How do modern Muslims adapt their traditions to engage with today's world? Charles Tripp's erudite and incisive book considers one of the most significant challenges faced by Muslims over the last ...sixty years: the challenge of capitalism. By reference to the works of noted Muslim scholars, the author shows how, faced by this challenge, these intellectuals devised a range of strategies which have enabled Muslims to remain true to their faith, whilst engaging effectively with a world not of their own making. The work is framed around the development of their ideas on Islamic socialism, economics and the rationale for Islamic banking. While some Muslims have resorted to confrontation or insularity to cope with the challenges of modernity, most have aspired to innovation and ingenuity in the search for compromise and interaction with global capitalism in the twenty-first century.
Al-Andalus, the Arabic name for the medieval Islamic state in Iberia, endured for over 750 years following the Arab and Berber conquest of Hispania in 711. While the popular perception of al-Andalus ...is that of a land of religious tolerance and cultural cooperation, the fact is that we know relatively little about how Muslims governed Christians and Jews in al-Andalus and about social relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. InDefining Boundaries in al-Andalus, Janina M. Safran takes a close look at the structure and practice of Muslim political and legal-religious authority and offers a rare look at intercommunal life in Iberia during the first three centuries of Islamic rule.
Safran makes creative use of a body of evidence that until now has gone largely untapped by historians-the writings and opinions of Andalusi and Maghribi jurists during the Umayyad dynasty. These sources enable her to bring to life a society undergoing dramatic transformation. Obvious differences between conquerors and conquered and Muslims and non-Muslims became blurred over time by transculturation, intermarriage, and conversion. Safran examines ample evidence of intimate contact between individuals of different religious communities and of legal-juridical accommodation to develop an argument about how legal-religious authorities interpreted the social contract between the Muslim regime and the Christian and Jewish populations. Providing a variety of examples of boundary-testing and negotiation and bringing judges, jurists, and their legal opinions and texts into the narrative of Andalusi history, Safran deepens our understanding of the politics of Umayyad rule, makes Islamic law tangibly social, and renders intercommunal relations vividly personal.
During the two decades that preceded the 2011 revolutions in Egypt and Syria, animated debates took place in Cairo and Damascus on political and social goals for the future. Egyptian and Syrian ...intellectuals argued over the meaning oftanwir, Arabic for "enlightenment," and its significance for contemporary politics. They took up questions of human dignity, liberty, reason, tolerance, civil society, democracy, and violence. InEnlightenment on the Eve of Revolution, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab offers a groundbreaking analysis of thetanwirdebates and their import for the 2011 uprisings. Kassab locates these debates in their local context as well as in broader contemporary political and intellectual Arab history. She argues that the enlightenment they advocated was a form of political humanism that demanded the right of free and public use of reason. By calling for the restoration of human dignity and seeking a moral compass in the wake of the destruction wrought by brutal regimes, they understoodtanwiras a humanist ideal. Kassab connects their debates to the Arab uprisings, arguing that their demands bear a striking resemblance to what was voiced on the streets of Egypt and Syria in 2011.Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolutionis the first book to document these debates for the Anglophone audience and to analyze their importance for contemporary Egyptian and Syrian intellectual life and politics.
Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is the most influential Islamist organization in India today. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abul Ala Maududi with the aim of spreading Islamic values in the subcontinent, Jamaat and ...its young offshoot, the Student Islamic Movement of India or SIMI, have been watched closely by Indian security services since September 11. In particular, SIMI has been accused of being behind terrorist bombings. This book is the first in-depth examination of India's Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI, exploring political Islam's complex relationship with democracy and providing a rare window into the Islamist trajectory in a Muslim-minority context. Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork at a school in the town of Aligarh, among student activists at Aligarh Muslim University, at a madrasa in Azamgarh, and during Jamaat's participation in elections in 2002. He deftly traces Jamaat's changing position in relation to India's secular democracy and the group's gradual ideological shift toward religious pluralism and tolerance. Ahmad demonstrates how the rise of militant Hindu nationalism since the 1980s--evident in the destruction of the Babri mosque and widespread violence against Muslims--led to SIMI's radicalization, its rejection of pluralism, and its call for jihad. Islamism and Democracy in India argues that when secular democracy is responsive to the traditions and aspirations of its Muslim citizens, Muslims in turn embrace pluralism and democracy. But when democracy becomes majoritarian and exclusionary, Muslims turn radical.
In 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic ...approach. In this book, M. Hakan Yavuz negotiates this ambivalence asking whether it is possible for a political party with a deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy or whether, as he contends, radical religious groups moderate their practices and ideologies when forced to negotiate a competitive and rule-based political system. The author explores the thesis through an analysis of the rise and evolution of the AKP and its more recent 2007 election victory. The book, which tackles a number of important issues including political participation, economics and internal security, provides a masterful survey of modern Turkish and Islamic politics, which will be of interest to a broad range of readers from students to professionals and policymakers.
This book reflects upon the political philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, a towering intellectual figure in South Asian history, revered by many for his poetry and his thought. He lived in India in the ...twilight years of the British Empire and, apart from a short but significant period studying in the West, he remained in Punjab until his death in 1938. The book studies Iqbal's critique of nationalist ideology and his attempts to chart a path for the development of the 'nation' by liberating it from the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the modern state structure. Iqbal frequently clashed with his contemporaries over his view of nationalism as 'the greatest enemy of Islam'. He constructed his own particular interpretation of Islam – forged through an interaction with Muslim thinkers and Western intellectual traditions – that was ahead of its time, and since his death both modernists and Islamists have continued to champion his legacy.
Secularism confronts Islam Roy, Olivier; Holoch, George
2007, 2007., 20070706, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook
The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is ...rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French—and, consequently, secular and liberal-society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society. Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences. Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy brilliantly demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis.
Contemporary studies on Syria assume that the country’s Ba’thist regime has been effective in subduing its Islamic opposition, placing Syria at odds with the Middle East’s larger trends of rising ...Islamic activism and the eclipse of secular ideologies as the primary source of political activism. Yet this assumption founders when confronted with the clear resurgence in Islamic militantism in the country since 2004.
This book examines Syria’s current political reality as regards its Islamic movement, describing the country’s present day Islamic groups – particularly their social profile and ideology – and offering an explanation of their resurgence. The analysis focuses on:
Who are today’s Syrian Islamic groups?
Why and how are they re-emerging after 22 years of relative silence as an important socio-economic and political force?
How is the Syrian state dealing with their re-emergence in light of Syria’s secularism and ideologically diverse society?
Bridging area studies, Islamic studies, and political science, this book will be an important reference for those working within the fields of Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and Middle Eastern Studies.
1. Introduction to the Subject of Secularism and Islamic Revivalism in Syria Part 1: The Origins of the Conflict 2. The Rise of a Secular Party to Power 3. The Rise and Fall of Political Islam in Syria Part 2: Hafez al-Asad's Era and the Conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood: Muting of Ba'thist Secularism in Syria 4. Conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood 5. Resurgence of Neo-fundamentalism and Decline of Political Islam as a Model for Change (1982-2000) Part 3: Bashar al-Asad's Era: Fundamentalist and Islamist Revivalism 6. Bashar al-Asad Following in his Father’s Footsteps: the Promotion of Moderate Islam from Above in the Name of De-Radicalization 7. Islamization from Below: Islamic Revivalism as a Model for Social Change and the Erosion of Ba´thist Secularism 8. Re-emergence of Political Islam: Syria’s Islamist Groups 9. Islamic Activism and Secularism in Syria 10. Conclusion
Line Khatib is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Sharjah. She earned a PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University, MA in Political Science from University of Montreal and a BA in Political Science from McGill University. She is a senior research fellow at ICAMES (the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies), McGill University, and a fellow at the Center for Syrian Studies, University of St Andrews. She is the author of a number of works including "Islamic Revivalism in Syria: the Rise and Fall of Ba´thist Secularism" (Routledge, 2011), and "Islamic Renewal and the Promotion of Moderate Islam from Above" (the University of St Andrews, 2012). Her research and teaching interests lie within the fields of comparative politics, religion and politics, and authoritarianism and democratization in the Arab World, with a particular focus on Islamic groups as social and political movements.
'Line Khatib’s book is an excellent overview of the Syrian Ba’th regime’s relations with Islam and especially of Syria’s creeping Islamization under Bashar al-Asad’s first decade. She shows how the regime’s attempt to foster a moderate Islam to counter secularists and radical Islamists inadvertently undermined secularism, leading to the Islamization of the anti-regime opposition after the Syrian Uprising.'
Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St Andrews, UK.
'In this remarkably prescient book, Line Khatib examines the erosion of Ba’thist secularism in the decade prior to the current civil war. Under Bashar al-Asad, she argues, the regime had sought to stabilize its position by reaching an accommodation with Islamist groups—thereby creating the political space for their growth and proliferation. Her analysis accurately predicts both the fragility of the regime and the foundations for Islamic radicalization since 2011, and is unquestionably important reading for anyone interested in contemporary Syrian politics.'
Rex Brynen, McGill University, Canada.
'Dr. Line Khatib has written a fascinating book, predicting and making clear in various ways what is going on in Syria today. Her in-depth study fills a (huge) gap in our knowledge of why Islam went through such a strong revival and became a potential political power threatening the regime of Bashar al-Asad. She convincingly explains how the regime itself gave a lot of space to the Islamic movements to the detriment of secularism.'
Nikolaos van Dam, author of The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society in Syria and the Ba'th Party (Routledge).
This remarkable book examines how the Islamist movement and its competition with secular-nationalist factions have transformed the identities of ordinary Palestinians since the first Palestinian ...uprising, or intifada, of the late 1980s. Drawing upon his years living in the region and more than eighty in-depth interviews, Loren Lybarger offers a riveting account of how activists within a society divided by religion, politics, class, age, and region have forged new identities in response to shifting conditions of occupation, peace negotiations, and the fragmentation of Palestinian life. Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians. Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.
Ethnographies of Islam Dupret, Baudouin; Pierret, Thomas; Pinto, Paulo G ...
07/2012
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
Explores the impact of the ethnographic method on the representation of Islam in anthropology.This comparative approach to the various uses of the ethnographic method in research about Islam in ...anthropology and other social sciences is particularly relevant in the current climate. Political discourses and stereotypical media portrayals of Islam as a monolithic civilisation have prevented the emergence of cultural pluralism and individual freedom. Such discourses are countered by the contributors who show the diversity and plurality of Muslim societies and promote a reflection on how the ethnographic method allows the description, representation and analysis of the social and cultural complexity of Muslim societies in the discourse of anthropology.Key Features: shows the benefit of using ethnography as a method to engage with and relate to specific empirical realitiesincludes case studies on rituals and symbols in Syria, Tunisia, Damascus, Algeria, Britain, Pakistan, Brazil and Lebanoncovers practices such as veiling, students' religious practices, charitable activities, law, and scholarship in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Yemen
