Search Results

This book is a pioneering study of how multiculturalism interacts with sub-state nationalism in Britain. It gives equal attention to Scotland’s largest ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ minorities: ethnic Pakistanis (almost all of them Muslim) and English immigrants; and to the Islamophobia and Anglophobia of majority Scots. Rising Scottish self-consciousness could have threatened both these minorities. But in reality, problems proved to be solutions, integrating rather than alienating. In the eyes of the minorities, the devolution of power to a Scottish Parliament has made Scots at once more proud and less xenophobic. English immigrants also felt that devolution has defused tensions, calmed frustrations, and forced Scots to blame themselves rather than others for their problems. Muslims suffered increased harassment after 9/11, although less in Scotland than elsewhere. Consciously or unconsciously, they continued to use Scottish identities and even Scottish nationalism as tools of integration. Conversely, nationalism in Scotland did not increase the majority’s Islamophobia as it did in England and elsewhere. The book is based on extensive quotations from focus-group discussions with minorities, in-depth interviews with elites, and statistical analysis of large-scale surveys of minorities and majorities.

Today there are more Muslims living in diaspora than at any time in history. This situation was not envisioned by Islamic law, which makes no provision for permanent as opposed to transient diasporic communities. Western Muslims are therefore faced with the necessity of developing an Islamic law for Muslim communities living in non-Muslim societies. This book explores the development of new forms of Islamic law and legal reasoning in the U.S. and Great Britain, as well as Muslims encountering Anglo-American common law and its unfamiliar commitments to pluralism and participation, and to gender, family, and identity. The underlying context is the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, the two attacks that arguably recast the way the West views Muslims and Islam. Islamic jurisprudence, the book notes, contains a number of references to various “abodes” and a number of interpretations of how Muslims should conduct themselves within those worlds. These include the dar al harb (house of war), dar al kufr (house of unbelievers), and dar al salam (house of peace). How Islamic law interprets these determines the debates that take shape in and around Islamic legality in these spaces. The book's analysis emphasizes the multiplicities of law, and the tensions between secularism and religiosity. It offers a close examination of the emergence of a contingent legal consciousness shaped by the exceptional circumstances of being Muslim in the U.S. and Britain in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

In 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin sealed the Oslo peace agreement, it was heralded as the beginning of a new era in the Middle East peace process. Instead, violence on both sides has continued to plague the region. The brutal facts on the ground have called into question the style of diplomacy that saw its greatest triumph with the Oslo Accords. This book asserts that the failure of the peace process stems in large part from its complete neglect of cultural and religious factors; attempted solutions have ignored the basic needs and values of average people. The author argues for a far greater integration of the religious communities of the region into peace‐building efforts. Drawing on his own personal experience with religion‐based peace initiatives in Israel and Palestine, he writes of the individuals and groups that are already attempting such reconciliations. He offers a detailed prescription for future negotiations using methods specifically designed to undermine the appeal of religious extremists by subtly incorporating religious values and symbols into the procedures of official and unofficial diplomacy, believing that a combination of secular and religious methods of peacemaking will yield a rich and creative model for conflict resolution. Any effort at peacemaking that fails to take into account the deep religious feelings of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is destined to fail. Only by including religion in the peace process can we move past fragile and superficial agreements and toward a deep and lasting solution. The book is arranged in two parts – Analysis, and Practical applications.

Conflicts and controversies at home and abroad have led Americans to focus on Islam more than ever before. Little is known about Islam in Victorian America. This book is a biography of Alexander Russell Webb, one of the earliest American Muslims to achieve public renown. Webb was a central figure of American Islam during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A native of the Hudson Valley, he was a journalist, editor, and civil servant. Raised a Presbyterian, Webb early on began to cultivate an interest in other religions and became particularly fascinated by Islam. While serving as US consul to the Philippines in 1887, he took a greater interest in the faith and embraced it in 1888, one of the first Americans known to have done so. Within a few years, he began corresponding with important Muslims in India. Webb became an enthusiastic propagator of the faith, founding the first Islamic institution in the United States: the American Mission. He wrote numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, started the first Islamic press in the United States, published a journal entitled The Moslem World, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In 1901, he was appointed Honorary Turkish Consul General in New York and was invited to Turkey, where he received two Ottoman medals of merits.

In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. This book demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expanding network of anti-Muslim organizations that exert profound influence on American understanding of Islam. The book traces how the anti-Muslim narrative of the political fringe has captivated large segments of the American media, government, and general public, validating the views of extremists who argue that the United States is at war with Islam and marginalizing mainstream Muslim-Americans who are uniquely positioned to discredit such claims. Drawing on cultural sociology, social network theory, and social psychology, the book shows how anti-Muslim organizations gained visibility in the public sphere, commandeered a sense of legitimacy, and redefined the contours of contemporary debate, shifting it ever outward toward the fringe. The book illustrates the author's pioneering theoretical argument through a big-data analysis of more than one hundred organizations struggling to shape public discourse about Islam, tracing their impact on hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, television transcripts, legislative debates, and social media messages produced since the September 11 attacks. The book also features in-depth interviews with the leaders of these organizations, providing a rare look at how anti-Muslim organizations entered the American mainstream.

This book tackles the most significant issues facing Muslims today. As Islam and Muslims enter the 21st century, the book argues, it is necessary to reopen the doors of religious interpretation—to re-examine and correct false interpretations, replace outdated laws and formulate new doctrines that respond to changing social contexts. Always using the Quran as a yardstick, the book demonstrates how and why Islamic law came to reflect political and social influences, leading to regulations that violate the spirit and the letter of the Quran. It analyzes critically Muslim teachings on issues of pluralism, civil society, war and peace, violence and self-sacrifice, the status and role of non-Muslims, and capital punishment.

Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to 100,000 German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. This book explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today's Europe. The book looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment. This book provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.

This interdisciplinary volume seeks to consider the notion of ‘Punjabiyat’, a loosely defined term often used to describe a sentiment of belonging or attachment to Punjab and/or the foundations of a shared, cross-religious, cross-caste, cross-class culture. It takes as its starting point the question of whether, despite political, social, religious—indeed, historical—differences, there are notions of ‘Punjabiyat’/Punjabiness that constitute the Punjab as a region conceptually in history, culture, and practice. The essays in this volume each examine a different Punjabi culture—language-based and literary; religious and those that define a ‘community’; rural, urban, and middle class; historical, contemporary, and cosmopolitan. Together they point to the complex foundations of ‘Punjabiyat’, making this volume a major contribution to the cultural history of a region. The essays in this volume are based on a broad array of colonial and indigenous sources in Punjabi, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu. These sources range from poetry to prose, and from literary to political to religious texts (Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim). The authors draw from their expertise in the disciplines of history, religious studies, comparative literature, and architectural history to provide cogent analyses of aspects of Punjabi early modern, colonial, and post-colonial history, as well as its historiography.

Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. This book takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support—a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting visions of Islam itself. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among rank-and-file activists in Morocco, the book shows how Islamist movements are encountering opposition from an unexpected source—each other. In vivid detail, the book describes the conflicts that arise as Islamist groups vie with one another for new recruits, and the unprecedented fragmentation that occurs as members wrangle over a shared urbanized base. Looking carefully at how political Islam is lived, expressed, and understood by young people, the book moves beyond the top-down focus of current research. Instead, it makes the compelling case that Islamist actors are shaped more by their relationships to each other than by their relationships to the state or even to religious ideology. By focusing not only on the texts of aging elites but also on the voices of diverse and sophisticated Muslim youths, the book exposes the shifting and contested nature of Islamist movements today—movements that are being reimagined from the bottom up by young Islam. This book, the first to shed light on this new and uncharted era of Islamist pluralism in the Middle East and North Africa, uncovers the rivalries that are redefining the next generation of political Islam.

Why are there so few Muslim terrorists? With more than a billion Muslims in the world—many of whom supposedly hate the West and ardently desire martyrdom—why don't we see terrorist attacks every day? Where are the missing martyrs? This counterintuitive book demonstrates that terrorist groups are thoroughly marginal in the Muslim world. Drawing on government sources, public opinion surveys, election results, and in-depth interviews with Muslims in the Middle East and around the world, the book finds that young Muslims are indeed angry with what they see as imperialism—and especially at Western support for local dictatorships. But revolutionary Islamists such as al-Qaida and the Taliban have failed to reach them, as can be seen from the terrorists' own websites and publications, which constantly bemoan the dearth of willing recruits. It takes only a small cadre of committed killers to wreak unspeakable havoc. But as easy as terrorism is to commit, few Muslims turn to violence. With each bombing, the terrorists lose support among Muslims. The threat of Islamist terrorism is real, but its dimensions are, so far, tightly confined.

The interchange between Muslims and Europe has a long and complicated history, dating back to before the idea of ‘Europe’ was born, and the earliest years of Islam. There has been a Muslim presence on the European continent before, but never has it been so significant, particularly in Western Europe. With more Muslims in Europe than in many countries of the Muslim world, they have found themselves in the position of challenging what it means to be a European in a secular society of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the European context has caused many Muslims to re-think what is essential to them in religious terms in their new reality. This work analyses the prospects for a European future where pluralism is accepted within unified societies, and the presence of a Muslim community that is of Europe, not simply in it.

Shivaji was a noble and virtuous hero from 17th-century western India. His legend is well known and has been retold, in several different versions, as it serves as an important part of Hindu nationalist ideology. His legend expresses deeply held convictions about what Hinduism is, and how it is opposed to Islam. Through presenting specific points about the similarities of themes and the contexts in which this legend has been set, this book traces the origin and development of the Shivaji legend, examining its meaning for those who have composed and read it, and paints a complex picture of the past four centuries of national identity, awareness of themes present during colonization, the influence of an author's experience in his narrations, and, most importantly, Hindu-Muslim relations.

The debate over educational disparities across religious communities in India, especially those concerning the Muslims, is as old as the history of the modern education system in the country. This debate has yielded several explanations for educational backwardness among the Muslims which evoke a supposedly low value placed on modern education by Islamic theology, the status of Indian Muslims as a minority, and invidious discrimination against the Muslims in India. Largely cast in a polemical and impressionistic mode, this debate has long awaited empirical underpinnings. The recent upsurge in empirical studies on the topic requires an explanatory frame that admits of precision and complexity. Despite the renewed interest in this subject following the Sachar Committee Report, considerable knowledge gaps continue to exist in our understanding of the dynamics between religion and access to education. The present work brings to fore the spatially contextualized historical trajectories that have shaped educational development and various forms of disparities therein. It argues that religious communities, such as the Muslims, have to be seen as spatially and economically differentiated across regions rather than as homogeneous socio-cultural aggregates. This argument draws upon disaggregation of national-level secondary data and is supplemented by a primary fieldwork-based comparison of the educational status of Muslims in Patna and Purnia districts of Bihar. The relative educational backwardness of the Muslim community is thus seen to have underlying spatial and class patterns that are often overlooked.