Islam and Modern Trends in Middle Eastern Islamic Countries

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In an attempt to understand the resurgence of Islam in the last decades in terms of social changes in Arab countries, Kimura reached the following conclusion : most of political and social reforms aimed at introducing western institutions, such as liberalism, democracy or socialism, failed largely because of the authoritarianism in the government, the continuance of Islamic ethos and the cultural, political and economic dependency of Arab countries on the western civilization. Disappointed at the poor performance of these reforms, the masses come to reassess traditional values and to seek their identity in traditional social groups and systems, including Islam and Islamic institutions. Kuroda tried to explore the relations between the Iranian central government and the Jangali movement which rose against the invading Russian army from the middle of 1915 in the Gilan province and after the October Revolution resisted the British forces aiming to control Iran alone. By analyzing some documents in Persian and in English, he concludes that the movement took into account the crucial nationwide problems as well as the local interests. Yanagihashi examined the positive rules of Hanbali law school in the domains of civil law. The Hanbali school is regarded as the forerunner of the fundamentalism which grew and does not cease to grow influencing in the modern Arab and Islamic countries. In accordance with its religious tendency to deny the authoritarianism characteristic of the Islamic world since the tenth century and at the same time to reject the non-Islamic elements of Sufism, the Hanbali jurisprudence reveals its tendency to abide by sacred texts in negligence of traditional legal opinions and in absence of rules in sacred texts it depends on discretionary judgment in a comparatively unrestrained manner. The Hanbali school in contemporary Saudi Arabia considers in practice the sharia as the supreme legal norm.