To the layman who wishes to understand modern Islamic financial transactions, this book will prove friendly and helpful. It provides the underlying principles of Shariah financial instruments and presented them in actual and practical form. Since 1983, Malaysia has been making significant inroads into the Islamic financials landscape. Today Islamic financial transactions have made their presence felt in almost all financial institutions including banks, unit trusts, insurance, discount houses, fund management, factoring, pawn broking and project financing. And with more than USD200 billion Islamic funds available in global finance today, it is logical that the business of Islamic banking, insurance and fund management is fast expanding and encroaching into non-traditional financing. As the Holy Quran enjoins profit creation via trading and commercial transactions (al-bay') while forbidding profit earned from loans (riba), increasing Islamic consciousness among the Muslims today has opened up new business opportunities in Islamic finance, financial planning and wealth management. The Shariah not only condone interest as riba, but prohibits elements of gambling (maisir) in financial transactions. Ambiguities (gharar) in contractual agreements must be avoided at all cost while companies seeking Islamic capital must not engage with prohibited goods such as alcoholic beverages, pork and pornographic material. But current practices although unintentionally seem to out focus the real Quranic agenda for wealth creation and management. The Quranic alternative to riba is trade and commerce (al-bay'). The essence of trade and commerce is profit creation that implicates risk-taking (ghorm) and value-addition (kasb). Doing so promotes fairness and equitable transactions ('adl) and thus putting ethics and morality (akhlak) into the limelight of corporate business today. This book has attempted to venture into several issues of Islamic finance that incorporates the Quranic conception of trading and commerce (al-bay'). Profit created from financial instruments devoid of risk-taking (ghorm) and value addition (kasb) does not fit into the Quran's outlook of al-bay'. It critically examines current Islamic financial products offered by banks, mutual funds and insurance companies and help guide prospective customers to understand the underlying Shariah principles on which these products are structured. Products ranging from bank deposits/assets and capital market instruments are discussed based on prevailing practical experience in Malaysia as well as other Muslim countries. Divergent Shariah opinions on sale-buyback (bay' al-'inah) and debt trading (bay'al-dayn) are discussed with good intentions to harmonize global Islamic financial transactions. Of most significant is the push for equity financing (musyarakah/mudarabah) in the banking business with proper application of salam and istisna' contract as well. Widespread use of murabahah and al-bai-bithaman ajil (credit sale) contracts in Islamic finance is a worrying trend. This book tries to explore the place of Islamic financial contracts in modern financial markets, whether Islamic financial instruments actually reflect true label. Implication of trading (al-bay') is expected to invite venture capital application in Islamic banking and rationalizes universal banking model for Islamic banks. This book serves to guide banking customers, practitioners and investors over the range of Shariah products available in Malaysia's financial market and help impress how these products can impact their earnings and business.

Since 2011, with the British Government's counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, non-violent Islamist groups have been considered a security risk for spreading a divisive ideology that can lead to radicalisation and violence. More recently, the Government has expressed concerns about their impact on social cohesion, entryism, and women's rights. The key protagonists of non-violent Islamist 'extremism' allegedly include groups and individuals associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama'at-i-Islami. They have been described as part of the 'global Muslim Brotherhood', but do they constitute a singular phenomenon, a social movement? This book shows that such groups and individuals do indeed comprise a movement in Britain, one dedicated to an Islamic 'revival'. It shows how they are networked organisationally, bonded through ideological and cultural kinship, and united in a conflict of values with the British society and state. Using original interviews with prominent revivalist leaders, as well as primary sources, the book also shows how the movement is not so much 'Islamist' in aspiring for an Islamic state, but concerned with institutionalising an Islamic worldview and moral framework throughout society. The conflict between the Government and the global Muslim Brotherhood is apparent in a number of different fields, including education, governance, law, and counterterrorism. But this does not simply concern the direction of Government policy or the control of state institutions. It most fundamentally concerns the symbolic authority to legitimise a way of seeing, thinking and living. By assessing this multifaceted conflict, the book presents an exhaustive and up-to-date analysis of the political and cultural fault lines between Islamic revivalists and the British authorities. It will be useful for anyone studying Islam in the West, government counter-terrorism and counter-extremism policy, multiculturalism and social cohesion.

Political liberalization and economic reform, the weakening of the state, and increased global interconnections have all had profound effects on Muslim societies and the practice of Islam in Africa. The contributors to this volume investigate and illuminate the changes they have brought, through detailed case studies of Muslim youth activists, Islamic NGOs, debates about Islamic law, secularism and minority rights, and Muslims and the political process in both conflict and post-conflict settings. Their work offers fresh perspectives on the complexity of Muslim politics in contemporary Africa.

Islamic powers in secular countries have presented a challenge for states around the world, including Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population as well as the third largest democracy in the world. This book explores the history of the relationships between Islam, state, and society in Indonesia with a focus on local politics in Madura. It identifies and explains factors that have shaped and characterized the development of contemporary Islam and politics in Madura and recognizes and elucidates forms and aspects of the relationships between Islam and politics; between state and society; between conflicts and accommodations; between piety, tradition and violence in that area, and the forms and characters of democratization and decentralization processes in local politics. This book shows how the area's experience in dealing with Islam and politics may illuminate the socio-political trajectory of other developing Muslim countries at present living through comparable democratic transformations. Madura was chosen because it has one of the most complex relationships between Islam and politics during the last years of the New Order and the first years of the post-New Order in Indonesia, and because it is a strong Muslim area with a history of a very strong religious as well as cultural tradition than is commonly understood and is largely ignored in literature on Islam and politics. Based on extensive sets of anthropological fieldwork and historical research, this book makes an important contribution to the analysis of Islam and politics in Indonesia and future socio-political trajectory of other developing Muslim countries experiencing comparable democratic transformations. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Religion and Politics and Southeast Asian Studies, in particular Southeast Asian politics, anthropology and history.

Nasir al-Din Tusi, the renowned Shi'i scholar of the 13th century, produced a range of writings in different fields of learning under Ismaili patronage and later under the Mongols. This is a new English translation of his Rawda-yi taslim - the single most important Ismaili text from the Alamut period. Here the Persian and English texts are published together for the first time to produce a work of enormous value to students of Islamic theology and philosophy. The book contains an introduction by Professor Hermann Landolt and philosophical commentary by Professor Christian Jambet, who has produced a French translation of this text.

Early Ibad i Theology presents the critical edition of six Arabic theological texts recently discovered in two manuscripts in Mzab in Algeria dating from the middle of the 8th century. The texts were sent by their author, the prominent Kufan Ibad i kalam theologian 'Abd Allah b. Yazid al-Fazari to North Africa where he had a large following in the Ibad i community later known as the Nukkar. They constitute the earliest extant body of Muslim kalam theology and are vital for the study of the initial development of rational theology in Islam. The sophisticated treatment of the divine attributes in these texts indicates that this subject developed considerably earlier in Islamic theology than previously accepted in modern scholarship.

Aysha A. Hidayatullah offers the first comprehensive examination of contemporary feminist Qur'anic interpretation, exploring its dynamic challenges to Islamic tradition and contemporary Muslim views of the Qur'an. She analyzes major feminist readings of the Qur'an beginning in the late twentieth century, synthesizing their common concepts and methods and revealing their vital part in the development of the nascent field of Qur'anic tafsir (exegesis). Hidayatullah contributes her own critical assessment of feminist ''impasses'' in the Qur'anic text and the field's appeals to the principles of equality and justice. She expands these observations into a radical critique of feminist approaches to the Qur'an, arguing that the feminist exegetical endeavor has reached a point of irresolvable contradiction by making claims about the Qur'an that are not fully supported by the text. Hidayatullah outlines major challenges to the authority of feminist interpretations of the Qur'an and interrogates the feminist premises on which they have relied, questioning the viability of current strands of feminist Qur'anic interpretation and proposing a major revision of its exegetical positions. An innovative work of Muslim feminist theology, this volume offers an essential contribution to conversations about feminist tafsir and asking bold questions at the ''edge'' of Qur'anic interpretation.

The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.

This Reader brings together nearly 80 extracts from major works by Christians and Muslims that reflect their reciprocal knowledge and attitudes. It spans the period from the early 7th century, when Islam originated, to 1500. The general introduction provides a historical and geographical summary of Christian-Muslim encounters in the period and a short account of the religious, intellectual and social circumstances in which encounters took place and works were written. Topics from the Christian perspective include: condemnations of the Qur'an as a fake and Muhammad as a fraud, depictions of Islam as a sign of the final judgement, and proofs that it was a Christian heresy. On the Muslim side they include: demonstrations of the Bible as corrupt, proofs that Christian doctrines were illogical, comments on the inferior status of Christians, and accounts of Christian and Muslim scholars in collaboration together. Each of the six parts contains the following pedagogical features: -A short introduction -An introduction to each passage and author -Notes explaining terms that readers might not have previously encountered

An award-winning journalist's extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years--a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that's "the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful" (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians--who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives--and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold--a grime-stained scrap of fabric--that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal. Now, Padnos recounts his time in captivity in Syria, where he was frequently tortured at the hands of the al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. We learn not only about Padnos's harrowing experience, but we also get a firsthand account of life in a Syrian village, the nature of Islamic prisons, how captors interrogate someone suspected of being CIA, the ways that Islamic fighters shift identities and drift back and forth through the veil of Western civilization, and much more. No other journalist has lived among terrorists for as long as Theo has--and survived. As a resident of thirteen separate prisons in every part of rebel-occupied Syria, Theo witnessed a society adrift amid a steady stream of bombings, executions, torture, prayer, fasting, and exhibitions, all staged by the terrorists. Living within this tide of violence changed not only his personal identity but also profoundly altered his understanding of how to live. Offering fascinating, unprecedented insight into the state of Syria today, Blindfold is "a triumph of the human spirit" (The New York Times Book Review)--combining the emotional power of a captive's memoir with a journalist's account of a culture and a nation in conflict that is as urgent and important as ever.

This book examines how the process of nation-building in Egypt helped transform Egypt from an Ottoman province to an Arabic speaking national community. Through the discussion of the life and works of the prominent writer A'isha Taymur, Hatem gives insight into how literature and the changing gender roles of women and men contributed to the definition and development of a sense of community.""

Social financial reporting as an economic tool presents the firm as a socio-economic unit with empowered social capital to enable a sustainable economic solution, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Islamic social finance (ISF) is a corporate social responsibility initiative in the form of humanitarian and socio-development programs by Islamic financial institutions and Shariah-compliant corporations. ISF is applied through various methods and tools that structure based on Islamic Sharia Law. For example, Islamic social finance tools would either be philanthropic, involving activities such as zakat (obligatory alms-giving), Sadaqah (voluntary alms-giving/charity), and waqf (endowment) or ta'awun (cooperation-based activities), which include Qardh al-hasan (benevolent loan) and kafala (guarantee). Thus, Islamic social finance instruments play a vital role in alleviating poverty and addressing socio-economic issues such as illiteracy, unemployment, malnutrition, and health issues. As such, integrated ISF reporting can empower sustainable economic development and lead to recovery. The Handbook of Research on Islamic Social Finance and Economic Recovery After a Global Health Crisis provides insights on the role of Islamic social finance in supporting and facilitating economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 era as well as reducing poverty and addressing the challenges of socio-economic problems such as education, unemployment, malnutrition, and health issues. This book is ideally intended for practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in improving their understanding on the role of Islamic social finance theoretically and empirically in solving the issue of poverty and developing excellent funds management to achieve economic empowerment with better environmental sustainability.

This book offers students and scholars an introduction to and insight into the wealth of historiographies produced in various Muslim milieus. Four articles deal with the classical period: archaeology and history in early Islamic Amman; an analysis of sources dealing with Muwahhid North Africa; al-Maqrizi's prosopographical production; the rise of early Ottoman historiography. Three examine sacred history as historiography: in 10th century Fatimid Egypt; in the 16th century Indian Chishti Sufi milieu; and in the Sino-Muslim Confucian tradition in Qing China. The final two articles provide fresh approaches to historiography by respectively looking into the sijils of Ottoman Cairo as historical sources and by highlighting the regional approach to the writing of the history of the Indian Ocean. Contributors: Frederic Bauden, Heather J. Empey, Derryl MacLean, Sami G. Massoud, Murat Cem Menguc, Reem Meshal, Hyondo Park, Patricia Risso, Shafique N. Virani and Michael Wood.

Cosmopolitanism, as an intellectual and political project, has failed. The portrayal of human rights, especially European, as evidence of cosmopolitanism in practice is misguided. Cosmopolitan theorists point to the rise of claims-making to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) among Europe's Muslims to protect their right to religious freedom, mainly concerning the hijab, as evidence of cosmopolitan justice. However, the outcomes of such claims-making show that far from signifying a cosmopolitan moment, European human rights law has failed Europe's Muslims. Human Rights, Islam and the Failure of Cosmopolitanism provides an empirical examination of claims-making and government policy in Western Europe focusing mainly on developments in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. A consideration of public debates and European law of conduct in the public sphere shows that cosmopolitan optimism has misjudged the magnitude of the impact claims-making among Europe's Muslims. To overcome this cul-de-sac, European Muslims should turn to a new 'politics of rights' to pursue their right to religious expression. This book is a theoretically challenging re-evaluation of cosmopolitan arguments through a rigorous discussion of rights-making claims by Europe's Muslims to the European Court of Human Rights. It combines sociological and legal case analysis which advances understanding of one of the most pressing topical issues of the day.

The celebrated Great Mosque of Damascus was built in the early eighth century by the Umayyad caliph al-Wal?d b. 'Abd al-Malik. This book provides a detailed study of this Mosque. Using textual, visual, and archaeological evidence, the author attempts to reconstruct some of the basic formal and decorative features of the Umayyad mosque, to locate it within its broader urban context, and to consider its role within al-Wal?d's unprecedented programme of architectural patronage. The work explores the intracultural and intercultural functions of religious architecture within an official visual discourse intended to project a distinctive Muslim identity in a manner determined by Umayyad political aspirations. It will be of particular interest to those concerned with the relationship between the Umayyad caliphate and Byzantium.

This book consists of a series of interrelated chapters analyzing why Iran, among all countries, has seen so many revolutionary movements in the past century; the degree to which its religion, Shi'ism, is revolutionary; and the history of revolutionary and resistance movements in the modern Muslim world. The author stresses historical change, such as the change of Twelver Shi'ism from political quietism to revolutionary opposition, and also previously unnoticed factors in revolution, such as the multi-urban character of all Iran's modern revolutions.

In the wake of radical Islamist terrorist attacks described as jihad worldwide and in South Asia, it is imperative that there should be a book-length study of this idea in this part of the world. The focus of the study is the idea of jihad with its changing interpretations mostly those available in exegetical literature of key figures in South Asia. The hermeneutic devices used to understand the meaning of the Quranic verses and the Prophetic traditions relating to jihad will be the focus of this study. The main thrust of the study is to understand how interpretations of jihad vary. It is seen as being both defensive and aggressive by traditionalists; only defensive and mainly about moral improvement by progressive Muslims; and being insurrectionist, aggressive, eternal and justifying violence against civilians by radical Islamists. One purpose of the book is to understand how the radical interpretation came to South Asia. The book also explains how theories about jihad are influenced by the political and social circumstances of the period and how these insights feed into practice legitimizing militant movements called jihad for that period.

Since the Mediterranean connects cultures, Mediterranean studies have by definition an intercultural focus. Throughout the modern era, the Ottoman Empire has had a lasting impact on the cultures and societies of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. However, the modern Balkans are usually studied within the context of European history, the southern Mediterranean within the context of Islam. Although it makes sense to connect both regions, this is a vast field and requires a command of different languages not necessarily related to each other. Investigating both Greek and Arabic sources, this book will shed some light on the significance of ideas in the political transitions of their time and how the proponents of these transitions often became so overwhelmed by the events that they helped trigger adjustments to their own ideas. Also, the discourses in Greek and Arabic reflect the provinces of the Ottoman Empire and it is instructive to see their differences and commonalities which helps explain contemporary politics.