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Muslim Midwives
By Avner Giladi. 2015
This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a…
wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional midwifery and Western obstetrics in the first half of the nineteenth century.Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy
By Agnes Nilufer Kefeli. 2014
In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between…
Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier’s mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnes Nilufer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region’s Krashens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The traditional view holds that the apostates had really been Muslim all along or that their conversions had been forced by the state or undertaken voluntarily as a matter of convenience. In Kefeli’s view, this argument vastly oversimplifies the complexity of a region where many participated in the religious cultures of both Islam and Orthodox Christianity and where a vibrant Krashen community has survived to the present. By analyzing Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, Kefeli shows how traditional education, with Sufi mystical components, helped to Islamize Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples in the Kama-Volga countryside and set the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia. Of particular interest is Kefeli’s emphasis on the role that Tatar women (both Krashen and Muslim) played as holders and transmitters of Sufi knowledge. Today, she notes, intellectuals and mullahs in Tatarstan seek to revive both Sufi and modernist traditions to counteract new expressions of Islam and promote a purely Tatar Islam aware of its specificity in a post-Christian and secular environment.Hospitality and Islam
By Mona Siddiqui. 2015
Considering its prominent role in many faith traditions, surprisingly little has been written about hospitality within the context of religion,…
particularly Islam. In her new book, Mona Siddiqui, a well-known media commentator, makes the first major contribution to the understanding of hospitality both within Islam and beyond. She explores and compares teachings within the various Muslim traditions over the centuries, while also drawing on materials as diverse as Islamic belles lettres, Christian reflections on almsgiving and charity, and Islamic and Western feminist writings on gender issues. Applying a more theological approach to the idea of mercy as a fundamental basis for human relationships, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly readers interested in Islam, ethics, and religious studies.Let Us Be Muslims
By Sayyid Abul Mawdudi, Khurshid Ahmad. 1982
This is a new revised and edited edition of Mawdudi s Urdu Khutubat which covers themes such as Faith …
Islam Prayer Fasting Almsgiving Pilgrimage and Jihad in a beautiful and powerfully resonant yet simple style By placing Iman belief at the center of life Mawdudi s addresses have the power to change man and stir his heartThe American Muslim Teenager's Handbook
By Dilara Hafiz, Imran Hafiz, Yasmine Hafiz. 2009
How do you reconcile being a teenager in America with being a Muslim? It's not as difficult as you think!…
The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook is a positive, fun, informative guide to being a Muslim teenager in America today. Covering everything from basic Islamic history and reading the Quran to drinking and dating, and filled with thoughts and opinions from Muslim teenagers across the country, this is an indispensable primer, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to learning about and finding one's place in American Islamic culture.Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975
By Edward E. Curtis IV. 2006
Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam came to America's attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a radical separatist African American…
social and political group. But the movement was also a religious one. Edward E. Curtis IV offers the first comprehensive examination of the rituals, ethics, theologies, and religious narratives of the Nation of Islam, showing how the movement combined elements of Afro-Eurasian Islamic traditions with African American traditions to create a new form of Islamic faith.Considering everything from bean pies to religious cartoons, clothing styles to prayer rituals, Curtis explains how the practice of Islam in the movement included the disciplining and purifying of the black body, the reorientation of African American historical consciousness toward the Muslim world, an engagement with both mainstream Islamic texts and the prophecies of Elijah Muhammad, and the development of a holistic approach to political, religious, and social liberation. Curtis's analysis pushes beyond essentialist ideas about what it means to be Muslim and offers a view of the importance of local processes in identity formation and the appropriation of Islamic traditions.Sufis and Saints' Bodies
By Scott Kugle. 2007
Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in…
the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power.Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.Muslim and Christian Understanding
By Waleed El-Ansary, David K. Linnan. 2010
This book explores 'A Common Word Between Us and You', a high-level ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue process. The Common Word process…
was commenced by leading Islamic scholars and intellectuals as outreach in response to the Pope's much criticized Regensburg address of 2007.The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism
By Mayanthi L. Fernando. 2014
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis…
signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History
By Ahmad Dallal. 2010
In this wide-ranging and masterful work, Ahmad Dallal examines the significance of scientific knowledge and situates the culture of science…
in relation to other cultural forces in Muslim societies. He traces the ways in which the realms of scientific knowledge and religious authority were delineated historically. The realization of a discrepancy between tradition and science often led to demolition and rebuilding and, most important, to questioning whether scientific knowledge should take precedence over religious authority in a matter where their realms clearly overlap. Dallal frames his inquiry around three concerns: What cultural forces provided the conditions for debate over the primacy of religion or science? How did these debates emerge? And how were they sustained? His primary objectives are to study science in Muslim societies within its larger cultural context and to trace the epistemological distinctions between science and philosophy, on the one hand, and science and religion, on the other. He looks at religious and scientific texts and situates them in the contexts of religion, philosophy, and science. Finally, Dallal describes the relationship negotiated in the classical (medieval) period between the religious, scientific, and philosophical systems of knowledge that is central to the Islamic scientific tradition and shows how this relationship has changed radically in modern times.Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism
By Jeffry R. Halverson, H. L. Goodall, Steven R. Corman. 2011
This volume introduces the concept of Islamist extremist 'master narratives' and offers a method for identifying and analyzing them. Drawing…
on rhetorical and narrative theories, the chapters examine thirteen master narratives and explain how extremists use them to solidify their base, recruit new members, and motivate actions.Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia
By Inaya Rakhmani. 2016
This cutting edge book considers the question of Islam and commercialisation in Indonesia, a majority Muslim, non-Arab country. Revealing the…
cultural heterogeneity behind rising Islamism in a democratizing society, it highlights the case of television production and the identity of its viewers. Drawing from detailed case studies from across islands in the diverse archipelagic country, it contends that commercial television has democratised the relationship between Islamic authority and the Muslim congregation, and investigates the responses of the heterogeneous middle class towards commercial da'wah. By taking the case of commercial television, the book argues that what is occurring in Indonesia is less related to Islamic ideologisation than it is a symbiosis between Muslim middle class anxieties and the workings of market forces. It examines the web of relationships that links Islamic expression, commercial television, and national imagination, arguing that the commercialisation of Islam through national television discloses unrequited expectations of equality between ethnic and religious groups as well as between regions.Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes
By Tony Mcenery, Paul Baker, Costas Gabrielatos. 2013
Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a…
detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an objective picture of media attitudes. The authors analyse representations around frequently cited topics such as Muslim women who wear the veil and 'hate preachers'. The analysis is self-reflexive and multidisciplinary, incorporating research on journalistic practices, readership patterns and attitude surveys to answer questions which include: what do journalists mean when they use phrases like 'devout Muslim' and how did the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks affect press reporting? This is a stimulating and unique book for those working in fields of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, while clear explanations of linguistic terminology make it valuable to those in the fields of politics, media studies, journalism and Islamic studies.New Islamic Schools
By Sanaa Riaz. 2014
Studies on Islamic schooling, particularly in Pakistan, largely focus on orthodox religious seminaries (madrasas) and presuppose that all types of…
religious schooling create the same religious subjectivity that is fundamentally extremist, anti-modern and anti-secular. In this groundbreaking narrative, Riaz attempts to cover this gap in ethnographic literature on Islamic education by presenting the first participant-observation based account of the new private Islamic schools that are fast becoming popular among middle and upper class urbanites. The schools combine modern secular education with traditional madrasa education. Through observations across pre-primary and Grades 1-10 subject classes, and interviews with Islamic school entrepreneurs, administrators, teachers, students and their parents associated with these schools - each catering to a different urban class - the author elucidates how the pedagogies, curriculum and the aspirations of the producers and patrons of knowledge in these schools modernize Islamic tradition to create diverse religious, secular, and class subjectivities in the students.The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity
By Aziz Al-Azmeh. 2014
Based on epigraphic and other material evidence as well as more traditional literary sources and critical review of the extensive…
relevant scholarship, this book presents a comprehensive and innovative reconstruction of the rise of Islam as a religion and imperial polity. It reassesses the development of the imperial monotheism of the New Rome, and considers the history of the Arabs as an integral part of Late Antiquity, including Arab ethnogenesis and the emergence of what was to become Muslim monotheism, comparable with the emergence of other monotheisms from polytheistic systems. Topics discussed include the emergence and development of the Muhammadan polity and its new cultic deity and associated ritual, the constitution of the Muslim canon, and the development of early Islam as an imperial religion. Intended principally for scholars of Late Antiquity, Islamic studies and the history of religions, the book opens up many novel directions for future research.The Sunna And Shi‘a In History
By Ofra Bengio, Meir Litvak. 2011
Sunni-Shi'i relations have undergone significant transformations in recent decades. In order to understand these developments, the contributors to the present…
volume demonstrate the complexity of Sunni-Shi'i relations by analyzing political, ideological, and social encounters between the two communities from early Islamic history to the present.Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam
By Asma Sayeed. 2013
Asma Sayeed's book explores the history of women as religious scholars from the first decades of Islam through the early…
Ottoman period. Focusing on women's engagement with hadīth, this book analyzes dramatic chronological patterns in women's hadīth participation in terms of developments in Muslim social, intellectual and legal history. It challenges two opposing views: that Muslim women have been historically marginalized in religious education, and alternately that they have been consistently empowered thanks to early role models such as 'Ā'isha bint Abī Bakr, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. This book is a must-read for those interested in the history of Muslim women as well as in debates about their rights in the modern world. The intersections of this history with topics in Muslim education, the development of Sunnī orthodoxies, Islamic law and hadīth studies make this work an important contribution to Muslim social and intellectual history of the early and classical eras.Media Framing of the Muslim World
By Halim Rane, Jacqui Ewart, John Martinkus. 2014
Media Framing of the Muslim World examines and explains how news about Islam and the Muslim world is produced and…
consumed, and how it impacts on relations between Islam and the West. The authors cover key issues in this relationship including the reporting on war and conflict, terrorism, asylum seekers and the Arab Spring.Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture
By Matthew Dimmock. 2013
The figure of 'Mahomet' was widely known in early modern England. A grotesque version of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet was…
a product of vilification, caricature and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam. In Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture Matthew Dimmock draws on an eclectic range of early modern sources – literary, historical, visual – to explore the nature and use of Mahomet in a period bounded by the beginnings of print and the early Enlightenment. This fabricated figure and his spurious biography were endlessly recycled, but also challenged and vindicated, and the tales the English told about him offer new perspectives on their sense of the world – its geographies and religions, near and far – and their place within it. This book explores the role played by Mahomet in the making of Englishness, and reflects on what this might reveal about England's present circumstances.Human Rights in the Middle East
By Mahmood Monshipouri. 1998
Exploring the most formidable human rights challenges facing the Middle East - the rights of women, minorities, migrant workers, and…
those of various sexual orientations, and the rights of all people to engage in civil disobedience - this volume addresses the extent to which dynamics surrounding human rights conditions in the region conform to or diverge from such dynamics in other parts of the world. Offering wide-ranging and rich analyses, the contributors to this volume argue that for human rights to be effectively enforced, they must be locally justified and achieved. The 2011 Arab revolts demonstrate that the people of the region can shape the condition of human rights in their societies.