This book sets out a rationale for the compatibility of Islam and Feminism and shows that Islamic Feminism is a diverse and valuable lens through which to analyse religion and gender. In addition, including scholarship written in Arabic, it promotes the decolonisation of knowledge production around Islam, gender and sexuality. Islamic feminism is a field of study that has been marginalised both in contemporary Islamic discourse and in feminist discourse. This study counters this marginalisation in two ways. Firstly, it enumerates the diversity of approaches used in Islamic feminist scholarship. Secondly, it foregrounds voices that are often neglected in discussions of Islam, gender and sexuality by highlighting and contrasting the work of two key scholars: Kecia Ali based in the USA and Olfa Youssef based in Tunisia. The book suggests that in addition to geo-political positioning, language, as a 'prior-text', also influences an individual's personal interpretation of Islamic feminism. This comparison, therefore, enables broader issues to be dissected, such as the interrelationships between life experiences, strategies of resistance to patriarchal and other forms of oppression, and the production of knowledge. This is a unique study of Islamic Feminism that will be of great use to any scholar of Religion and Gender, Islamic Studies, Gender Studies and the Sociology of Religion.

This is not an ordinary book by any standard, and simply going through its table of contents will tell you why. The author takes you on a journey to the 6th Century A.D. where events and incidents of this book started, meticulously detailing life in the Arabian Peninsula during the period of time that preceded the birth of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammed. Then he details the struggle of the Prophet and his followers to survive in the most hostile environment and among the most ruthless people. After that, he gives you an idea about unfortunate events that followed Muhammed's demise and how those who were the closest people to him during his lifetime betrayed him and his message thereafter, confiscating the estate of his only daughter, Fatima. A chapter about his wives is included as well in addition to one about the Holy Qur'an and why it is called a miracle. Many sayings of the Prophet of Islam on various subject-matters have been included, too, giving you an idea about how Muhammed thought and what he preached. A Glossary is finally added for the benefit of those who study or teach the Islamic faith either academically or out of curiosity. Perhaps the most interesting contents of this book are two very important pacts which Muhammed signed, one with the Jews of Medina, and another with the Christians of Najran, Yemen. These pacts shed light on the Prophet's tolerance and genuine desire for a peaceful coexistence between the Muslims on the one hand and followers of the Jewish and Christian faiths on the other.

Muslims from the region that is now Nigeria have been undertaking the Hajj for hundreds of years. But the process of completing the pilgrimage changed dramatically in the twentieth century as state governments became heavily involved in its organization and management. Under British colonial rule, a minimalist approach to pilgrimage control facilitated the journeys of many thousands of mostly overland pilgrims. Decolonization produced new political contexts, with nationalist politicians taking a more proactive approach to pilgrimage management for both domestic and international reasons. The Hajj, which had previously been a life-altering journey undertaken slowly and incrementally over years, became a shorter, safer, trip characterized by round trip plane rides. In examining the transformation of the Nigerian Hajj, this book demonstrates how the Hajj became ever more intertwined with Nigerian politics and governance as the country moved from empire to independence. -- .

Islam and violence appear to dominate global politics in the twenty-first century. This book examines dimensions of Islam and violence as part of wider debates about politics, history, faith, power, rebellion and struggle both within Muslims' realms and outside it. The author accounts for definitions of violence and terrorism with both historical and contemporary dimension. The book explores the motif of violence in its myriad aspects including debates about sacrifice, private and public violence, responses and reactions, as well as suicide and martyrdom.

This book examines the legal conundrum of reconciling international human rights law in a Muslim majority country and identifies a trajectory for negotiating the protection of religious minorities within Islam. The work explores the history of religious minorities within Islam in Indonesia, which contains the world's largest Muslim population, as well as the present-day ways by which the government may address issues through reconciling international human rights law and Islamic law. Given the context of multiple sets of religious norms in Indonesia, this is a complicated endeavour. In addition to amending and enacting human rights norms, the government is also negotiating with the long history of Islamisation in Indonesia. Particularly relevant is the practice of customary law, which puts the rights of community over individualism. This practice directly affects the rights of religious minorities within Islam. Readers, especially those conducting research, will also be provided with information and references which are relevant to the field of human rights, especially in relation to religious minorities and international law. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers in the fields of International Human Rights Law, Law and Religion, and Islamic Studies.

This book investigates Turkey's departure from a 'flawed democracy' under Kemalist secularism, and its transitioning into Islamist authoritarian Erdoganism, through the lenses of informal law, legal pluralism, and legal hybridity. In doing so, it examines the attempts of Turkey's ruling party (AKP) at social engineering and gradual Islamisation of the Turkish state and society, by using informal Islamist laws. To that end, the book argues that the AKP has paved the way for Islamist legal hybridity where society, state, and law, are being gradually Islamised on an ad hoc basis. Informal law and legal pluralism in Turkey have had a non-state characteristic which have permitted Muslims to solve disputes by seeking the opinions of religio-legal scholars. Yet under the AKP rule, this informal legal system has become increasingly dominated by conservatives, sometimes radical Islamists, which the governing party has taken advantage of by either formalizing some parts of the informal Islamist law, or using it informally to mobilize its supporters against the opposition.

"Will be welcomed by all interested in African history and anthropology. A valuable contribution and a rich mine of material."
"--Journal of African History"

In many parts of the African Muslim world, slavery still blights the landscape. What are the origins of this terrible institution? Why is it still practiced? How widespread is it and how does it differ from Western chattel slavery?

This book tells the story of how the enslavement of Africans by Berbers, Arabs, and other Africans became institutionalized and legitimized throughout Muslim Africa. A classic, pioneering study, first published in 1971 and extensively updated in this revised edition, Slavery in the History of Black Muslim Africa provides an expansive portrait of domestic slavery from the tenth to the nineteenth century in the context of the religious, social, and economic conditions of the African Islamic world.

Drawing on a host of accounts from contemporary observers such as Leo Africanus and Ibn Battuta, Fisher and Fisher describe the status and rights of slaves in Africa, and their various roles as currency, goods, eunuchs, soldiers, and statesmen, as well as the jarring historical interruption brought on by slave raiders and traders in West and North Africa.

This book explores the protests of Job from the perspectives of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious and philosophical traditions. Shira Weiss examines how challenges to divine justice are understood from a Jewish theological perspective, including the pro-protest and anti-protest traditions within rabbinic literature, in an effort to explicate the ambiguous biblical text and Judaism's attitude towards the suffering of the righteous. Scott Davison surveys Christian interpretations of the book of Job and the nature of suffering in general before turning to a comparison of the lamentations of Jesus and Job, with special attention to the question of whether complaints against God can be expressions of faith. Sajjad Rizvi presents the systematic ambiguity of being present in monistic approaches to reality as one response to evil and suffering in Islam, along with approaches that attempt a resolution through the essential erotic nature of the cosmos, and explores the suggestion that Job is the hero of a metaphysical revolt that is the true sign of a friend of God. Each author also provides a response essay to the essays of the other two authors, creating an interfaith dialogue around the problem of evil and the idea of protest against the divine.

This scholarly work focuses on the establishment in 1809 of the celebrated Sokoto caliphate in what is now Nigeria. The Sokoto caliphate may well have been the last complete re-establishment of Islam in its entirety, comprising all of its many and varied dimensions.

In recent years, the debate over science, reason, and religion has reached a peak (or a high plateau, depending on your perception of time scales) of intensity, breadth, and confrontational vigor. Hundreds of Web sites, blogs, and forums have sprung up, enabling the debate to rage day-to-day. But people will always want points of view to be encapsulated in portable form: books.

Faith in the Unseen is a contribution to the debate. Its author, Dr. Rashid Seyal, who is a consultant cardiologist with numerous books on cardiology and religion under his belt, approaches the debate on the "faith" side as a religious man (he is a Muslim) with a strong background in science. The title of his book places the emphasis on the key issue that stands between the scientific atheist side and the faith side: evidence, and the absence thereof. For fundamentalist believers, evidence (other than what is written in holy books) is simply not an issue. However, for the rational religious believer, it is a pivotal point and must be rationalized.

It is divided into substantial chapters, each dealing with a major subject of faith and/or reason, and each chapter is subdivided into sections, which discuss various detailed aspects or examples, including death, the afterlife, and the philosophy of life.

Analyzes how American Muslim women assert themselves as religious actors in the US and beyond, using the Qur'an as a tool for social justice and community building The Women's Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas the established model of Islamic authority is rooted in formal religious training and Arabic language expertise, the WMA is predicated on women's embodied experiences, commitments to social and racial justice, English interpretations of the Qur'an, and community building across Islamic sects and in an interfaith context. Situating the US at the center rather than at the margins of debates over Islamic authority and showing how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US and beyond, Ali's work offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging.

For the first time, the author has explored the intertwinement of written law, Islamic law, and customary law in the highly complex Afghan society, being deeply influenced by traditional cultural and religious convictions. Given these facts, the author explores how to bridge the exigencies of a human rights-driven penal law and conflicting social norms and understandings by using the rich tradition of Islamic law and its possible openness for contemporary rule of law standards. This work is based on ample field research in connection with a thorough analysis of the normative contexts. It is a landmark, since it offers broadly acceptable and thus feasible solutions for the Afghan legal practice. The book is of equal interest for scientists and practitioners interested in legal, religious, social, and political developments concerning human rights and regional traditions in the MENA region, in Afghanistan in particular.

In Twelver Shi'a Islam, the wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, at the end of time, overshadowed the value of actively seeking martyrdom. However, what is the place of martyrdom in Twelver Shi'ism today? This book shows that the Islamic revolution in Iran resulted in the marriage of Shi'i messianism and extreme political activism, changing the mindset of the Shi'a worldwide. Suddenly, each drop of martyrs' blood brought the return of al-Mahdi one step closer, and the Islamic Republic of Iran supposedly became the prelude to the foretold world revolution of al-Mahdi. Adel Hashemi traces the unexplored area of Shi'i discourse on martyrdom from the 1979 revolution-when the Islamic Republic's leaders cultivated the culture of martyrdom to topple the Shah's regime-to the dramatic shift in the understanding of martyrdom today. Also included are the reaction to the Syrian crisis, the region's war with ISIS and other Salafi groups, and the renewed commitment to the defense of shrines. This book shows the striking shifts in the meaning of martyrdom in Shi'ism, revealing the real relevance of the concept to the present-day Muslim world.

In recent years there has been a remarkable surge in Iranian films expressing contentious issues which would otherwise be very difficult to discuss publicly inside the Islamic Republic of Iran -- such as the role of clergy in Iranian society. Nacim Pak-Shiraz here highlights how many Iranian film directors concern themselves with the content of the religious and historical narratives of culture and society, sparking debate about the medium's compatibility or incongruity with religion and spirituality. She explores the various ways that Shi'i discourse emerges on screen, and offers groundbreaking insights into both the role of film in Iranian culture and society, and how it has become a medium for exploring what it means to be Iranian and Muslim after thirty years of Islamic rule. This is invaluable reading students and scholars of Film Studies and contemporary Iranian cinema, but also of the culture and identity of Iran more widely.

A NYT Bestseller, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi provides an intimate window into American Muslim life, describing how a passionate pursuit of Islam led him to Christ through friendship, apologetics, dreams and visions.

Providing an intimate view into a loving Muslim home, Qureshi shares how he developed a passion for Islam before discovering, almost against his will, evidence that Jesus rose from the dead and claimed to be God. Unable to deny the arguments but not wanting to deny his family, Qureshi struggled with an inner turmoil that will challenge Christians, Muslims, and all those who are interested in two of the world's greatest religions and the quest for truth.

Qureshi - with great courage and intimacy - wrote this book with three major purposes in mind:

• To tear down walls between two of the world's major religions by giving non-Muslim readers an insider's perspective into a Muslim's heart and mind.
• To equip the reader with facts and knowledge, showing the strength of the case for the gospel contrasted with the case for Islam.
• To portray the immense inner struggle of Muslims grappling with the gospel, including all the sacrifices and doubts that rise up along the way.

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus is more than the memoir of a man's pursuit of answers to the most important issues of life and faith. Ultimately, it's the story about the transformative grace and mercy of the one true God.

This edition has been expanded to include:

• A revised foreword and introduction

In this comprehensive open access book, written for readers from any or no religious background, Leena El-Ali does something remarkable. Never before has anyone taken on every last claim relating to Islam and women and countered it not just with Qur'anic evidence to the contrary, but with easy-to-use tools available to all. How can a woman's testimony be worth half of a man's? How can men divorce their wives unilaterally by uttering three words? And what's with the obsession with virgins in Paradise? Find the chapter on any of the seventeen topics in this book, and you will quickly learn a) where the myth came from and b) how to bust it. The methodology pursued is simple. First, the Qur'an is given priority over all other literary or "scriptural" sources. Second, the meaning of its verses in the original Arabic is highlighted, in contrast to English translations and/or widespread misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

This book showcases multidisciplinary research at the intersection of the Islamic tradition and biomedicine. Within this broad area of scholarship, this book considers how Islamic theological constructs align with the science and practice of medicine, and in so doing offer resources for bridging the challenges of competing ontological visions, varied epistemic frameworks, and different theologies of life and living among the bodies of knowledge. By bringing together theologians, medical practitioners and intellectual historians, the book spurs deeper conversations at the intersection of these fields and provides fundamental resources for further dedicated research.

This book combines contemporary discussions on modernity with the history of the Muslim world. From a heuristic perspective, it is sketching out a framework for a global sociology of modernity. This framework attempts to accommodate a core assumption of classical modernization theory - the global nature of modernity - with the pluralistic perspective of the rise of a multiplicity of historically concrete forms of modernities. It tries to reconcile a universalistic concept of modernity with the fact of modernity's multiple historical realizations. At the same time, this discussion of contemporary social theory puts forward a critique of the still so conveniently applied equation of modernization with Westernization. In empirical terms, the book substantiates this critique in drawing its exemplary illustrations from the historical experience of Muslim peoples. Bringing Muslim history and discussions in social theory together, this book represents a synthesis of research efforts in sociology and Islamic studies.

The figure of the renegade - a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan - is omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan. Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts in the Ottoman military-administrative elite. The Sultan's Renegades inserts these 'foreign' converts into the context of Ottoman elite life to reorient the discussion of these individuals away from the present focus on their exceptionality, towards a qualified appreciation of their place in the Ottoman imperial enterprise and the Empire's relations with its neighbours in Christian Europe. Drawing heavily on Central European sources, this study highlights the deep political, religious, and cultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe beyond the Mediterranean Basin as the 'shared world' par excellence. The existence of such trans-imperial subjects is not only symptomatic of the Empire's ability to attract and integrate people of a great diversity of backgrounds, it also illustrates the extent to which the Ottomans participated in processes of religious polarization usually considered typical of Christian Europe in this period. Nevertheless, Christian Europeans remained ambivalent about those they dismissed as apostates and traitors, frequently relying on them for support in the pursuit of familial and political interests.

Bassam Tibi offers a radical solution to the problems faced by Islam in a rapidly changing and globalizing world. He argues that Islam is being torn between the pressure for cultural innovation and a defensive move towards the politicization of its symbols for non-religious ends. Tibi proposes a depoliticization of the faith and the introduction of reforms to embrace secular democracy, pluralism, civil society, and individual human rights. The alternative to this is the impasse of fundamentalism.

Since the beginning of recorded history, Iran/Persia has been one of the most important world civilizations. Iran remains a distinct civilization today despite its status as a major Islamic state with broad regional influence and its deep integration into the global economy through its vast energy reserves. Yet the close attention paid to Iran in recent decades stems from the impact of the 1979 revolution, which unleashed ideological shock waves throughout the Middle East that reverberate to this day. Many observers look at Iran through the prism of the Islamic Republic's adversarial relationship with the US, Israel, and Sunni nations in its region, yet as Michael Axworthy shows in Iran: What Everyone Needs to Know, there is much more to contemporary Iran than its fraught and complicated foreign relations. He begins with a concise account of Iranian history from ancient times to the late twentieth century, following that with sharp summaries of the key events since the1979 revolution. The final section of the book focuses on Iran today-its culture, economy, politics, and people-and assesses the challenges that the nation will face in coming years. Iran will be an essential overview of a complex and important nation that has occupied world headlines for nearly four decades.