Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. InGendered Morality, Zahra ...Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core.Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.
This book presents general readers and specialists alike with a broad survey of Islamic political thought in the six centuries from the rise of Islam to the Mongol invasions. Based on a wide variety ...of sources, it seeks to bring out the enormous scope and high level of historical (and, in some cases, contemporary) interest of medieval Muslim thinking on this subject. The author aims to make Islamic political thought easier for modern readers to understand by relating it to the contexts in which it was formulated, analysing it in terms familiar to the reader, and, where possible, comparing it with medieval European and modern thought. Guiding the reader through this complex history on a tour of one of the great civilizations of the pre-modern world, the book brings out the fascinating nature of medieval Islamic political thought, both in its own right and as the background to political thinking in the Muslim world today. Key Features
* Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field
* All concepts have been glossed and all persons, events and historical developments have been identified or summarised, both on first encounter and in the index (where the number of the page containing the gloss will be emboldened)
* Specialists are addressed in the footnotes; non-specialists are free to skip these and read an uncluttered text
How does a group that operates terror cells and espouses violence become a ruling political party? How is the world to understand and respond to Hamas, the militant Islamist organization that ...Palestinian voters brought to power in the stunning election of January 2006?
This important book provides the most fully researched assessment of Hamas ever written. Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert with extensive field experience in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, draws aside the veil of legitimacy behind which Hamas hides. He presents concrete, detailed evidence from an extensive array of international intelligence materials, including recently declassified CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security reports.Levitt demolishes the notion that Hamas' military, political, and social wings are distinct from one another and catalogues the alarming extent to which the organization's political and social welfare leaders support terror. He exposes Hamas as a unitary organization committed to a militant Islamist ideology, urges the international community to take heed, and offers well-considered ideas for countering the significant threat Hamas poses.
Islam and the West African Novel Bangura, Ahmed S
Islam and the West African Novel: The Politics of Representation,
2000, 20000101
eBook
To many Muslims The Satanic Verses constitutes an utterly negative representation of Islam. ...this negative representation has been linked to the author's personal ideological hostility to Islam. ......the one good thing to have come out of this controversy may well be the revitalization of the debate on the "worldliness" of the literary system: the politics of textuality and representation, as well as the politics of interpretation. ...the novels, as I shall demonstrate, express at once the novelist's interpretation (representation) of social reality and articulate the writer's various alternatives for the overall reform of society. ...concepts as "Sufi Islam," "orthodox Islam," "revolutionary Islam," "Asharism," and "Mu'talizism" are used to provide explanation for attitudes and actions taken by characters in different social and historical contexts.
The Uzbekistan government has been criticized for its brutal suppression of its Muslim population. This 2011 book, which is based on the author's intimate acquaintance with the region and several ...years of ethnographic research, is about how Muslims in this part of the world negotiate their religious practices despite the restraints of a stifling authoritarian regime. Fascinatingly, the book also shows how the restrictive atmosphere has actually helped shape the moral context of people's lives, and how understandings of what it means to be a Muslim emerge creatively out of lived experience.
Does political inclusion produce ideological moderation? Schwedler argues that examining political behaviour alone provides insufficient evidence of moderation because it leaves open the possibility ...that political actors might act as if they are moderate while harbouring radical agendas. Through a comparative study of the Islamic Action Front party in Jordan and the Islah party in Yemen, she argues that the IAF in Jordan has become more moderate through participation in pluralist political processes, while the Islah party has not. The variation is explained in part by internal group organization and decision-making processes, but particularly by the ways in which the IAF has been able to justify its new pluralist practices on Islamic terms while the Islah party has not. Based on nearly four years of field research in Jordan and Yemen, Schwedler contributes both an important theory of ideological moderation and detail about these powerful Islamist political parties.
This book offers a comparative and cross-cultural history of Islamic reform and European colonialism as both dependent and independent factors in shaping the multiple ways of becoming modern in ...Indonesia and Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century.
Compulsion in Religion relies on extensive research with Ba’thist archives to investigate the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. The ...Iraqi archival records demonstrate that by the 1990s, Saddam’s regime had developed institutions to control and monitor Iraq’s religious landscape. The regime’s ability to do so provided it with confidence to launch a national “Faith Campaign” and to inject religion into Iraqi politics in a controlled manner. Islam played a greater role in the regime’s symbols and Saddam Hussein’s statements in the 1990s than it had in earlier decades. This increase in religious rhetoric did not represent a shift from secular-nationalist ideology to Islamism, however. The regime’s official policies toward religious leaders and institutions remained remarkably consistent throughout the Ba’thist period; Saddam spoke derisively about all forms of Islamist politics in Iraq throughout his presidency. He promoted a Ba’thist interpretation of religion that subordinated it to Arab nationalism rather than depicting the religion as an independent or primary political identity. Saddam did so explicitly to undermine Islamists and the revolutionary religious movements that would emerge after 2003. When the American-led invasion of 2003 destroyed the regime’s authoritarian structures, it unhinged the forces that these structures were designed to contain, creating an atmosphere infused with politically instrumentalized religion but lacking the checks provided by the former regime. Sadrists, al-Qaida, and eventually the Islamic State emerged out of this context to unleash the insurgencies that have plagued post-2003 Iraq.
