The Influence of Islamic Values on Management Practice is a cultural study examining how Islamic values influence management practice. Using Morocco as a case study, and with academic research and actual business managers working in this context, the book explores and explains how national characteristics, including Islam, shape management practice

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.

"Harmonizing Similarities" is a study of the legal distinctions (al-furuq al-fiqhiyya) literature and its role in the development of the Islamic legal heritage. This book reconsiders how the public performance of Islamic law helped shape legal literature. It identifies the origins of this tradition in contemporaneous lexicographic and medical literature, both of which demonstrated the productive potential of drawing distinctions. Elias G. Saba demonstrates the implications of the legal furuq and how changes to this genre reflect shifts in the social consumption of Islamic legal knowledge. The interest in legal distinctions grew out of the performance of knowledge in formalized legal disputations. From here, legal distinctions incorporated elements of play through its interactions with the genre of legal riddles. As play, books of legal distinctions were supplements to performance in literary salons, study circles, and court performances; these books also served as mimetic objects, allowing the reader to participate in a session virtually. Saba underscores how social and intellectual practices helped shape the literary development of Islamic law and that literary elaboration became a main driver of dynamism in Islamic law. This monograph has been awarded the annual BRAIS - De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

This thoughtful and wide-ranging open access volume explores the forces and issues shaping and defining contemporary identities and everyday life in Brunei Darussalam. It is a subject that until now has received comparatively limited attention from mainstream social scientists working on Southeast Asian societies. The volume helps remedy that deficit by detailing the ways in which religion, gender, place, ethnicity, nation-state formation, migration and economic activity work their way into and reflect in the lives of ordinary Bruneians. In a first of its kind, all the lead authors of the chapter contributions are local Bruneian scholars, and the editors skilfully bring the study of Brunei into the fold of the sociology of everyday life from multiple disciplinary directions. By engaging local scholars to document everyday concerns that matter to them, the volume presents a collage of distinct but interrelated case studies that have been previously undocumented or relatively underappreciated. These interior portrayals render new angles of vision, scale and nuance to our understandings of Brunei often overlooked by mainstream inquiry. Each in its own way speaks to how structures and institutions express themselves through complex processes to influence the lives of inhabitants. Academic scholars, university students and others interested in the study of contemporary Brunei Darussalam will find this volume an invaluable resource for unravelling its diversity and textures. At the same time, it hopefully stimulates critical reflection on positionality, hierarchies of knowledge production, cultural diversity and the ways in which we approach the social science study of Brunei. 'I wish to commend the editors for bringing this volume to fruition. It is an important book in the context of Southeast Asian sociology and even more important for the development of our social, geographical, cultural and historical knowledge of Brunei.' -Victor T. King, University of Leeds

This book presents selected chapters from the proceedings of the 12th Global Islamic Marketing Conference (June 2021). The chapters provide an up-to-date overview of research and insights into Islamic business practices in general and Islamic marketing strategies in particular. Papers include topics such as understanding Muslim consumer behavior, services marketing, implications and implementation of Halal business practices, social media marketing, ecommerce strategies, and overall business strategy. This book is helpful for researchers interested in the specialties of the topic and also for business consultants who wish to have an in-depth understanding of doing business in Islam-oriented regions.

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 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.

Ashlee Quosigk explores the diversity of opinions within the largest religious group in the US - Evangelical Christians - on the topic of Islam. Evangelicals are often characterized as monolithically antagonistic toward Muslims. This book challenges that stereotype, exposing the sharp divides that exist among Evangelicals on Islam and examines why there is division. Drawing on qualitative research on two congregations in the US, as well as on popular Evangelical leaders, this book details the surprisingly diverse views Evangelicals hold on Muhammad, the Qur'an, interfaith dialogue, syncretism, and politics. This research is invaluable for providing a better understanding of what Evangelicals think, and why. This book also offers insight into why conflict exists and why Evangelicals differ, while advancing culture war theory and qualitative methods. Specifically, it explores differences in moral authority (assumptions that guide one's perceptions of the world) among Evangelicals and explains how these differences influence their views on Islam. The findings are relevant to religious relations worldwide as everyone appeals to moral authority, irrespective of their geographic location.

This open access book addresses, for the first time, Islamic social work as an emerging concept at the interface of Islamic thought and social sciences. Applying a multidisciplinary approach it explores, on the one hand, the discourse that provides religious legitimisation to social work activities and, on the other hand, case studies of practical fields of Islamic social work including educational programmes, family counselling, and resettlement of prisoners. Although in many cases, these activities are oriented towards Muslim clients, more often than not they go beyond the boundaries of Muslim communities to benefit society as a whole. Muslim actors are also starting to professionalise their services and to negotiate the ways in which they can become fully recognised service-providers within the welfare state. At a more general level, the volume also shows that in contrast to the widespread processes of secularisation of social work and its separation from religious communities, new types of activities are now emerging, which bring back to the public arena both an increased sensitivity to the religious identities of the beneficiaries and the religious motivations of the benefactors. The edited volume will be of interest to researchers in Islamic Studies, Social and Political Sciences, Social Work, and Religious Studies. This is an open access book.

"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.

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.

Christian-Muslim dialogue grows increasingly important, but little is known about individual Muslim dialogical thinkers. Born in Palestine in 1921, Ismail al-Faruqi was a leading figure in the development of conversation and debate across faiths in North America in the second half of the twentieth century, and was actively engaged in inter-faith study and dialogue. Al-Faruqi founded the Islamic Studies programme at Temple University, Pennsylvania where several distinguished Muslim intellectuals have taught, such as Seyyid Hossein Nasr, Mahmoud Ayoub and Hasan Hanafi. Along with Kenneth Cragg and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, al-Faruqi was an active participant in Muslim-Christian dialogues in the 1970s and the 1980s. Charles Fletcher here presents the first study dedicated to Ismail al-Faruqi's theory and practice of interfaith dialogue. Analysing al-Faruqi's sometimes provocative ideas on the comparative study of religion, dialogue and practical engagement, the author provides an illuminating study of the life and thought of this important scholar. Tracing the development of al-Faruqi's ideas and practice of inter-faith dialogue, Fletcher shows how Muslim intellectuals engaged in such attempts viewed their role as representatives of the worldwide Muslim community. With perceptive insights into the history of contemporary Muslim-Christian dialogue, this book will be invaluable for all those interested in inter-faith relations, comparative religious studies, North American Muslims and Islamic studies.

This book works on the interface between literature, culture, and discourse. It is entirely devoted to the reading of some of Zafzaf's novels that came out in the early 1970s and in the late 1980s, and attempts to chart the trajectory of the aesthetic imaginary of an exceptional writing experience that marked out the literary and cultural landscape in Morocco and in the Arab world for long. Zafzaf and his writings are associated with aspects of the country's social contradictions, cultural transition, and political transformations, expressed through various aesthetic patterns that translate the crisis of the intellectual within a society weighed down by poverty, political instability, social conflict, and cultural disintegration. Given the relative scarcity of resources that are written in English about the Moroccan novel of Arabic expression, this work is an attempt to theorize and approach in an interdisciplinary manner a set of narratives that have not been previously explored in western academia. Using postcolonial discourse as approach and a metaphor of reading, it draws attention to the often-neglected texts in Moroccan literature of Arabic expression and explores their aesthetic, discursive, and cultural implications that rethink and disturb canonical formations of literary texts in Morocco. This book will be adopted in the now burgeoning fields of the Humanities, and will provide useful resources for courses about Moroccan Literature and culture.

The study of Islam's origins from a rigorous historical and social science perspective is still wanting. At the same time, a renewed attention is being paid to the very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be formed by various independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha, and other ancient writings of Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean provenance may be found. Likewise, the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps much later than commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way. The following volume gathers select studies that were originally shared at the Early Islamic Studies Seminar. These studies aim at exploring afresh the dawn and early history of Islam with the tools of biblical criticism as well as the approaches set forth in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Christian, and Rabbinic origins, thereby contributing to the renewed, interdisciplinary study of formative Islam as part and parcel of the complex processes of religious identity formation during Late Antiquity.

A spiritual memoir by the author of "God Is a Verb."

"This book is a treasure map, but not like any you have seen before. Most people believe that the object of a treasure hunt is to find a chest of gold. The mystical approach, however, is that the search itself is the treasure . Here is an invitation to begin an exploration of the treasure fields of your own mind the most exciting and rewarding adventure you will ever take." from the Introduction

Here is an insider s look at a spectrum of mystical traditions by someone who is remarkably fluent in the language of each. Three Gates to Meditation Practicechronicles more than fifteen years in the spiritual journey of "post-denominational" Rabbi David A. Cooper and his wife Shoshana years that led the Coopers everywhere from a secluded mountain hut in New Mexico to the Sinai desert, from chanting Sufi dhikr and meditation with Buddhist masters to studying Kabbalah and esoteric Judaism in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Coopers story is an intimate account of what intensive spiritual practice is like, with an ultimate message that is supremely inspiring: The spiritual path is completely within our reach, whoever we are, whatever we do, as long as we are willing to try.

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.

This book presents how ancient Christianity must be understood from the viewpoint of the history of religions in late antiquity. The continuation of biblical prophecy runs like a thread from Jesus through Mani to Muhammad. And yet this thread, arguably the single most important characteristic of the Abrahamic movement, often remains outside the mainstream, hidden, as it were, since it generates heresy. The figures of the Gnostic, the Holy man, and the mystic are all sequels of the Israelite prophet. They reflect a mode of religiosity that is characterized by high intensity. It is centripetal and activist by nature and emphasizes sectarianism and polemics, esoteric knowledge, or gnosis and charisma. The other mode of religiosity, obviously much more common than the first one, is centrifugal and irenic. It favours an ecumenical attitude, contents itself with a widely shared faith, or pistis, and reflects, in Weberian parlance, the routinisation of the new religious movement. This is the mode of priests and bishops, rather than that of martyrs and holy men. These two main modes of religion, high versus low intensity, exist simultaneously, and cross the boundaries of religious communities. They offer a tool permitting us to follow the transformations of religion in late antiquity in general, and in ancient Christianity in particular, without becoming prisoners of the traditional categories of Patristic literature. Through the dialectical relationship between these two modes of religiosity, one can follow the complex transformations of ancient Christianity in its broad religious context.

This book chronicles individual perspectives and specific iterations of Muslim community, practice, and experience in the Himalayan region to bring into scholarly conversation the presence of varying Muslim cultures in the Himalaya. The Himalaya provide a site of both geographic and cultural crossroads, where Muslim community is simultaneously constituted at multiple social levels, and to that end the essays in this book document a wide range of local, national, and global interests while maintaining a focus on individual perspectives, moments in time, and localized experiences. It presents research that contributes to a broadly conceived notion of the Himalaya that enriches readers' understandings of both the region and concepts of Muslim community and highlights the interconnections between multiple experiences of Muslim community at local levels. Drawing attention to the cultural, social, artistic, and political diversity of the Himalaya beyond the better understood and frequently documented religio-cultural expressions of the region, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Anthropology, Geography, History, Religious Atudies, Asian Studies, and Islamic Studies.

The Islamic prophet Muhammad initiated a theological program in theocratic form. The Qur'an challenges Christians and Jews in many ways and invites them to take a stance. This is why an explicitly theological response is legitimate and necessary. This book draws on current scholarly research on Islam and discusses the sources of the Qur'an, the fundamental features of its relationship with Judaism, and its perception of Jesus. This leads to a realistic assessment of Islam and stimulates a renewed Christian self-understanding. The fourth chapter presents the largely unknown insights of the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig and the theologian Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI on Islam. They provide an important perspective - beyond submission.