In popular and academic literature, jihad is predominantly assumed to refer to armed combat, and Muslim martyrdom is understood to be invariably of the military kind. This perspective, derived mainly from legal texts, has led to discussions of jihad and martyrdom primarily as concepts with fixed, universal meanings divorced from the socio-political circumstances in which they have been deployed through time. This book, however, studies in a more holistic manner the range of significations that can be ascribed to the term jihad from the earliest period to the contemporary period against the backdrop of specific historical and political circumstances that frequently mediated the meanings of this critical term. Instead of privileging the juridical literature, the book canvasses a more diverse array of texts - Qur'an, tafsir, hadath, edifying and hortatory literature - to recuperate a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of both jihad and martyrdom through time. As a result, many conventional and monochromatic assumptions about the military jihad and martyrdom are challenged and undermined. Asma Afsaruddin argues that the notion of jihad as primarily referring to armed combat is in fact relatively late. A comprehensive interrogation of varied sources, she shows, reveals early and multiple competing definitions of a word that translates literally to "striving on the path of God."

Iconoclastic and fiercely rational, the European Enlightenment witnessed the birth of modern Western society and thought. Reason was sacrosanct and for the first time, religious belief and institutions were open to widespread criticism. In this groundbreaking book, Ziad Elmarsafy challenges this accepted wisdom to argue that religion was still hugely influential in the era. But the religion in question wasn't Christianity - it was Islam. Charting the history of Qur'anic translations in Europe during the 18th and early 19th Centuries, Elmarsafy shows that a number of key enlightenment figures - including Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and Napoleon - drew both inspiration and ideas from the Qur'an. Controversially placing Islam at the heart of the European Enlightenment, this lucid and well argued work is a valuable window into the interaction of East and West during this pivotal epoch in human history.

The Third Edition of Brill s Encyclopaedia of Islam appears in four substantial segments each year, both online and in print. The new scope includes comprehensive coverage of Islam in the twentieth century and of Muslim minorities all over the world. This Part 2009-1 of the Third Edition of Brill s Encyclopaedia of Islam contains 82 new articles, reflecting the great diversity of current scholarship in the fields of Islamic Studies.

In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.

Lyse Doucet – now the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, then a young reporter on her inaugural trip to Afghanistan – first checked into the Inter-Continental in 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors.

Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days – an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Central Asia’. Of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021.

Through these intimate portraits of Kabul life, the story of a hotel becomes the story of a people.

Justice is considered the basic norm of human coexistence. Every legal order refers to the concept of justice, and Muslims also regard their religious norms (the Sharia) as offering just solutions to legal questions. But is the assumption that the Sharia is just merely an acceptance of a status quo correct? And is justice the necessary aim of the Sharia? In this volume, renowned scholars discuss these questions from different perspectives. In principle, the first normative source of Islam, the Qur'an, orders justice and fair conduct (Rohe). At the same time, an analysis of the concept of justice in the classical age of Islam (Ahmed and Poya) also shows that there existed ambivalent understandings of this concept. The relationship of the idea of justice in Islam to political questions (Ende), to war (Poya), and to modern reform (Mir-Hosseini) again confirms the importance of the concept for a critical reflection on traditional assumptions and existing circumstances. The discussion on the hijab in Western countries (Ladwig) shows paradigmatically how justice can regulate the relationship between the secular state and the Sharia. The essays in this volume endeavor to show that debates about justice, in Islam as well, express an underlying tension between the perception of an order as just on the one hand, and the feeling of injustice under the same order on the other. This discussion validates the idea that justice should be understood as a concept subject to a perpetual reexamination according to changing times and circumstances.

The Third Edition of Brill s Encyclopaedia of Islam appears in four substantial segments each year, both online and in print. The new scope includes comprehensive coverage of Islam in the twentieth century and of Muslim minorities all over the world. This Part 2012-3 of the Third Edition of Brill s Encyclopaedia of Islam will contain 49 new articles, reflecting the great diversity of current scholarship in the fields of Islamic Studies.

David Tittensor offers a groundbreaking new perspective on the Gulen movement, a Turkish Muslim educational activist network that emerged in the 1960s and has grown into a global empire with an estimated worth of $25 billion. Named after its leader Fethullah Gulen, the movement has established more than 1,000 secular educational institutions in over 140 countries, aiming to provide holistic education that incorporates both spirituality and the secular sciences. Despite the movement's success, little is known about how its schools are run, or how Islam is operationalized. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Tittensor explores the movement's ideo-theology and how it is practiced in the schools. His interviews with both teachers and graduates from Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, and Turkey show that the movement is a missionary organization, but of a singular kind: its goal is not simply widespread religious conversion, but a quest to recoup those Muslims who have apparently lost their way through proselytism and to show non-Muslims that Muslims can embrace modernity and integrate into the wider community. Tittensor also examines the movement's operational side and shows how the schools represent an example of Mohammad Yunus's social business model: a business with a social cause at its heart. The House of Service is an insightful exploration of one of the largest transnational Muslim associations in the world today, and will be invaluable for those seeking to understand how Islam will be perceived and practiced in the future.

Irshad Manji's message of moral courage, with stories about contemporary reformers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Islam's own Gandhi, inspire and show the way to practicing faith without fear. Irshad addresses all people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, in this universal message about the importance of independent thought and internal strength, of love, liberty, free speech, and the pursuit of happiness. Allah, Liberty, and Love is about creating choices beyond conforming or leaving the faith, which is what Manji hears from young Muslims who write to her in frustration, whose emails, letters, and conversations are included in this book. Manji writes, "I'll show struggling Muslims how to embrace a third option: reforming ourselves." And she recounts many affecting stories from young people who have contacted her for advice on how to step out of limiting views of Islam and the restrictions they put on life, love, family, and careers.

Transregional and regional elites of various backgrounds were essential for the integration of diverse regions into the early Islamic Empire, from Central Asia to North Africa. This volume is an important contribution to the conceptualization of the largest empire of Late Antiquity. While previous studies used Iraq as the paradigm for the entire empire, this volume looks at diverse regions instead. After a theoretical introduction to the concept of 'elites' in an early Islamic context, the papers focus on elite structures and networks within selected regions of the Empire (Transoxiana, Khurasan, Armenia, Fars, Iraq, al-Jazira, Syria, Egypt, and Ifriqiya). The papers analyze elite groups across social, religious, geographical, and professional boundaries. Although each region appears unique at first glance, based on their heterogeneous surviving sources, its physical geography, and its indigenous population and elites, the studies show that they shared certain patterns of governance and interaction, and that this was an important factor for the success of the largest empire of Late Antiquity.

In Possessed by the Right Hand, the first comprehensive legal history of slavery in Islam ever offered to readers, Bernard K. Freamon, an African-American Muslim law professor, provides a penetrating analysis of the problems of slavery and slave-trading in Islamic history. After examining the issues from pre-Islamic times through to the nineteenth century, Professor Freamon considers the impact of Western abolitionism, arguing that such efforts have been a failure, with the notion of abolition becoming nothing more than a cruel illusion. He closes this ground-breaking account with an examination of the slaving ideologies and actions of ISIS and Boko Haram, asserting that Muslims now have an important and urgent responsibility to achieve true abolition under the aegis of Islamic law. See Bernard Freamon live at Rutgers Law School (October 8, 2019). Listen to Possessed by the Right Hand: An Interview with Prof. Bernard Freamon from Network ReOrient on Anchor

Offering new perspectives on the relationship between Shi'is and Sufis in modern and pre-modern times, this book challenges the supposed opposition between these two esoteric traditions in Islam by exploring what could be called "Shi'i Sufism" and "Sufi-oriented Shi'ism" at various points in history. The chapters are based on new research in textual studies as well as fieldwork from a broad geographical areas including the Indian subcontinent, Anatolia and Iran. Covering a long period stretching from the early post-Mongol centuries, throughout the entire Safawid era (906-1134/1501-1722) and beyond, it is concerned not only with the sphere of the religious scholars but also with different strata of society. The first part of the volume looks at the diversity of the discourse on Sufism among the Shi'i "ulama" in the run up to and during the Safawid period. The second part focuses on the social and intellectual history of the most popular Shi'i Sufi order in Iran, the Ni'mat Allahiyya. The third part examines the relationship between Shi'ism and Sufism in the little-explored literary traditions of the Alevi-Bektashi and the Khaksariyya Sufi order. With contributions from leading scholars in Shi'ism and Sufism Studies, the book is the first to reveal the mutual influences and connections between Shi'ism and Sufism, which until now have been little explored.

Media Framing of the Muslim World examines and explains how news about Islam and the Muslim world is produced and consumed, and how it impacts on relations between Islam and the West. The authors cover key issues in this relationship including the reporting on war and conflict, terrorism, asylum seekers and the Arab Spring.

We have an obligation to learn the truth about Islam and resist the many attempts to sanitize it. A poison becomes deadlier when it is falsely labeled as a nutrient.

The Western world often fears many aspects of Islam, without the knowledge to move forward. On the other hand, there are sustained and complex debates within Islam about how to live in the modern world with faith. Alison Scott-Baumann and Sariya Contractor-Cheruvallil here propose solutions to both dilemmas, with a particular emphasis on the role of women. Challenging existing beliefs about Islam in Britain, this book offers a paradigm shift based on research conducted over 15 years. The educational needs within several groups of British Muslims were explored, resulting in the need to offer critical analysis of the provision for the study of classical Islamic Theology in Britain. Islamic Education in Britain responds to the dissatisfaction among many young Muslim men and women with the theological/secular split, and their desire for courses that provide combinations of these two strands of their lived experience as Muslim British citizens. Grounded in empirical research, the authors reach beyond the meta-narratives of secularization and orientalism to demonstrate the importance of the teaching and learning of classical Islamic studies for the promotion of reasoned dialogue, interfaith and intercultural understanding in pluralist British society.

The articles in this volume are dedicated to Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani for the breadth and depth of his interests and his influence on those interests. They attest to the fact that his fervor and rigorously surgical attention to detail have found fertile ground in a wide variety of disciplines, including (among others) Persian literature and philology; Islamic history and historiography; Arabic literature and philology; and Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence. The volume has brought together some of the most respected scholars in the fields of Islamic studies and Islamic literatures, all his prior students, to contribute with articles that touch on the fields Professor Mahdavi Damghani has so permanently touched with his astonishing scholarship and attention to detail.

This book contains selected papers which were presented at the 3rd International Halal Conference (INHAC 2016), organized by the Academy of Contemporary Islamic Studies (ACIS), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam, Malaysia. It addresses halal-related issues that are applicable to various industries and explores a variety of contemporary and emerging issues. Highlighting findings from both scientific and social research studies, it enhances the discussion on the halal industry (both in Malaysia and at the international level), and serves as an invitation to engage in more advanced research on the global halal industry.

As the forces of globalisation and modernisation buffet Islam and other world religions, Indonesia's 200 million Muslims are expressing their faith in ever more complex ways. Celebrity television preachers, internet fatwa services, mass religious rallies in soccer stadiums, glossy jihadist magazines, Islamic medical treatments, alms giving via mobile phone and electronic sharia banking services are just some of the manifestations of a more consumer-oriented approach to Islam which interact with and sometimes replace other, more traditional expressions of the faith. This book examines some of the myriad ways in which Islam is being expressed in contemporary Indonesian life and politics. Authored by leading authorities on Indonesian Islam, it gives fascinating insights into such topics as the marketisation of Islam, contemporary pilgrimage, the rise of mass preachers, gender and Islamic politics, online fatwa, current trends among Islamist vigilante and criminal groups, and recent developments in Islamic banking and microfinance.