The politics of the veil Scott, Joan Wallach
2007., 20090411, 2009, 2007, 2010-08-02, Volume:
7
eBook
In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls ...wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all. Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She examines the long history of racism behind the law as well as the ideological barriers thrown up against Muslim assimilation. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate--how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French. Scott maintains that the law, far from reconciling religious and ethnic differences, only exacerbates them. She shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France--or the West in general--and how it creates the very "clash of civilizations" said to be at the root of these tensions.
Senegalese Murid migrants have circulated cargo and currency through official and unofficial networks in Africa and the world. Muslim Families in Global Senegal focuses on trade and the transmission ...of enduring social value though cloth, videos of life-cycle rituals, and religious offerings. Highlighting women's participation in these networks and the financial strategies they rely on, Beth Buggenhagen reveals the deep connections between economic profits and ritual and social authority. Buggenhagen discovers that these strategies are not responses to a dispersed community in crisis, but rather produce new roles, wealth, and worth for Senegalese women in all parts of the globe.
First Nationalism Then Identity focuses on the case of Bosnian Muslims, a rare historic instance of a new nation emerging. Although for Bosnian Muslims the process of national emergence and the ...assertion of a new salient identity have been going on for over two decades, Mirsad Kriještorac is the first to explain the significance of the whole process and how the adoption of their new Bosniak identity occurred. He provides a historical overview of Yugoslav and Bosnian Slavic Muslims’ transformation into a full-fledged distinct and independent national group as well as addresses the important question in the field of nationalism studies about the relationship between and workings of nationalism and identity. While this book is noteworthy for ordinary readers interested in the case of Bosnian Muslims, it is an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the role of nationalism in the political life of a group and adds an interdisciplinary perspective to comparative politics scholarship by drawing from anthropology, history, geography, and sociology.
In a Western world suddenly acutely interested in Islam, one question has been repeatedly heard above the din: where are the Muslim reformers? As the number of Muslims living in the West grows, the ...question of what it means to be a Western Muslim becomes increasingly important to the futures of both Islam and the West. While the media are focused on radical Islam, this book claims that a silent revolution is sweeping Islamic communities in the West, as Muslims actively seek ways to live in harmony with their faith within a Western context. French, English, German, and American Muslims—women as well as men—are reshaping their religion into one that is faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies. The book's goal is to create an independent Western Islam, anchored not in the traditions of Islamic countries but in the cultural reality of the West. It begins by offering a fresh reading of Islamic sources, interpreting them for a Western context and demonstrating how a new understanding of universal Islamic principles can open the door to integration into Western societies. The author contends that Muslims can—indeed must—be faithful to their principles while participating fully in the civic life of Western secular societies. This book offers a vision of a new Muslim Identity that rejects the idea that Islam must be defined in opposition to the West.
Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra inSex and the City 2playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake "Mustafa Bayoumi" was) in a detective novel, the ...subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an "anti-American, pro-Islam" agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.
Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. InThis Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Dannin provides an unprecedented look inside the fascinating and little understood world of black Muslims. He examines the tension between the Nation of Islam and ...Islamic orthodoxy, visits mosques and prisons, and ponders the effect of the assassination of Malcolm X.
This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the ...unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization.
Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens.
InMuslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.
Muslims have been shaping the Americas and the Caribbean for
more than five hundred years, yet this interplay is frequently
overlooked or misconstrued. Brimming with revelations that
synthesize area ...and ethnic studies, Crescent over Another
Horizon presents a portrait of Islam's unity as it evolved
through plural formulations of identity, power, and belonging.
Offering a Latino American perspective on a wider Islamic world,
the editors overturn the conventional perception of Muslim
communities in the New World, arguing that their characterization
as "minorities" obscures the interplay of ethnicity and religion
that continues to foster transnational ties.
Bringing together studies of Iberian colonists, enslaved
Africans, indentured South Asians, migrant Arabs, and Latino and
Latin American converts, the volume captures the power-laden
processes at work in religious conversion or resistance. Throughout
each analysis-spanning times of inquisition, conquest, repressive
nationalism, and anti-terror security protocols-the authors offer
innovative frameworks to probe the ways in which racialized Islam
has facilitated the building of new national identities while
fostering a double-edged marginalization. The subjects of the
essays transition from imperialism (with studies of
morisco converts to Christianity, West African slave
uprisings, and Muslim and Hindu South Asian indentured laborers in
Dutch Suriname) to the contemporary Muslim presence in Argentina,
Brazil, Mexico, and Trinidad, completed by a timely examination of
the United States, including Muslim communities in "Hispanicized"
South Florida and the agency of Latina conversion. The result is a
fresh perspective that opens new horizons for a vibrant range of
fields.
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.
