Islam is not only a religion, but also a culture, tradition, and civilization. There are currently 1.5 billion people in the world who identify themselves as Muslim. Two thirds of the worldwide Muslim population, i.e. approximately a billion people, live in forty-eight Muslim majority countries (MMC) in the world- all of which except one are in Africa and Asia. Of these MMCs in Africa and Asia, only twelve (inhabited by about 165 million people) have ever achieved a high score on the Human Development Index (HDI), the index that measures life expectancy at birth, education and standard of living and ranks how "developed" a country is. This means that the majority of the world's Muslim population lives in poverty with low or medium level of human development.

The contributions to this innovative volume attempt to determine why this is. They explore the influence of environment, space, and power on human development. The result is a complex, interdisciplinary study of all MMCs in Africa and Asia. It offers new insights into the current state of the Muslim World, and provides a theoretical framework for studying human development from an interdisciplinary social, cultural, economic, environmental, political, and religious perspective, which will be applicable to regional and cultural studies of space and power in other regions of the world.

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While Ayatollah Khomeini is considered the face of the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, 'Ali Shari'ati is considered a much greater influence on shaping the revolutionary consciousness than Khomeini. Acceptable to both modernists as well as Islamists, Shari'ati's radicalism inspired much of the resistance in urban Iran in the closing years of the Shah. "'Ali Shari'ati and the Shaping of Political Islam in Iran" tells the story of how Shari'ati developed a language of political Islam, speaking in an idiom intelligible to the Iranian public, and subverting the Shah's regime and its claim to legitimacy.

Routledge Library Editions: Politics of Islam brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print classics from a variety of academic imprints. With titles ranging from Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East (1984) to Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity (1988) and Islam and Power (1981), this set provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from a wide range of authors expert in the field.

Modern scholarship has not given Edirne the attention it deserves regarding its significance as one of the capitals of the Ottoman Empire. This edited volume offers a reinterpretation of Edirne's history from Early Ottoman times to recent periods of the Turkish Republic. Presently, disconnections and discontinuities introduced by the transition from empire to nation state still characterize the image of the city and the historiography about it. In contrast, this volume examines how the city engages in the forming, deflecting and creative appropriation of its heritage, a process that has turned Edirne into a UNESCO heritage hotspot. A closer historical analysis demonstrates the dissonances and contradictions that these different interpretations and uses of heritage produce. From the beginning, Edirne was shaped by its connectivity and relationality to other places, above all to Istanbul. This perspective is employed at many different levels, e.g., with regard to its population, institutions, architecture, infrastructures and popular culture, but also regarding the imaginations Edirne triggered. In sum, this multi-disciplinary volume boosts urban history beyond Istanbul and offers new insight into Ottoman and Turkish connectivities from the vantage point of certain key moments of Edirne's history.

Studies on Sufism in Central Asia reproduces 12 studies which explore previously unstudied sources with an eye to identifying prominent developments in the social and organizational history of the major Sufi groupings of the region; The chronological range reflected in the studies included here runs from the 13th century to the 17th, with a somewhat uneven distribution between the earlier half of the period (13th-15th centuries, with six articles, Nos. II, IV, V, VII, VIII, and XI) and the later half (16th-17th centuries, with four pieces, Nos. III, IX, X, XII), and two studies (Nos. I and VI) spanning the entire period. In terms of specific Sufi traditions, the studies included here reflect DeWeese's attention to groups and individuals that might be identified (despite the focus of some of his more recent work on questioning the use and meaning of such labels) as KubravAE", YasavAE", and KhwAE jagAE nAE"/NaqshbandAE", with four studies focused entirely on 'KubravAE"' circles (Nos. I, II, V, XI), five on 'YasavAE"' subjects (Nos. III, VII, IX, X, XII), and one on the KhwAE jagAE n (No. VIII), as well as one dealing with YasavAE"-NaqshbandAE" relations (No. VI) and another exploring a group that falls outside these labels (No. IV). KhwAE jagAE nAE" and NaqshbandAE" history has a strong 'background' presence, nevertheless, in five other articles (Nos. I, III, IV, VII, and IX), reflecting the steady rise of the NaqshbandAE"ya to predominance among Central Asian Sufi traditions.

This volume complements the selections of Wilferd Madelung's articles previously published by Variorum (Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam, and Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam). The first articles here examine legal and political aspects of early Shi`ism. The following studies relate to doctrinal views of the Zaydi imams al-Qasim b. Ibrahim al-Rassi and al-Natiq bi-l-Haqq and to Zaydi attitudes to Sufism. The final group focuses on the Isma`iliyya, their social and political history and aspects of their religious thought. A detailed index completes the volume.

Muslim Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics and Islamic Reformism is a pioneering collection of studies on Islam in contemporary Ethiopia. This volume challenges the popular notion of a 'Christian Ethiopia' imagined as the centuries-old, never-colonized Abyssinia, isolated in the highlands and dominated by Orthodox Christianity. In addition to marginalizing Muslim cultures and societies within Ethiopia, this notion has also excluded Muslims from public discourse and led to the neglect of Islam in Ethiopian studies. This is strikingly at odds with the country's cultural and historical reality, as Muslims constitute a significant part of the population and have contributed significantly to its development. Muslim Ethiopia develops this overlooked nexus of Ethiopian and Islamic Studies, while broadening our understandings of Muslims in Africa as a whole.

This book offers a novel interpretation of Russian contemporary discourse on Islam and its influence on Russian state policies. It shifts the analytical perspective from the discussion about Russia's Islam as a potential security threat to a more comprehensive view of the relationships of Muslims with Russia as a state and a civilization. The work demonstrates how many Muslims increasingly express a sense of belonging to Russia and are increasingly willing to contribute to state building processes.

As a minority religion in a predominantly Christian country, America's Muslims face many difficulties - lack of understanding of their cultural traditions by the majority of their fellow citizens, threats to their civil liberties based on their beliefs and ethnicity, and challenges to retaining a Muslim identity within their community. Muslims in the United States clarifies this complex situation by explaining for a non-Muslim audience the basic teachings and practices of Islam, the history of Islam in the United States, and a discussion of how and where Muslims live in this country. The volume concludes with a discussion of the problems that Muslims have adjusting to American culture, and a description from the Muslim perspective of 9/11 and its aftermath. Muslims in the United States provides an objective overview of what it's like to live as a Muslim in the United States: BLIncludes a history of Islam in America and a summary of what is known about the diversity of the Muslim population BLExamines the centrality of faith for the Muslims of the United States BLAnalyzes the importance of women and the family BLProbes the troubles that Muslims have endured after 9/11

This book explores the social life of Muslim women and Christian minorities amid Islamic and Christian movements in urban Java, Indonesia. Drawing on anthropological perspectives and 14 months of participant observation between 2009 and 2013 in the multi-religious Javanese city of Salatiga, this ethnography examines the interrelations between Islamic piety, Christian identity, and gendered sociability in a time of multiple religious revivals. The novel encounters between multiple forms of piety and customary sociality among "moderate" Muslims, puritan Salafists, born-again Pentecostals, Protestants, and Catholics require citizens to renegotiate various social interactions. En-Chieh Chao argues that piety has become a complex phenomenon entangled with gendered sociality and religious others, rather than a preordained outcome stemming from a self-contained religious tradition.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, Sustainable Diplomacy is a highly constructive work. Set in the context of modern Moroccan-Spanish relations, this text is a direct critique of realism as it is practiced in modern diplomacy. Proposing a new eco-centric approach to relations between nation-states and bioregions, Wellman presents the case for Ecological Realism, an undergirding philosophy for conducting a diplomacy which values the role of popular religions, ecological histories, and the consumption and waste patterns of national populations. Sustainable Diplomacy is thus a means of building relations not only between elites but also between people on the ground, as they together face the real possibility of global ecological destruction.

This concise and accessible volume introduces the reader to issues around religion, gender, and violence, using a wide range of case studies to engage the reader and apply the subject area to the real world. An outstanding resource for students approaching the topic for the first time. The eBook is open access and therefore widely available.

When originally published this was the first reference book to address itself to Islamic banking and finance and it offers comprehensive information on all major institutions which have commercial or banking interests in this field. It includes analysis of the principles behind interest-free banking and indicates its relationship with financial institutions in both Islamic countries and Western ones. It also lists the laws governing interest-free banking in countries where it is extensively in operation and provides essential information for all international financial institutions. The Directory lists all banks and financial institutions by country, giving details of their specific role and areas of operation.

Biomedical ethics is a burgeoning academic field with complex and far-reaching consequences. Whereas in Western secular bioethics this subject falls within larger ethical theories and applications (utilitarianism, deontology, teleology, and the like), Islamic biomedical ethics has yet to find its natural academic home in Islamic studies.
In this pioneering work, Abdulaziz Sachedina - a scholar with life-long academic training in Islamic law - relates classic Muslim religious values to the new ethical challenges that arise from medical research and practice. He depends on Muslim legal theory, but then looks deeper than juridical practice to search for the underlying reasons that determine the rightness or wrongness of a particular action. Drawing on the work of diverse Muslim theologians, he outlines a form of moral reasoning that can derive and produce decisions that underscore the spirit of the Shari'a. These decisions, he argues, still leave room to revisit earlier decisions and formulate new ones, which in turn need not be understood as absolute or final. After laying out this methodology, he applies it to a series of ethical questions surrounding the human life-cycle from birth to death, including such issues as abortion, euthanasia, and organ donation.
The implications of Sachedina's work are broad. His writing is unique in that it aims at conversing with Jewish and Christian ethics, moving beyond the Islamic fatwa literature to search for a common language of moral justification and legitimization among the followers of the Abrahamic traditions. He argues that Islamic theological ethics be organically connected with the legal tradition of Islam to enable it to sit in dialogue with secular and scripture-based bioethics in other faith communities. A breakthrough in Islamic bioethical studies, this volume is welcome and long-overdue reading for anyone interested in facing the difficult questions posed by modern medicine not only to the Muslim faithful but to the ethically-minded at large.

What does it mean to be a Muslim - in this world, in this deeply transformative time? Hamid Dabashi suggests that the transition to a changed, post-Western world requires the crafting of a new language of critical conversation with Islam and its cosmopolitan heritage - a language that is tuned to the emerging, not the disappearing, world

In February 2018, the 'Independent Review on Sharia Law in England and Wales' was published headed by Professor Mona Siddiqui. The review focused on whether sharia law is being misused or applied in a way that is incompatible with the domestic law in England and Wales, and in particular whether there were discriminatory practices against women who use sharia councils. It came about after years of concerns raised by academics, lawyers and women's activists. This timely collection of essays from experts, scholars and legal practitioners provides a critique and evaluation of the Inquiry findings as a starting point for analysis and debate on current British Muslim family law practices in the matters of marriage and divorce. At the heart of the collection lie key questions of state action and legal reform of religious practices that may operate 'outside the sphere of law and legal relations' but also in conjunction with state law mechanisms and processes. This cutting-edge book is a must read for those with an interest in Islamic law, family law, sociology of religion, human rights, multiculturalism, politics, anthropology of law and gender studies.

This book provides a critical and a conceptual analysis of radical Islamist rhetoric drawn from temporally and contextually varied Islamist extremist groups, challenging the popular understanding of Islamist extremism as a product of a clash-of-civilizations .

Arguing that the essence of Islamist extremism can only be accurately understood by drawing a distinction between the radical Islamist explanations and justifications of violence, the author posits that despite the radical Islamist contextualization of violence within Islamic religious tenets, there is nothing conceptually or distinctly Islamic about Islamist extremism. She engages in a critical analysis of the nature of reason in radical Islamist rhetoric, asserting that the radical Islamist explanations of violence are conceptually reasoned in terms of existential Hegelian struggles for recognition (as fundamentally struggles against oppression), and the radical Islamist justifications of violence are conceptually reasoned in terms of moral consequentialism.

With a detailed analysis of Islamist extremist discourse spanning a wide range of contexts, this book has a broad relevance for scholars and students working in the field of Islamic studies, religious violence, philosophy and political theory.

It has been argued that Islam liberated Muslim women by granting them full rights as citizens. Yet in reality we see that in much of the Muslim world women have been subjected to both cultural and political oppression. Instances such as forced marriages, arbitrary divorce, female mutilation and other abuses are sadly common, as are restrictions on women's education and on their role in the labor force. This book explores these problems and highlights the contrast with what Islam--through the Quran and the Sunnah--in fact prescribes. The causes of such contradictions are shown to lie in other sociocultural and political dynamics, quite outside the realm of the revealed religion.