Gold for a Golden Age: Sacred Money and Islamic Freedom in a Global Sufi Order

Abstract

Global protest is changing. In the 1980s and 1990s, single-cause forms of protest to save the whale, protect the rain forest, or advocate indigenous rights increasingly replaced the lifelong loyalties that people had previously demonstrated through class-based, unionized forms of protest. This article argues that we may now be seeing a second shift in global protest that combines personal sub-politics with a collective, religious vision. I will illustrate how twists in political geo-politics and modernity have allowed for the emergence of not only religious forms of social movements but also religious forms of global protest. An analysis of the paradoxical links between faith and finance in the Murabitun movement, a global Sufi brotherhood of converts to Islam from Europe, Africa, and the United States, provides the basis for the argument.

From metal to paper: validating paper money from Islamic perspective

“…This is congruent with Malik bin Anas’s stance that societal acceptance is a firm determinant of money’s form. According to Malik’s fatwa , if the society agrees upon treating animal skins as money and it were forged into pieces resembling coins and monetary units, it would be reprehensible to be traded for gold and silver on a deferred basis (Bubandt, 2009). Centuries later, Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyyah believed no religious compulsion exists in legally defining what naturally constitutes money.…”

“…With the approbation of the late-Ottoman-era clerics, the currency discourse went on a hiatus. Among the modern revivalists, the World Murabitun Movement is an assiduous advocate of the physical use of gold and silver as the only acceptable form of currency for Muslims (Bubandt, 2009). They pronounce a blanket ban on all forms of paper money.…”

Gold vis-à-vis money in Islam: the case against Dinarist Movement

“…Imam Malik bin Anas ruled that if society agreed upon treating animal skins as money, and it were forged into pieces resembling coins and monetary units, it would be reprehensible to be traded for gold and silver on deferred basis (Bubandt, 2009). Ibn Taymiyyah believed no religious compulsion exists in defining legally or naturally what constitutes money.…”

Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

“…I explore how the enduring histories of movement and circulation are experienced among the Rifa'i dervishes of a central Bosnian provincial town. The dervish disciples I have lived with could hardly be characterized as highly mobile, de-territorialized, cosmopolitan subjects embedded in global transnational networks, a worldly spiritual profile that has been carefully explored in recent scholarship on Sufism (e.g., Bubandt 2009; Van Bruinessen and Day Howell 2007; Werbner 2003). Rather, the dervish networks discussed here are composed of local cosmopolitans who are aware of and maintain historical connections across large geographical and temporal scales, yet who value the local without necessarily falling into national or pan-national modes of belonging (Ho 2006: 68–69) 10 .…”