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The New Faces of Political Islam in the Middle East: A Survey of 15 Countries after the Arab Spring
By Nostalgiawan Wahyudhi, M. Hamdan Basyar, Dhurorudin Mashad, M. Fakhry Ghafur, Defbry Margiansyah. 2025
This book provides a survey of the political situation in 15 Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa…
and provides overviews of associated post-Arab Spring politics, with an emphasis of political Islamist movements. A translation from its original in Bahasa Indonesia, the book critically assesses the concept of post-Islamism from an Indonesian perspective. It argues that the wave of democratization in the Middle East following the Arab Spring failed to create an open democratic life in the region, except in the country where the Arab Spring began, Tunisia. Rather, it has left growing conflicts and destabilization in the region, with the rise of new authoritarianism. The authors simultaneously show that Islamic political movements in general are adaptive in the face of the changing political environment post-Arab Spring. They present the example of the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement with distinctive characteristics and high levels of adaptability in changing socio-political environments. It is relevant to advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying and researching contemporary Arab or Islamist movements and to scholars look for a neat comparative survey of countries after the Arab Spring.
Islam Explained: A Short Introduction to History, Teachings, and Culture
By Ahmad Rashid Salim. 2020
A revealing guide to understanding the principles of IslamWith more than 1.8 billion followers worldwide, Islam is one of the…
world's largest religions, but it is also one that is poorly understood by many Americans. Islam Explained offers an informative overview of the faith, helping those who are new to Islam foster cultural awareness while also providing those already familiar with it the opportunity to deepen their understanding.Whether you are looking to expand your own knowledge of Islam or just better understand the practices of Muslim friends, coworkers, and neighbors, this concise and essential guide provides a solid foundation for future study and conversation.Islam Explained features:Easy-to-understand explanations—This book provides a complete overview ideal for those who are interested in Islam as a faith, a subject of study, and beyond.Historical contexts—Better understand the history of Islam, how the religion has evolved, and the ways that history has shaped the lives of Muslims.Beliefs and practices—Explore what it means to be a practicing Muslim, including the Five Pillars, laws, dress codes, and brief glimpses into how they vary between individual sects.Take yourself on a journey that will end in a better, more complete understanding of Islam.
Outline of Sufism: the essentials of Islamic spirituality
By William Stoddart. 2012
"Followed by many millions of Muslims throughout the world, Sufism is the heart of Islamic spirituality. However, not only is…
there still in the West a widespread ignorance of Islam and Sufism, there is also, thanks to the "Islamic" terrorists, a widespread hostility. This book offers a succinct, yet comprehensive overview of Sufism's fundamental doctrines and spiritual practices. Stoddart highlights Sufism's intricate symbolism and explains the central role of the invocation of the Name of God in Sufi spiritual practice. An appendix includes central Koranic, Prophetic, and traditional Sufi sayings."-- Provided by publisher
The Literary Qur'an: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb
By Hoda El Shakry. 2020
Winner, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language AssociationThe novel, the literary adage has it,…
reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions. The Literary Qurʾan mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qurʾanic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. Engaging with the Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as social and moral comportment—El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self.Foregrounding form and praxis alike, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. The book places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object, process, and model, this interdisciplinary study blends literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices.
The Niqab in France: Between Piety and Subversion
By Agnès De Féo. 2024
This original new work is the fascinating result of sociologist and documentary filmmaker Agnès De Féo’s ten-year exploration of the…
phenomenon of niqab wearing. It is at once a groundbreaking study and a series of compelling first-person accounts from French and Francophone women who wear or have worn the niqab in France’s Salafi communities. With the backdrop of the French government’s 2010 ban on full facial veiling in public spaces, which itself has shaped the phenomenon, De Féo draws on her subjects’ own words to show their agency, working against the clichés that often underlie public views of the niqab—that it is purely the result of masculine pressure, for example, or extreme religiosity or nationalism, or the submissive desire to disappear. Instead, she shows, the niqab is multivalent: women wear it for reasons that range from religious piety to the desire to rebel against mainstream society, family, or the rule of law. The reasons are complex, overdetermined, contradictory, or even inconsistent, but they are the women’s own. Despite being worn only by a small minority of Muslim women, the Islamic garment has nonetheless been a major source of intense political, religious, and cultural debate in France. Searching to understand, rather than speculate, De Féo chose to approach the people who wear the niqab, and to make them, rather the veil itself, the subject of her research. Her unprecedented study, based on more than 200 interviews, reveals the many factors—social, political, geopolitical, and psychological—underpinning a personal choice that is not always as religious as it seems.The book ends with sixteen captivating interviews giving voice to stories rarely heard. With finesse and discernment, the author debunks the myths surrounding the wearing of the niqab, and sheds light on a practice subject to misunderstanding and prejudice, offering the reader unique insight. Challenging our preconceived notions and stereotypes about women who wear any form of Islamic apparel, but particularly the niqab, The Niqab in France introduces a group of women each with her own life story, her own share of personal struggles, aspirations, and desires, and her own claim to a certain place in society.This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine.
Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism
By Michael Muhammad Knight. 2023
“There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,” Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What…
Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity “secretes” atheism “more than any other religion,” however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze’s atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam’s historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze’s model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable “lines of flight.”A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal “Islamic theology” that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of “orthodoxy.” The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam’s extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur’an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular “mainstream” interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze’s vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.
Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality
By Becky L. Schulthies. 2021
Honorable Mention, 2022 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African StudiesWhat does it mean to connect as a…
people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling, dress styles, and orthography; to media platforms like television news, religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. Channeling Moroccanness examines these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.
Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands
By William Sherman. 2024
Winner, Carolina's Outstanding Contribution to Middle East and Islamic Studies Book AwardAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought…
the revelation of GodIn the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity.In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia.In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.
Who Is a Muslim?: Orientalism and Literary Populisms
By Maryam Wasif Khan. 2021
Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College,…
Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.
Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya
By Sarah Hillewaert. 2020
This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya’s island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge…
and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu’s inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices—how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood.Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs—and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.
A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean
By Elizabeth Spragins. 2023
No matter when or where one starts telling the story of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (August 4, 1578), the…
precipitating event for the formation of the Iberian Union, one always stumbles across dead bodies—rotting in the sun on abandoned battlefields, publicly displayed in marketplaces, exhumed and transported for political uses. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean proposes an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography.A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not incidental. It fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: providing tangible evidence of the narrator’s reliability while provoking an affective response in the audience. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse analyzes the literary, semiotic, and epistemological function these bodies serve within text and through language. It finds that corpses are indexically present and yet disturbingly absent, a tension that informs their fraught relationship to their narrators’ own bodies and makes them useful but subversive tools of communication and knowledge.A Grammar of the Corpse complements recent work in medieval and early modern Iberian and Mediterranean studies to account for the confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity of the region. By reading Arabic texts alongside Portuguese and Spanish accounts of this key event, the book responds to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean studies to work beyond the linguistic limitations of modern national boundaries.
Islamic Epistemics and Socioeconomics: A Selected Compilation of Essays
By Masudul Alam Choudhury. 2025
This book presents selected essays on the epistemological foundation of the Islamic world-system, in the light of the exegesis of the…
Qur’an, to develop existing understandings of Islamic economics. A selection of key contributions by one of the world's leading figures working at the nexus of Islamic social sciences, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic economics, the book integrates applied foundations of Islamic economics and Islamic philosophy, presenting a critical outlook on the existing state of Islamic economics and Islamic finance, within a broader framework of socio-scientific enquiry, philosophical perspectives on Islam, and philosophy of science. The author confronts the absence of epistemic groundwork upon which any fresh social and scientific enquiry is developing in Islamic economics, casting the discussion within an explanatory framework of ‘the unity of knowledge’ as bestowed by Islamic monotheistic law, which substantively characterizes the generalization and details of ‘everything’. The present work unravels this objective methodology and its application with reference to a limited number of issues and problems in global economics. Complex and multidisciplinary in its treatment, this book presents the key arguments on mathematical, philosophical, and socio-scientific modes of inquiry in deriving, developing, and empirically applying the Qur’anic methodology of the “unity of knowledge” to economic problems. It is relevant to scholars and advanced students in social scientific studies of Islam, Islamic theology and philosophy, and Islamic economics and finance.
Understanding Salafism: Seeking the Path of the Pious Predecessors
By Yasir Qadhi. 2025
A comprehensive overview of the most misunderstood movement in modern Islam: Salafism.The Salafi movement invokes fear and dread in outsiders…
who treat Salafism as synonymous with religious extremism. For Salafis themselves, it&’s a jealously guarded title, always in danger of dilution. Salafism has changed the face of Islam; its ideas reach far outside its own ranks. Yet popular portrayals never go beyond hackneyed stereotypes. In Understanding Salafism, Dr Yasir Qadhi delves into the origins of the movement, from the earliest debates in Islam to Salafism today, in both the Western and Islamic worlds. In an analysis covering Salafism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and Africa, he illuminates Salafism&’s theological ideas, the debates within Salafism about political participation, and its relationship to other schools in Sunni Islam.----- Yasir Qadhi is a resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center in Texas, and dean of the Islamic Seminary of America. He is one of the few people who has combined a traditional Eastern Islamic seminary education with Western academic training in the study of Islam. ----- Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface Conventions 1 Introduction: A Bird&’s Eye View of Salafism 2 A Comprehensive History of Salafi Thought: From its Origins to Modernity 3 Wahhabism and Salafism 4 Salafism and Islamism: A Case Study of the Muslim Brotherhood 5 The Phenomenon of Jihadi-Salafism 6 Global Salafism in the Contemporary World Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
Riyad As Salihin: The Gardens of the Righteous
By Imam Nawawi. 2014
Riyad As Salihin: The Gardens of the Righteous, is one of the most famous works of Imam Nawawi. This collection…
of authentic hadiths can be briefly defined as a book of enhancing morals, mannerliness, encouraging goodness, and warning against the evil. This work consists of the wisdom of the noble Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, setting the criteria about the manners to be observed by individuals. Since the time it was published, Riyad As Salihin has been a must read on the way to deepening in Islamic teaching. This work we present to you with pride is an abridged version of the full compilation.
Taking Control: A Muslim Woman's Guide to Surviving Infertility
By Farah Dualeh. 2022
&“Taking Control&” aims to provide a guidance for Muslim women who are trying to conceive. Author Farah Dualeh, who herself…
has tried to conceive for many years, shares her personal experience along with psychological tools to cope with this traumatic ordeal for women who struggle to become mothers. Dualeh also gives extensive content from Islamic perspective, including rulings on certain issues, as well as prayers.In this book, women who are trying to conceive will be encouraged to take control of their infertility experience at different levels:* within themselves * within their marriage * in relation to social pressures * on treatment options * and on what their family can look like (even when different from the 'norm')
Messenger Of God: Muhammad
By M. Fethullah Gülen. 2015
In Muhammad: The Messenger of God, Gulen delves deep into the reasons how Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him,…
a single man with minimum means, was able to leave indelible marks on millions of minds and souls. Rather than listing events in a chronological biography, Gulen follows an analytical framework of the Prophet&’s mission and character, providing numerous accounts from his lifetime. Gulen presents the noble Prophet in the different roles he assumed within his community as a father, husband, statesman, chief of staff, and an individual with the utmost compassion, wisdom, grace, humility, and trustworthiness.
The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View
By Craig Considine. 2020
What makes an American Catholic of Irish and Italian descent one of the leading global voices in admiration of Prophet…
Muhammad? In this overview of Muhammad's life and legacy, prominent scholar Craig Considine provides a sociological analysis of Muhammad's teachings and example. Considine shows how the Prophet embraced religious pluralism, envisioned a civic nation, stood for anti-racism, advocated for seeking knowledge, initiated women's rights, and followed the Golden Rule. Considine sheds light on the side of Prophet Muhammad that is often forgotten in mainstream depictions and media narratives. The Humanity of Muhammad is Considine's contribution to the growing body of literature on one of history's most important human beings.
Emerald Hills of the Heart: Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism
By M. Fethullah Gülen. 2010
Concluding a textually long but spiritually endless journey toward insan al-kamil--the perfect human--this fourth volume approaches Sufism through the middle…
way, an approach that revives the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. With an awareness of the social realities of the 21st century, concepts such as tranquility, the truth of divinity, life beyond the physical realm, the preserved tablet, the glorified attributes, and the beautiful names are delicately explained.
Understanding The Basic Principles of Islam
By Omer A. Ergi. 2012
This book describes and explains the meaning of the essential articles of faith and basic forms of worship in Islam.…
The narration is enriched with relevant essays from prominent scholars. in addition to the answers given to the frequently asked questions, the author uses different allegories and metaphors in order to clarify his points. Perfect for young readers, the book presents the basic framework of understanding and reasoning of the Islamic faith.
Devoted to the Truth
By Fethullah Gulen. 2023
For decades, Fethullah Gülen spoke on religion together with science, addressed challenging issues on faith, and inspired a generation to…
promote education and dialogue around the world. Those who listened to him felt empowered by this engaging and learned man of religion. To the ruling establishment of Turkey, his native country, these activities were assumed to be crossing over the line, and they made sure he suffered the consequences, especially throughout the second decade of the twenty-first century. Gülen and the people he inspired were scapegoated for the failures and malfeasance of a corrupt regime which conducted a nationwide crackdown on affiliated schools, foundations, and media organizations, while hundreds of thousands of teachers, doctors, journalists, civil servants, and supporters affiliated with them were purged and incarcerated, especially in the aftermath of the &“staged&” coup attempt in July 2016. Devoted to the Truth is a series of essays Gülen wrote following this event. What transpires from this collection is a seasoned leader who is going through all the blood, sweat, and tears to keep his ship afloat, the crew and passengers safe and calm. When the world seems to be in darkness, we find Gülen calling out to his community that this &“Eclipse&” is over, and inspires them how to be &“Travelers to the Light.&” As he leads his followers on this journey, he teaches how they should hold themselves to account by &“Facing the Self.&” While feeling &“Pity&” for the perpetrators of all the persecution they are going through, Gülen shows the path on to how to &“Heal&” and take action &“So Others May Live.&”