Between the tenth and sixteenth centuries Central Asia was one of the most prestigious cultural areas of the entire Muslim world, playing a pivotal role in the Silk Road trade. Throughout that ...history, and up to the present, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and other Muslim peoples of Central Asia have developed their own unique understanding and practice of Islam which has shaped their national identity and particular social and political evolution. These special characteristics of Central Asian Islam ensured its survival during seventy years of Soviet atheist rule, while in the post-Soviet period Islam has been integrated into nation-building projects in constitutionally secular Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. This absorbing history is traced in this fascinating study which shows how, from the seventh century to the present day, the region's people have negotiated their distinctively Central Asian Islamic identity in the face of enduring external Islamic and non-Islamic dominations, ethnic nationalisms and, more recently, global transnational Islamic influences.
Examines the variation and similarity in the political choices of Islamic movements. Compares three sub-regions of the greater Middle East/North Africa: Morocco, Turkey and Jordan. Based on ...qualitative fieldwork before and after the Arab Spring, including personal interviews with leading party and movement leaders.
Leading jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State dominate through cooperation in the form of knowledge sharing, resource sharing, joint training exercises, and operational ...collaboration. They build alliances and lesser partnerships with other formal and informal terrorist actors to recruit foreign fighters and spread their message worldwide, raising the aggregate threat level for their declared enemies. Whether they consist of friends or foes, whether they are connected locally or online, these networks create a wellspring of support for jihadist organizations that may fluctuate in strength or change in character but never runs dry.Nexus of Global Jihadidentifies types of terrorist actors, the nature of their partnerships, and the environments in which they prosper to explain global jihadist terrorism's ongoing success and resilience.Nexus of Global Jihadbrings to light an emerging style of "networked cooperation" that works alongside interorganizational terrorist cooperation to establish bonds of varying depth and endurance. Case studies use recently declassified materials to illuminate al-Qaeda's dealings from Iran to the Arabian Peninsula and the informal actors that power the Sharia4 movement. The book proposes policies that increase intelligence gathering on informal terrorist actors, constrain enabling environments, and disrupt terrorist networks according to different types of cooperation. It is a vital text for strategists and scholars struggling to understand a growing spectrum of terrorist groups working together more effectively than ever before.
Placing Islam Hammond, Timur
05/2023, Volume:
4
eBook
Open access
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû ...Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond. “Timur Hammond’s reimagining of Eyüp is lively and erudite, bringing readers a fresh understanding of the spaces and tempos in Istanbul as a place of Islam. The result is thrilling: a story of Islam and placemaking that is at once intricately grounded and expansively illuminating.” — ANNA J. SECOR, Professor of Geography, Durham University “An impressive ethnographic and textual work. Hammond provides new insight into the inner workings of a sacred site and pilgrimage center, making this a valuable contribution to the literature on urban anthropology and lived Islam.” — M. BRETT WILSON, Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Central European University"
In the last decade a number of women-led mosques have emerged in Europe and North America. In The Making of a Mosque with Female Imams Jesper Petersen documents the serendipitous, yet predictable, ...emergence of the Mariam Mosque in Copenhagen. The study first demonstrates that individuals’ facing the unpredictable plays a decisive role in social processes. This leads to an investigation of how serendipities are erased when narratives are erected retrospectively in the form of commodified products, autobiographical narratives, and research. Furthermore, Petersen conceptualizes non-Muslims’ theological productions of Islam – Islam without the worship of Allah, so to speak – and demonstrates how this influences Muslim productions of Islam.
The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each ...religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.
Peer review is the driving force of journal development, and reviewers are gatekeepers who ensure that Future Internet maintains its standards for the high quality of its published papers ...
In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, ...and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history. The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post- colonial visions of India.