This book examines the conceptions of justice from Zarathustra to Islam. The text explores the conceptions of justice by Zarathustra, Ancient Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. During the Axial Age (800-200BCE), the focus of justice is in India, China, and Greece. In the post-Axial age, the focus is on Christianity. The authors then turn to Islam, where justice is conceived as a system, which emerges if the Qur'anic rules are followed. This work concludes with the views of early Muslim thinkers and on how these societies deteriorated after the death of the Prophet. The monograph is ideal for those interested in the conception of justice through the ages, Islamic studies, political Islam, and issues of peace and justice.

In Islamic History and Law, Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul undertakes an extensive examination of Islamic intellectual history, covering ages that witnessed different movements and doctrinal trends. While political and geographical factors certainly influenced the Islamic religious sciences, internal and intellectual factors exerted a much more substantial influence. This study gives priority to jurists' intellectual operations throughout the Muslim world, covering the historical development of Islamic jurisprudence from the middle of 4th century. Bsoul's examination of jurisprudential advances takes into account the shifting dominance of particular centers of legal scholarship in light of competing doctrines and their adherents. This work sheds light on jurists of North Africa and the Andalus, who are rarely mentioned in general modern works, and also aims to demonstrate Muslim women's important role in the history of jurisprudence, highlighting their participation in the Islamic sciences. Bsoul relies mainly on Arabic primary sources to give an impartial presentation of these jurists and produce an accurate memory of the past based on objective knowledge.

This book explores the ways in which dynamics of Islamophobia and neoliberalism shape the schooling experiences of minority Muslim students in Sydney primary, public and independent schools. The author examines the issues at macro, meso and micro level. At the global systemic level, the book discusses the politics of naming Muslims and racialised governmentality within a capitalist neoliberal context. At the institutional level, it provides an insight into the Living Safe Together policy and explains how it can potentially provide space for teachers to abuse their authority or power in schools over minority Muslim students, within a wider discursive context shrouded by national security discourses, 'homegrown' terrorism and deradicalisation. Finally, at the individual level, drawing on the voices of teachers and Muslim students, the book highlights how Islamophobic discourse was reinforced through pedagogical practices, and how Muslim students resisted these discourses by speaking back to power.

The book, organized in three parts, offers a guide to constructing financial instruments based on cash waqf in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. The first part discusses the alignment between the Shari'ah economic objectives and the SDGs, the Islamic social finance concept, its instruments and institutions and the intersection between Islamic finance and Islamic social finance. The second part presents a product structure that is based on cash waqf and is targeting the SDGs specifically. Some of these product structures involve zakat collection. The third part of the book presents the methodology to gather all these product structures in a national cash waqf ecosystem that is targeting SDGs. The aim of this ecosystem is to increase the impact of the various initiatives and instruments. In addition to this, the third part of the book presents the concept of Waqf offshore centers and the methodology to conceive and implement them. The aim of these Waqf offshore centers is to connect national cash waqf ecosystems and individuals with investment opportunities bringing more impact. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and practitioners of not only Islamic finance but sustainable finance.

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904-2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu-Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism. Barua argues that the characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations were modulated by a shifting array of socio-economic and socio-political parameters. It is within these contexts that Rabindranath, Nazrul, and Annada Shankar are developing their thoughts on Hindus and Muslims through the prisms of religious humanism and universalism.

The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the focus of Selim Deringil's book, traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, and as this engaging study illustrates with examples from real-life cases, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their denationalization. The book tells the story of the struggle for the bodies and the souls of people, waged between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers, and a multitude of evangelical organizations. Many of the stories shed light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two."

The epistle ascribed to Salim Ibn Dhakwan, and written sometime before AD 800, was discovered in the early 1970s by the scholar, Amr Khalifa Ennami, who brought a xerox of the now lost manuscript to the attention of Islamic scholars. The epistle which is here edited, translated, and discussed in full for the first time is an early Islamic tract against `wrong' doctrines regarding the classification and treatment of opponents.

In recent years, the Islamization of Turkish politics and public life has been the subject of much debate in Turkey and the West. This book makes an important contribution to those debates by focusing on a group of religious schools, known as Imam-Hatip schools, founded a year after the Turkish Republic, in 1924. At the outset, the main purpose of Imam-Hatip schools was to train religious functionaries. However, in the ensuing years, the curriculum, function and social status of the schools have changed dramatically. Through ethnographic and textual analysis, the book explores how Imam-Hatip school education shapes the political socialization of the schools' students, those students' attitudes and behaviours and the political and civic activities of their graduates. By mapping the schools' connections to Islamist politicians and civic leaders, the book sheds light on the significant, yet often overlooked, role that the schools and their communities play in Turkey's Islamization at the high political and grassroots levels.

Louis Massignon was a pivotal figure in awakening Western interest in Islamic studies, and although his work is well-known to students of Islam or French history, he is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. Now in this fascinating biography Mary Louise Gude introduces a new audience to the eminent French Orientalist who dominatesd the field of Islamic studies for over 60 years. This account covers many aspects of Massignon's rich and complex life, beginning with his birth in 1883 in Paris until his death in 1962, and reveals how Massignon's extraordinary life unfolded during a time when relations between Islam and the West changed radically. Gude discusses how Massignon first discovered the Muslim world in the nineteenth century - the era of European colonial imperialism - and lived to witness the major events that reshaped Islam in the first half of the twentieth century, including the creation of the Arab states after World War I, the creation of Israel and the subsequent Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and the independence of Algeria in 1962. Drawn from Massignon's own writings as well as other primary and secondary sources, this unique biography also includes theological discussions of Massignon's intellectual development and writings. Gude reveals Massignon to be a believer who rediscovered Christianity through Islam; a mystic involved in the political realities of his day; and an Islamophile who remained quintessentially French. What emerges overall is the story of a passionate, but ultimately elusive, man whose professional and personal commitments were inseparable. Today Massignon's work continues to engage scholars and students of Islam and interfaith relations, and, as abridge-builder between Christianity and Islam, his far-reaching influence is unequaled.

The subject of Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East and indeed in the West attracts much academic and media attention. Nowhere is this more the case than in Egypt, which has the largest Christian community in the Middle East, estimated at 6-10 per cent of the national population. Henrik Lindberg Hansen analyzes this relationship, offering an examination of the nature and role of religious dialogue in Egyptian society and politics. Analysing the three main religious organizations and institutions in Egypt (namely the Azhar University, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic Orthodox Church) as well as a range of smaller dialogue initiatives (such as those of CEOSS, the Anglican and Catholic Churches and youth organisations), Hansen argues that religious dialogue involves a close examination of societal relations, and how these are understood and approached. The books includes analysis of the occasions of violence against and dialogue initiatives involving Christian communities in 2011 and the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, and thus provides a wide-ranging exploration of the importance of religion in Egyptian society and everyday encounters with a religious other. The book is consequently vital for practitioners as well as researchers dealing with religious minorities in the Middle East and interfaith dialogue in a wider context.

Islamic jurisprudence has undergone many historical changes since the time of Prophet Muhammad, and researchers have divided its development into several historical stages. In Formation of the Islamic Jurisprudence, Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul presents the history of Islamic jurisprudence from its earliest period. Drawing upon a wide variety of Arabic primary sources to provide an inclusive, unbiased view of the history of jurisprudence, this book covers all the main centers of legal scholarship in the Islamic world, addressing not only the four well-known Sunni legal schools but also defunct Sunni and sectarian legal schools. Bsoul makes intellectual history the center of attention, recognizing the contributions of women to legal scholarship, and avoids attributing academic developments to the events of political history. This book presents a new reading and understanding as Bsoul critically assesses the history, development, and impact of Islamic jurisprudence in the Muslim world.

Featuring the work of leading contemporary Muslim philosophers and theologians, this book grapples with various forms of evil and suffering in the world today, from COVID-19 and issues in climate change to problems in palliative care and human vulnerability. Rather than walking down well-trodden paths in philosophy of religion which often address questions of evil and suffering by focusing on divine attributes and the God-world relationship, this volume offers another path of inquiry by focusing on human vulnerability, potential, and resilience. Addressing both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the question of evil, topics range from the transformative power of love, virtue ethics in Sufism and the necessity of suffering, to the spiritual significance of the body and Islamic perspectives on embodiment. In doing so, the contributors propose new perspectives based on various pre-modern and contemporary materials that can enrich the emerging field of the global philosophy of religion, thereby radically transforming contemporary debates on the nature of evil and suffering. The book will appeal to researchers in a variety of disciplines, including Islamic philosophy, religious studies, Sufism and theology.

This book seeks to construct a Muslim-Christian theological discourse on creation and humanity, which could help adherents of both faiths work together to preserve our planet, bring justice to its most needy inhabitants and contribute to peacebuilding in areas of conflict. Drawing from the disciplines of theology, philosophy, ethics, hermeneutics, critical theory and the social sciences, its premise is that theology is always developed in particular situations. A first part explores the global context of postmodernity (the post-Cold War world dominated by a neoliberal capitalist system) and the influential turn away from the modern Cartesian view of the autonomous, disembodied self, to a self defined in discourse, community and culture (postmodernism). A second part traces the "career" of Q. 2:30 (Adam's God-mandated trusteeship), first in Islamic commentaries in the classical period and then in the writings of Muslim scholars in the modern and postmodern periods. The concept of human trusteeship under God is also studied over time in Christian and Jewish writers. The third part, building on the previous data, draws together the essential elements for a Muslim-Christian theology of human trusteeship.

Iman Rappetti is an award-winning journalist who has been involved in print, radio and television. She worked as a young journalist in South Africa and then abandoned it (along with all her worldly possessions) when she became Muslim. She lived in the Islamic Republic of Iran for two years, where she also worked on a current affairs TV show for the state broadcaster before returning to South Africa and resuming her life here.

She describes herself as `the youngest of five children. One Rasatafarian brother (passed away), one ex-con brother (who can dance the pants off any woman and has a wicked sense of humour), another brother who's a big shot in the marine engineering industry (he makes a mean curry), and a sister who has the thankless task of staying at home and raising the rugrats (she has a way with words, and also makes a kick-ass briyani)'.

In this moving and entertaining memoir, Iman shares stories and what she has learned from her colourful journey through life.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821 90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851 2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855 6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 2 of Burton's book vividly describes the heat and dangers of the journey to Medina, the behaviour and conversation of the pilgrims from many different tribes and nations, and the mosques, tombs and other sights of the bustling city, complete with traders and beggars.

With a scope that bridges the gap between the study of classical Islam and the modern Middle East, this book uncovers a profound theological dimension in contemporary Islamic radicalism and explores the continued relevance of medieval theology to modern debates. Based on an examination of the thought of the medieval scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the book demonstrates how long-standing fault lines within Sunni Islam have resurfaced in the past half-century to play a major role in such episodes as the Qutbist controversy within the Muslim Brotherhood, the split between radical salafis and politically quietist ones, the renunciation of militancy by Egyptian and Libyan jihadist groups, and the radicalization of the insurgency in the North Caucasus. This work combines classical Islamic scholarship with a deep familiarity with contemporary radicalism and offers compelling new insights into the structure of modern radical Islam.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821-90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851-2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855-6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 3 of Burton's book vividly describes the pilgrims' journey from Medina to Mecca, with catering including coffee, rice and 'occasionally ... tough mutton and indigestible goat', crowded camp-sites and all-night prayers and singing. Finally he arrives at the Kaabah and witnesses the culminating ceremonies of the hajj.

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of "clothing" sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.

The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five years, until the 2003 US invasion. Under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, a powerful authoritarian regime was created based on a system of violence and an extraordinary surveillance network, as well as reward schemes and incentives for supporters of the party. The true horrors of this regime have been exposed for the first time through a massive archive of government documents captured by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is these documents that form the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book and that have been translated and analyzed by Joseph Sassoon, an Iraqi-born scholar and seasoned commentator on the Middle East. They uncover the secrets of the innermost workings of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council, how the party was structured, how it operated via its network of informers and how the system of rewards functioned.