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This book examines various attempts in the ‘West’ to manage cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity – focusing on Muslim minorities…
in predominantly non-Muslim societies. An international panel of contributors chart evolving national identities and social values, assessing the way that both contemporary ‘Western’ societies and contemporary Muslim minorities view themselves and respond to the challenges of diversity. Drawing on themes and priority subjects from Islamic Culture within Euro-Asian, Australian, and American international research, they address multiple critical issues and discuss their implications for existing and future policy and practice in this area. These include subjects such as gender, the media, citizenship, and multiculturalism. The insight provided by this wide-ranging book will be of great use to scholars of Religious Studies, Interreligious Dialogue and Islamic Studies, as well as Politics, Culture, and Migration.Muhammad: Forty Introductions
By Michael Muhammad Knight. 2019
Muhammad: Forty Introductions offers a distinct and nuanced take on the life and teachings of the prophet Muhammad, using a…
traditional genre of Islamic literature called the forty hadiths collection. Michael Muhammad Knight offers forty narrations that provide windows into the diverse ways in which Muslims envision Muhammad. He also examines his own relationship to Muslim traditions while exploring such topics as law, mysticism, sectarianism, gender, and sexuality. By revealing the Prophet to be an ongoing construction, he carefully unravels notions about Islam's center and margins.Transforming Bodies and Religions: Powers and Agencies in Europe (Routledge Critical Studies in Religion, Gender and Sexuality)
By Mariecke Van Den Berg, Lieke Schrijvers, Jelle Wiering, Anne-Marie Korte. 2021
This book sheds an interdisciplinary light on ‘transforming bodies’: bodies that have been subjected to, contributed to, or have resisted…
social transformations within religious or secular contexts in contemporary Europe. It explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion that underpin embodied transformations. Using post-secularist, postcolonial and gender/queer perspectives, it aims to gain a better understanding of the orchestrations and effects of larger social transitions related to religion. This volume is the outcome of the intensive collaboration of the authors, who for years have been meeting regularly in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to discuss themes related to religion and ‘the challenge of difference’, with an added afterword by Prof. Pamela Klassen from the University of Toronto. The book is divided in three subsections that focus on particular types of embodiment: body politics in governmental and NGO organisations; the role of the body in literary and/or autobiographical narratives; and ethnographic case studies of bodies in daily life. Doing so, it provides an innovative exploration of contemporary religion and the body. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Theology, and Philosophy.The Palgrave Handbook of Islam in Africa
By Toyin Falola, Fallou Ngom, Mustapha H. Kurfi. 2020
This handbook generates new insights that enrich our understanding of the history of Islam in Africa and the diverse experiences…
and expressions of the faith on the continent. The chapters in the volume cover key themes that reflect the preoccupations and realities of many African Muslims. They provide readers access to a comprehensive treatment of the past and current traditions of Muslims in Africa, offering insights on different forms of Islamization that have taken place in several regions, local responses to Islamization, Islam in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and the varied forms of Jihād movements that have occurred on the continent. The handbook provides updated knowledge on various social, cultural, linguistic, political, artistic, educational, and intellectual aspects of the encounter between Islam and African societies reflected in the lived experiences of African Muslims and the corpus of African Islamic texts.Muslim Women’s Political Participation in France and Belgium (New Directions in Islam)
By Amina Easat-Daas. 2020
This book outlines the principal motivations, opportunities and barriers to Muslim women’s political participation in France and francophone Belgium. Easat-Daas draws…
on in-depth comparative contextual analysis along with semi-structured interview material with women from France and Belgium who self-identify as Muslim and are active in a variety of modes of political participation, such European Parliamentarians, Senators, councilwomen, trade-union activists and those engaged in grass-roots political movements. This provides an alternative framing of Muslim women, removed from the tired and often exaggerated stereotypes that portray them as passive objects or sources of threat, instead highlighting their remarkable resilience and consistent determination. Through exploring the intersecting fault lines of racial, Islamophobic and gendered struggles of Muslim women in these two cases, this book also sheds new light on the role of ‘European Islam’, political opportunity structures, secularism and Muslim women’s dress.The Muslim Next Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and That Veil Thing
By Sumbul Ali-Karamali. 2008
- Bronze Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Award 2009 -Since 9/11, stories about Muslims and the Islamic world have…
flooded headlines, politics, and water-cooler conversations all across the country. And, although Americans hear about Islam on a daily basis, there remains no clear explanation of Islam or its people. The Muslim Next Door offers easy-to-understand yet academically sound answers to these questions while also dispelling commonly held misconceptions. Written from the point of view of an American Muslim, the book addresses what readers in the Western world are most curious about, beginning with the basics of Islam and how Muslims practice their religion before easing into more complicated issues like jihad, Islamic fundamentalism, and the status of women in Islam. Author Sumbul Ali-Karamali's vivid anecdotes about growing up Muslim and female in the West, along with her sensitive, scholarly overview of Islam, combine for a uniquely insightful look at the world's fastest growing religion.Religion in the Age of Digitalization: From New Media to Spiritual Machines (Routledge Research in Religion, Media and Culture)
By Giulia Isetti; Elisa Innerhofer; Harald Pechlaner; Michael de Rachewiltz. 2021
This book examines the current use of digital media in religious engagement and how new media can influence and alter…
faith and spirituality. As technologies are introduced and improved, they continue to raise pressing questions about the impact, both positive and negative, that they have on the lives of those that use them. The book also deals with some of the more futuristic and speculative topics related to transhumanism and digitalization. Including an international group of contributors from a variety of disciplines, chapters address the intersection of religion and digital media from multiple perspectives. Divided into two sections, the chapters included in the first section of the book present case studies from five major religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism and their engagement with digitalization. The second section of the volume explores the moral, ideological but also ontological implications of our increasingly digital lives. This book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the development of religion and spirituality in the digital age. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Digital Religion, Religion and Media, Religion and Sociology, as well as Religious Studies and New Media more generally, but also for every student interested in the future of religion and spirituality in a completely digitalized world.The 'Ulama in Contemporary Pakistan: Contesting and Cultivating an Islamic Republic
By Mashal Saif. 2021
In this book, Mashal Saif explores how contemporary 'ulama, the guardians of religious knowledge and law, engage with the world's…
first and most populated Islamic nation-state: Pakistan. In mapping these engagements, she weds rich ethnography with rigorous textual analysis and offers insight into some of the most significant and politically charged issues in recent Pakistani history. These include debates over the rights of women; the country's notorious blasphemy laws; the legitimacy of religiously mandated insurrection against the state; sectarian violence; and the place of Shi'as within the Sunni majority nation. These diverse case studies are knit together by the project's most significant contribution: a theoretical framework that understands the 'ulama's complex engagements with their state as a process of both contestation and cultivation of the Islamic Republic by citizen-subjects. This framework provides a new way of assessing state-'ulama relations not only in contemporary Pakistan but also across the Muslim world.Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, and Aesthetics
By Esra Akin-Kivanc. 2020
Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its…
mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akın-Kıvanc explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akın-Kıvanc imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force…
Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct. Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.Islam: An Advanced Introduction
By Roberto Tottoli. 2021
Exploring complex relations between Muslim visions and critical stances, this textbook is a compact introduction to Islam, dealing with the…
origins of its forms, from early developments to contemporary issues, including religious principles, beliefs and practices. The author’s innovative method considers the various opposing theories and approaches between the Islamic tradition and scholars of Islam. Each topic is accompanied by up-to-date bibliographical references and a list of titles for further study, while an exhaustive glossary includes the elementary notions to allow in-depth study. Part I outlines the two founding aspects, the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad, highlighting essential concepts, according to Islamic religious discourse and related critical issues. In Part II the emergence of the religious themes that have characterised the formation of Islam are explored in terms of historical developments. Part III, on contemporary Islam, examines the growth of Islam between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age. Advanced readers, already familiar with the elementary notions of Islam and religious studies will benefit from Islam that explores the development of religious discourse in a historical perspective. This unique textbook is a key resource for post-graduate researchers and academics interested in Islam, religion and the Middle East.Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (Framing the Global)
By Rachel Harris. 2020
China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is experiencing a crisis of securitization and mass incarceration. In Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, author…
Rachel Harris examines the religious practice of a group of Uyghur women in a small village now engulfed in this chaos. Despite their remote location, these village women are mobile and connected, and their religious soundscapes flow out across transnational networks. Harris explores the spiritual and political geographies they inhabit, moving outward from the village to trace connections with Mecca, Istanbul, Bishkek, and Beijing. Sound, embodiment, and territoriality illuminate both the patterns of religious change among Uyghurs and the policies of cultural erasure used by the Chinese state to reassert its control over the land the Uyghurs occupy. By drawing on contemporary approaches to the circulation of popular music, Harris considers how various forms of Islam that arrive via travel and the Internet come into dialogue with local embodied practices. Synthesized together, these practices create new forms that facilitate powerful, affective experiences of faith.Le sfide dell'integrazione dei mussulmani nella civiltà contemporanea
By Ahmed Sarirete. 2020
Visto che il mondo si interessa sempre di più ai comportamenti dei mussulmani, e che gli sguardi diffidenti sono puntati…
all'origine della loro cultura, che è l'islam, questo saggio è destinato ai mussulmani in primo luogo, per donargli nuovi spunti di riflessione affinché possano riavere la propria visione del mondo alla luce delle sfide civilizzazionali da rilevarsi, e infine di permettergli di completare la loro integrazione e di giocare un vero ruolo nel concerto delle nazioni. Essendo poi destinato a chiunque sia interessato alla cultura e alla fede islamica in particolare al fine di chiarire e di invitarli ad una comprensione maggiore, e a cambiare l' atteggiamento di sospetto nei confronti dei popoli educati in questa cultura di fede.Regesso ao Essencial
By Farhad Pourgolafshan. 2020
O mundo como o conhecíamos parou durante a noite, com o medo de um vírus mortal se espalhar rapidamente, causando…
uma pandemia. As pessoas foram forçadas a ficar confinadas em casas por um número imprevisto de semanas. Empresas foram fechadas. As consequências econômicas ainda não foram sentidas, mas as perspectivas eram mais mortais do que as do vírus. Todos começaram a aprender e a se preocupar com a higiene física. Essa reclusão forçada fez com que muitos repensassem suas vidas e o que consideravam normal, e tudo o que consideravam natural. Para muitos, o significado de suas vidas ficou em questão, e o foco começou a mudar para como poderíamos nos preparar para um evento como este ou pior. Tornou-se evidente para muitos que a fraqueza crucial tinha sido uma desnutrição espiritual e negligência; e a higiene espiritual? Este trabalho se concentra em como nos reviver espiritualmente para realizar e cumprir o verdadeiro significado de nossas vidas.Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice
By Marion Katz. 2014
Juxtaposing Muslim scholars' debates over women's attendance in mosques with historical descriptions of women's activities within Middle Eastern and North…
African mosques, Marion Holmes Katz shows how over the centuries legal scholars' arguments have often reacted to rather than dictated Muslim women's behavior. Tracing Sunni legal positions on women in mosques from the second century of the Islamic calendar to the modern period, Katz connects shifts in scholarly terminology and argumentation to changing constructions of gender. Over time, assumptions about women's changing behavior through the lifecycle gave way to a global preoccupation with sexual temptation, which then became the central rationale for limits on women's mosque access. At the same time, travel narratives, biographical dictionaries, and religious polemics suggest that women's usage of mosque space often diverged in both timing and content from the ritual models constructed by scholars. Katz demonstrates both the concrete social and political implications of Islamic legal discourse and the autonomy of women's mosque-based activities. She also examines women's mosque access as a trope in Western travelers' narratives and the evolving significance of women's mosque attendance among different Islamic currents in the twentieth century.Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran
By Niloofar Haeri. 2020
Following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government set out to Islamize society. Muslim piety had to be visible, in personal…
appearance and in action. Iranians were told to pray, fast, and attend mosques to be true Muslims. The revolution turned questions of what it means to be a true Muslim into a matter of public debate, taken up widely outside the exclusive realm of male clerics and intellectuals. Say What Your Longing Heart Desires offers an elegant ethnography of these debates among a group of educated, middle-class women whose voices are often muted in studies of Islam. Niloofar Haeri follows them in their daily lives as they engage with the classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, illuminating a long-standing mutual inspiration between prayer and poetry. She recounts how different forms of prayer may transform into dialogues with God, and, in turn, Haeri illuminates the ways in which believers draw on prayer and ritual acts as the emotional and intellectual material through which they think, deliberate, and debate.Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond: Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility (Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism)
By Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Marjo Buitelaar, Viola Thimm. 2021
This book investigates female Muslims pilgrimage practices and how these relate to women’s mobility, social relations, identities, and the power…
structures that shape women’s lives. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regional expertise, it offers in-depth investigation of the gendered dimensions of Muslim pilgrimage and the life-worlds of female pilgrims. With a variety of case studies, the contributors explore the experiences of female pilgrims to Mecca and other pilgrimage sites, and how these are embedded in historical and current contexts of globalisation and transnational mobility. This volume will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across pilgrimage, gender, religious, and Islamic studies.Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (Religion, Culture, and Public Life #15)
By Mamadou Diouf. 2013
This collection critically examines "tolerance," "secularism," and respect for religious "diversity" within a social and political system dominated by Sufi…
brotherhoods. Through a detailed analysis of Senegal's political economy, essays trace the genealogy and dynamic exchange among these concepts while investigating public spaces and political processes and their reciprocal engagement with the state, Sunni reformist and radical groups, and non-religious organizations. The anthology provides a rich and nuanced historical ethnography of the formation of Senegalese democracy, illuminating the complex trajectory of the Senegalese state and reflecting on similar postcolonial societies. Offering rare perspectives on the country's "successes" since liberation, the volume identifies the role of religion, gender, culture, ethnicity, globalization, politics, and migration in the reconfiguration of the state and society, and it makes an important contribution to democratization theory, Islamic studies, and African studies.Creation (Guides For The Perplexed)
By Simon Oliver. 2017
This addition to our popular Guides for the Perplexed series tackles a subject that is enjoying renewed debate: Christianity, along…
with Judaism and Islam, claims that the universe is not a brute fact. It is 'created'. But what do we mean by 'creation'? Do we mean that the universe is 'designed'? Is it the product of an evolutionary process? How are creatures related to God, and does God act within creation? Simon Oliver begins with the background to the Christian theology of creation in Greek philosophy and the Old Testament. This provides a route into understanding the claim that we are part of a created order that is also the theatre of God's providential action. He examines different understandings of creation, including creation out of nothing and the analogy of being, with close reference to the work of patristic and medieval theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. This leads to an historical overview of the relationship between theological, philosophical and scientific approaches to creation in the modern period. Some of the ethical issues concerning humanity's place within, and treatment of, creation and our environment are also examined. A distinctive yet traditional theology of creation is proposed focused on the concepts of gift and participation as ways of understanding more fully the meaning and implications of the claim that the universe is created.Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination
By John Tolan. 2002
In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under…
Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words.In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.