait for the ulama of the twentieth century.82 Although Mazrui did not meet the training and qualifications of a scholar practicing ijtihād,83 he was not the kind of public intellectual who would hide his opinions from fear of being accused of blasphemy, which some of his crit- ics had already done.84 To the contrary, he was sympathetic toward those courageous Muslim thinkers who engaged in it and were persecuted for that reason, such as the Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who was put on trial and executed in 1985.85 In Lieu of Conclusion: The Story Continues Attracted to the study of politics, Mazrui refused to study the Shari‘ah at al- Azhar as his father, the grand judge of Mombasa, once wished. Along with many other young and aspiring Africans and Muslims in the mid-twentieth century, he thought that such an activity seemed to have little, if any, relevance to modernizing societies and provided no promising career path.86 Studying the modern sciences in the West was so appealing an idea that it enticed such emerging intellectual giants as Ismail Al-Faruqi (d. 1986), Abdelwahab Elmes- siri (d. 2008), and Mona Abul-Fadl (d. 2008), who later became adamant ad- vocates of Islamic epistemology and methodology.87 54 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 Had Ali Mazrui followed his father’s advice, he might well have become a prominent scholar of Islamic studies in a traditional sense, which he, of course, was not. But he became a professor at an Islamic university, namely, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Virginia, USA. His scholarship on Islam World Studies met the university’s unique mission, namely, approaching Islamic studies from social science perspectives and, at the same time, approaching the social sciences from the Islamic studies per- spectives. I am proud to have been a fruit of this collaboration. Endnotes 1. Ahmed Ali Salem, “The Islamic Heritage of Mazruiana,” in The Scholar be- tween Thought and Experience: A Bibliographical Festschrift in Honor of Ali Mazrui, ed. Parviz Morewedge (Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 2001), 63-101. 2. James Dougherty and Robert Pfaltzgraff, Contending Theories of International Relations: A Comprehensive Survey (New York: Longman, 1996), 33-35; Michael Haas and Henry Kariel, Approaches to the Study of Political Science (Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing Company, 1970), 15-16. 3. David Easton, “Political Science in the United States: Past and Present,” in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 291-310. 4. The separation between area studies (including African studies) and the disci- plines (including political science) is an American tradition and now a worldwide model, one that fundamentally subdues the former to the latter. See, for example, an attempt to justify African studies research as beneficial to the disciplines in Robert Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 5. Seifudein Adem, “Postcolonial Constructivism: Ali Mazrui’s Theory of Inter- Cultural Relations?” Africa Review of Books 11, no. 1 (March 2015): 4. 6. Seifudein Adem, “Ali A. Mazrui: The Postcolonial Theorist,” African Studies Review 57, no. 1 (2014): 135-52. 7. Arent Lijphart, “The Comparable-Cases Strategy in Comparative Research,” Comparative Political Studies 8, no. 2 (1975): 158-77. 8. Alamin Mazrui, “Prologue: Ali Mazrui and His Critics,” in Race, Gender and Culture Conflict: Debating the African Condition, ed. Alamin Mazrui and Willy Mutunga (Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2004), 1-4. 9. On logical positivism, its critics and applications in the social sciences, see Paul Diesing, How Does Social Sciences Work?: Reflections on Practice (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 55 10. Vendulka Kubalkova, “Foreign Policy, International Politics, and Construc- tivism,” in Foreign Policy in a Constructed World, ed. Vendulka Kubalkova (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 22; Samuel Barkin, “Realist Constructivism,” In- ternational Studies Review 5 (2003): 329. 11. Ali A. Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics (London: James Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Nairobi, Heinemann, 1990). 12. Ali A. Mazrui, “Africa and the Egyptian’s Four Circles,” African Affairs 63, no. 251 (1964): 129-41. 13. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Semitic Impact on Black Africa: Arab and Jewish Cultural Influences,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 13, no. 3 (1983). 14. Ali A. Mazrui, “Religion and Political Culture in Africa,” Journal of the Amer- ican Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 (1985). 15. Ali A. Mazrui, “Religion and Democracy in the First Republic of the Sudan,” Makerere Journal 11 (December 1965). 16. Ali A. Mazrui, “Religious Strangers in Uganda: From Emin Pasha to Amin Dada,” African Affairs 76, no. 302 (1977). 17. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Black Intifada? Religion and Rage at the Kenya Coast,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 4, no. 2 (1993). 18. Ali A. Mazrui, “Towards Re-Africanising South Africa: an Islamic Perspective,” Extracts from a presentation made at the international conference “Islam and Civil Society in South Africa,” sponsored by the University of South Africa and the United States Institute of Peace, held in Pretoria, South Africa, August 1994. 19. Ali A. Mazrui, “Crisis in Somalia: From Tyranny to Anarchy,” in Mending Rips in the Sky: Options for Somali Communities in the 21st Century, ed. Hussein M. Adam and Richard Ford (Lawrenceville, NJ, and Asmara: The Red Sea Press, 1997). 20. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 2 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ali A. Mazrui, “The World of Islam: A Political Overview,” Jour- nal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 11, no. 2 (July 1990). 21. Ali A. Mazrui, “African Islam and Islam in Africa: Between Exceptionalism and Marginality,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 3 (sum- mer 2009): iii-iv. 22. Ibid., i. 23. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” a co-production of WETA- TV and BBC-TV, 1986; Ali A. Mazrui on ‘The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Public Library, 1987). 24. On the origins of this notion, see Mazrui, “Ali Mazrui and the Triple Heritage,” 21-26. 25. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Split Soul of a Continent,” Michigan Alumnus (Sept.-Oct. 1986). 26. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, “Language in a Multi-Cultural Context: The African Experience,” An International Journal (special issue on Language and Education) 6, nos. 2-4 (1992); Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The 56 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Cape Town: David Philip Publishers; Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1998). 27. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and African Art: Stimulus or Stumbling Block?” African Arts 27, no. 1 (Jan. 1994). 28. Ali A. Mazrui, “Africa’s Triple Heritage of Play: Reflections on the Gender Gap,” in Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History, ed. W. J. Baker and J. A. Mangan (New York and London: Africana Publishing Company, 1987). 29. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Triple Heritage of the State in Africa,” in The State in Global Perspective, ed. Ali Kazancigil (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1986). 30. Ali A. Mazrui, “Comparative Slavery and Africa’s Triple Heritage: Indigenous, Islamic, and Western Systems,” Keynote address at the World Conference on “Slavery and Society in History,” Kaduna, Nigeria, March 26, 1990. 31. Ali A. Mazrui, Christianity and Islam in Africa’s Political Experience: Piety, Passion and Power (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Mus- lim-Christian Understanding, 1996). 32. For a different point of view that portrays Mazrui as globalist from the beginning of his intellectual career, see Adem, Postcolonial Constructivism, 4. 33. On the liberalist foundation of political science in the West, see James Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1992); David Ricci, “Contradictions of a Political Discipline,” in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 165-78. 34. On the heated debates between Mazrui and his leftist critics, see Alamin Mazrui, Prologue, 5-9. 35. Ali A. Mazrui, “The Sacred and the Secular in East African Politics,” Cahiers D’Etudes Africaines 13, no. 4 (1973). 36. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam, Political Leadership, and Economic Radicalism in Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9, no. 3 (Apr. 1967). 37. Islam has always been an anticolonial force, though sometimes subtly through non-militant means, especially after the brutal crashing of the jihad movements that resisted the colonial invasion of Africa. For examples of jihad by other means in colonized Africa, see Andrew Roberts, The Colonial Moment in Africa: Essays on the Movement of Minds and Materials, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1990) chap. 4. 38. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the English Language in East and West Africa,” in Language Use and Social Change: Problems of Multilingualism with Special Reference to Eastern Africa, ed. W. H. Whilteley (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 39. Ali A. Mazrui and Pio Zirimu, “The Secularisation of an Afro-Islamic Language: Church, State, and Marketplace in the Spread of Kiswahili,” Journal of Islamic Studies 1, no. 1 (1990). Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 57 40. Ali A. Mazrui and Teshome Wagaw, “Towards Decolonising Modernity: Edu- cation and Culture Conflict in Eastern Africa,” in The Educational Process and Historiography in Africa (Paris: UNESCO, 1985). 41. Ali A. Mazrui, “Christian Power and Muslim Challenge in Africa’s Experience,” Indian Journal of Politics 12, no. 3 (December 1978); Ali A. Mazrui, “African Islam and Competitive Religion: Between Revivalism and Expansion,” Third World Quarterly 10 (April 1988). 42. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islamic Doctrine and the Politics of Induced Fertility Change: An African Perspective,” in The New Politics of Population: Conflict and Con- sensus in Family Planning, ed. Jason L. Finkle and C. Alison McIntosh (New York: The Population Council, 1994). 43. Ali A. Mazrui, “Shariacracy and Federal Models in the Era of Globalization: Nigeria in a Comparative Perspective,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sci- ences 26, no. 3 (summer 2009): 41. 44. Ali A. Mazrui, “Oil Power, Palestine, and the Political Resurrection of Islam,” Paper presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, San Francisco, 29 October – 1 November, 1975; Ali A. Mazrui, “Oil Power and the Steady Rise of Islam,” Sunday Nation (23 April 1978). 45. Seifudein Adem, Postcolonial Constructivism, 4. 46. See, for example, the following CODESRIA publication: Africa Review of Books 11, no. 1 (March 2015). 47. See, for example, analyses of French and British colonial knowledge of Africa that paved the way to emerging African studies in the United States as a highly racialized enterprise, in William G. Martin and Michael O. West, eds., Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) chaps. 1, 2, and 4. 48. Paul T. Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Nashville: Lightning Source, 1997), chap. 7. 49. See a criticism of this Afro-centrism in Kwame A. Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 50. See, for example, Wole Soyinka’s criticism of Mazrui’s TV series “The Africans,” in Alamin Mazrui, Prologue, 15. 51. Ali A. Mazrui, “Africa’s Triple Heritage and I,” Africa Events 2, nos. 7-8 (July- August 1986); Ali A. Mazrui, “The Legacy of Life and Death: Africa’s Triple Heritage in a Personal Context,” Africa Notes (February 1997). 52. Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Culture of the Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism: Commerce and Islam before the Coming of the Europeans, trans. from English into Arabic (Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 2013), chap. 13. 53. Ali A. Mazrui, African Islam and Islam in Africa, ii-iii. 54. See a critique of the colonialist narratives of the Omani Sultanate in Zanzibar, and Mazrui’s comments on the 1964 revolution, in Ahmed Ali Salem, “The His- 58 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3 toriography of the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar and Arab-African Rapproche- ment: Reflections and Annotated Bibliography,” Encounters 1, no. 1 (October 2009): 141-73. 55. Ali A. Mazrui, “Global Apartheid?: Race and Religion in the New World Order,” in The Gulf War and the New World Order: International Relations of the Middle East, ed. T. Y. and J. S. Ismael (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 56. Ali A. Mazrui, “Afrabia: Africa and the Arabs in the New World Order,” Ufa- hamu 20, no. 3 (1992). 57. Ali A. Mazrui, “Religious Alternatives in Black Diaspora: From Malcolm X to the Rastafari,” Caribbean Affairs 3(1) (1990); Ali A. Mazrui, “Global Africa in Flux: The Dialectic of Diversity in Black World,” in African Presence in the Americas, ed. Carlos Moore, Tanya R. Saunders and Shawna Moore (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995). 58. Ali A. Mazrui, “African Factor in the U.S. (Part One),” Africa Events 9, no. 7 (July 1993); Ali A. Mazrui, “North American Muslims: Rising to the Challenge of a Dual Identity,” Islamic Studies 34, no. 4 (winter 1995); Ali A. Mazrui, “Be- tween the Crescent and the Star-Spangled Banner: American Muslims and US Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 72, no. 3 (July 1996). 59. Ali A. Mazrui, “Religion and Political Culture in Africa,” Journal of the Amer- ican Academy of Religion 53, no. 3 (1985): 830. 60. See a passionate criticism of this practice in Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 3-35. 61. Following the American academic tradition of defining Islamic studies, I use this term rather broadly to include Islamic history, society, and politics, not only Islamic religion and theology. For insightful, recent discussions of this tradition, see Mumtaz Ahmad, Zahid Bukhari and Sulayman Nyang, eds., Observing the Observer: The State of Islamic Studies in American Universities (London and Washington: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), especially chaps. 2 and 3 by Sayyed Hossein Nasr and John O. Voll, respectively. 62. Ali A. Mazrui, “North American Muslims: Rising to the Challenge of a Dual Identity,” Islamic Studies 3, no. 4 (winter 1995): 451. 63. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia: Conflicting Images in a Eurocentric World,” in Islamic Political Economy in Capitalistic-Globalization: An Agenda for Change, ed., Masudul A. Choudhury, M. Z.Abdad, and Muhammad S. Salleh (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications and Penang, 1997), 92. 64. Ali A. Mazrui, “Hegemony: From Semites to Anglo-Saxons,” Alternatives 11, no. 1 (January 1986). 65. Ali A. Mazrui, “Hegemony,” 92-95; Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the End of His- tory,” The American Journal of Islamic and Social Sciences 10, no. 4 (winter 1993): 513-14. 66. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia,” 92-93. Interestingly, Mazrui made no similar argument on Islam as the first Jewish Haskalah (reformist) movement. Salem: Localizing Islam in the West 59 67. Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia,” 94-98; Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 73-76. 68. Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia,” 96-98; Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 75-77. 69. Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 78-79. 70. Ibid., 67-69; Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia,” 96-97. 71. Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 81. 72. Ibid., 76-77. 73. Ibid., 68. 74. Ali A. Mazrui, “Islamic and Western Values,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (Sep- tember-October 1997): 120. 75. Ibid., 123; Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 83. 76. Ali A. Mazrui, “Globalization, Islam, and the West: Between Homogenization and Hegemonization,” The American Journal of Islamic and Social Sciences 15, no. 3 (fall 1998): 6-7. 77. Ali A. Mazrui, Islam, Western Democracy and the Third Industrial Revolution: Conflict or Convergence (Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1998), 8-9. 78. Mazrui, “Islam and the End of History,” 533. 79. Mazrui, “Islam and Islamophobia,” 102-03. Of course, other scholars argue against this interpretation, given the practice of the Companions and that the rel- evant Qur’anic verse speaks in the imperative. In linguistic terms, this establishes license, not prohibition. 80. Mazrui, “Islam and the End of History,” 533. 81. Mazrui, Islam, Western Democracy, and the Third Industrial Revolution, 22-23. 82. Mazrui, “Shariacracy and Federal Models in the Era of Globalization,” 51. 83. For those qualifications, see Muhammad H. Kamali, Principles of Islamic Ju- risprudence (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1991), 374-77. 84. Mazrui, Cultural Forces, 10. 85. Mazrui, “African Islam and Competitive Religion,” 515. 86. On the absent link between traditional Islamic education and economic employ- ment in the African context, see Lamin Sanneh, The Crown and The Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1997), 118-19. See also a review of this book by Ahmed Ali Salem, “Review of The Crown and the Turban: Muslim and West African Pluralism,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 15, no. 2 (1998): 141-46. 87. See, for example, Isma’il Al-Faruqi, Tawḥīd: Its Implications for Thought and Life (Wyncote, PA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1982); Abdel- wahab Elmessiri, “The Gate of Ijtihad: An Introduction on the Study of Episte- mological Bias,” in Epistemological Bias in the Physical and Social Sciences, ed. Abdelwahab Elmessiri (London and Washington: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2006) p.68; Mona Abul-Fadl, Islam and the Middle East: The Aesthetics of a Political Inquiry (Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1990). 60 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3