. SEMINAR Jointly organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and
About the Speaker Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, and Co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam programme. He was a member of the core team of authors of the UN’s Arab Human Development Report (2004), and of the UK Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, a member of the Board of Directors of the Inter-Africa Group, and a trustee of the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue. He frequently writes in the media in the United Kingdom. His research interests include Islamic liberalism, Theories of Power, European Muslims and Democracy, and Terrorism and Democracy Promotion in the Middle East. In 2006 he was awarded the Allama Iqbal Award for Creativity in Islamic Thought by the Muslim News. His recent articles include Orientalism is alive and well in Iraq, ‘Suicide attacks’ against American academia, Pro-Israel ‘suicide attacks’ on US academia are worse than previously thought, and American academia may be principal casualty of September 11, all accessible at <Http://www.campus-watch.org/docs/author/Abdelwahab+El-Affendi>. He is the author of the controversial Who Needs an Islamic State? (Malaysia Think Tank London 2008, 2nd edition; 1st edition 1991 by Grey Seal Books).
Modern debates on the “Islamic state” are conducted against two interconnected historical developments. One is the advent of the colonial era, which saw the bulk of Muslim lands subjected to invasion and control by alien powers. The second, which was a corollary of the first, was the collapse of the caliphate and the conversion of Islam into a stateless religion for the first time in its history. It did not matter that the caliphate had for centuries been no more than a fiction, for it has remained a reassuring fiction, making its demise very traumatic for Muslims. The disappearance of the caliph as a formal religio-political authority has opened the way for the rise of Islamist groups and other “freelance” actors to assume the role of self-styled religious authorities. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as religious authority in Islam has always been fluid and contested. However, the problem is that most of these movements appear to favour an authoritarian vision of the state. The concept of the Islamic state should therefore be abandoned in favour of a concept of the “state for the Muslims”. ISEAS and Malaysia Think Tank London are pleased to invite you to the Seminar.
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