Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally ...binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism.
Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions-NGO-run women's arbitration centers ( mahila panchayats); sharia courts ( dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions ( fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert ( mufti) calls "spiritual healing"- Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.
The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on ...hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy.
The French government's 2004 decision to ban Islamic headscarves and other religious signs from public schools puzzled many observers, both because it seemed to infringe needlessly on religious ...freedom, and because it was hailed by many in France as an answer to a surprisingly wide range of social ills, from violence against females in poor suburbs to anti-Semitism.Why the French Don't Like Headscarvesexplains why headscarves on schoolgirls caused such a furor, and why the furor yielded this law. Making sense of the dramatic debate from his perspective as an American anthropologist in France at the time, John Bowen writes about everyday life and public events while also presenting interviews with officials and intellectuals, and analyzing French television programs and other media.
Bowen argues that the focus on headscarves came from a century-old sensitivity to the public presence of religion in schools, feared links between public expressions of Islamic identity and radical Islam, and a media-driven frenzy that built support for a headscarf ban during 2003-2004. Although the defense oflaïcité(secularity) was cited as the law's major justification, politicians, intellectuals, and the media linked the scarves to more concrete social anxieties--about "communalism," political Islam, and violence toward women.
Written in engaging, jargon-free prose,Why the French Don't Like Headscarvesis the first comprehensive and objective analysis of this subject, in any language, and it speaks to tensions between assimilation and diversity that extend well beyond France's borders.
Debates about Muslim societies have intensified in the last four decades, triggered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and 9/11. At the heart of these assumptions is Muslim exceptionalism: the ...idea that Muslims think and behave differently from other faith communities. This book debunks this flawed notion by looking at religious trends in Iran since 1979.
Pure and True Stroup, David R; Harrell, Stevan
02/2022
eBook
The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui-China's largest
Muslim ethnic group-as a model ethnic minority and touts its
harmonious relations with the group as an example of the party's
great ...success in ethnic politics. The Hui number over ten million,
but they lack a common homeland or a distinct language, and have
long been partitioned by sect, class, region, and language. Despite
these divisions, they still express a common ethnic identity. Why
doesn't conflict plague relationships between the Hui and the
state? And how do they navigate their ethnicity in a political
climate that is increasingly hostile to Muslims?
Pure and True draws on interviews with ordinary urban
Hui-cooks, entrepreneurs, imams, students, and retirees-to explore
the conduct of ethnic politics within Hui communities in the cities
of Jinan, Beijing, Xining, and Yinchuan and between Hui and the
Chinese party-state. By examining the ways in which Hui maintain
ethnic identity through daily practices, it illuminates China's
management of relations with its religious and ethnic minority
communities. It finds that amid state-sponsored urbanization
projects and in-country migration, the boundaries of Hui identity
are contested primarily among groups of Hui rather than between Hui
and the state. As a result, understandings of which daily habits
should be considered "proper" or "correct" forms of Hui identity
diverge along professional, class, regional, sectarian, and other
lines. By channeling contentious politics toward internal
boundaries, the state is able to manage ethnic politics and exert
control.
This book studies the political and institutional project of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya, the official translation of the Qurʾān into Indonesian by the Indonesian government. It investigates how the ...translation was produced and presented, and how it is read, as well as considering the implications of the state’s involvement in such a work. Lukman analyses the politicisation of the Qurʾān commentary through discussion of how the tafsīr mechanism functions in this version, weighing up the translation’s dual constraints: the growing political context, on the one hand, and the tafsīr tradition on the other. In doing so, the book pays attention to three key areas: the production phase, the textual material, and the reception of the translation by readers. This book will be of value to scholars with an interest in tafsīr studies, modern and Southeast Asian or Indonesian tafsīr sub-fields, the study of Qurʾān translations, and Indonesian politics and religion more broadly.
In Islam in Post-communist Eastern Europe Egdūnas Račius reveals how governance of religions and practical politics in Eastern Europe are permeated by churchification and securitization of Islam, and ...Muslim religious organizations have been turned into ecclesiastical-bureaucratic institutions akin to 'Muslim Churches'.
Islam At 250 M. Sijpesteijn, Petra; Adang, Camilla
2020, Letnik:
10
eBook
Odprti dostop
This volume, which pays tribute to the work of G.H.A. Juynboll, is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization.
Rentier Islamism Freer, Courtney
2018, 2018-05-31, 2018-03-01
eBook
This book, using contemporary history and original empirical research, updates traditional rentier state theory, which largely fails to account for the existence of Islamist movements, by ...demonstrating the political capital held by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While rentier state theory predicts that citizens of such states will form opposition blocs only when their stake in rent income is threatened, this book demonstrates that ideology, rather than rent, has motivated the formation of independent Islamist movements in the wealthiest states of the region. It argues for this thesis by chronicling the history of the Brotherhood in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, and showing how the organization adapted to the changing (and often adverse) political environs of those respective countries to remain a popular and influential force for social, educational, and political change in the region. The presence of oil rents, then, far from rendering Islamist complaint politically irrelevant, shapes the ways in which Islamist movements seek to influence government policies.
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