With a focus on the areas of theory, literature, culture, society and film, this collection of essays examines, questions and broadens the applicability of Postcolonialism and Islam from a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary perspective. Topics covered include the relationship between Postcolonialism and Orientalism, theoretical perspectives on Postcolonialism and Islam, the position of Islam within postcolonial literature, Muslim identity in British and European contexts, and the role of Islam in colonial and postcolonial cinema in Egypt and India. At a time at which Islam continues to be at the centre of increasingly heated and frenzied political and academic deliberations, Postcolonialism and Islam offers a framework around which the debate on Muslims in the modern world can be centred. Transgressing geographical, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, this book is an invaluable resource for students of Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociolgy and Literature.

An enduring educational concern that has plagued researchers and policy makers in a number of affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities. These inequalities highlight distinct differences in the educational skills, knowledge, capabilities and credentials between learners' demographic characteristics. They also point to issues of educational disadvantage that emanate from a combination of factors including family life, communities, the geographies of space and place, gender and ethnicity. This book examines some of the causes and responses to educational inequalities, and focuses upon poor urban contexts where educational disadvantage is at its most concentrated, and where educational policy and practice has, over time, proliferated. It questions how wider inequities experienced by young people in urban contexts generate educational inequalities and disadvantage, detailing explicitly what an equitable approach to education might look like. Included in the book is an innovative educational equity framework and toolkit with illustrative policy and practice case studies, bringing together unique scholarship and analysis to examine future educational policy in a holistic, comprehensive and equitable way. It will be valuable reading for postgraduate students, researchers and policy makers with an interest in education and educational equity.

This book reinterprets the Muslim architecture and urban planning of South India, looking beyond the Deccan to the regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala - the historic coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. For the first time a detailed survey of the Muslim monuments of the historic ports and towns demonstrates a rich and diverse architectural tradition entirely independent from the better known architecture of North India and the Deccan sultanates. The book, extensively illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings, widens the horizons of our understanding of Muslim India and will no doubt pave new paths for future studies in the field.

Surface decoration has always played a fundamental role in Islamic architecture. As human representation is forbidden in Islamic religious monuments, designers employed mosaics, stucco, brickwork and ceramics, and the vigorous use of brilliant colour to reach unparalleled heights of expression. It is this ornamental dimension of Islamic architecture that is explored in this magnificent volume. Rather than limiting itself to an exclusively historical or chronological perspective, Ornament and Decoration in Islamic Architecture presents four successive approaches to its subject. The first part offers an overview of Islamic architecture, discussing the great diversity it contains. Dealing exclusively with techniques, the second part considers the materials most often used as well as the expertise of the builders and Muslim decorative artists, and the third part explores themes in Islamic ornamentation. Section four discusses aesthetics, and studies the relationship between the buildings - the structures or their architectonic components - and their ornamental coverings. Each of these topics is presented through a number of outstanding examples and then through comparable monuments from all over the Islamic world. For anyone in thrall to such great wonders as the Taj Mahal and the Alhambra, and for everyone interested in the world of Islam, this lavish publication will be indispensable.

Inside the Muslim Brotherhood provides a comprehensive analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt since 1981. The book unpacks the principal factors that shape the Brotherhood's identity, organization, and activism, investigating the processes of socialization, indoctrination, recruitment, identification, networking, and mobilization utilized by the movement. Khalil al-Anani argues that the Brotherhood is not merely a political actor seeks power but also an identity maker that aims to change societal values, norms, and morals to line up with its ideology and worldview. As a socio-political movement, he finds, the Brotherhood is involved in an intensive process of meaning construction and symbolic production that shape individuals' identity and gives sense to their lives. The result is Brotherhood a distinctive code of identity that governs the norms, values, and regulations that bind members together, maintains their activism, and guides their behavior in everyday life. The book also explains the Brotherhood's durability and how it endured regime repression and exclusion over the past three decades, which al-Anani attributes to the organization's structure and coherence. A tight-knit structure coupled with complex membership system has allowed the Brotherhood to resist regime penetration. Lastly, the book explores the balance of power within the Brotherhood. It investigates the divisions and differences within the movement and how this affects its strategy and decisions.

This book examines the Islamist radicalisation process in Europe, developing a new theoretical model based on an empirical study of the evolution of Islamist radicals in their social environment. The approach of this book is to examine how, and under what conditions, people choose to radicalise. It focuses on the experience of radicalisation from the perspective of those who have undergone it. The study is based on trial and court material, along with an extensive number of interviews collected from many different European countries, and this biographical approach is used to address individuals and the details of their social environment. Overall, the explanatory framework departs from the existing deterministic paradigm (with grievances as causes), also present in some psychological models, and argues that radicalisation is a process much like occupational choice - a rational choice made with social and ideational significance. It addresses critically the assumption that, because the result of the radicalisation process could be seen as 'abnormal', the cause of it might be of a similar nature. Parallels are drawn with other forms of extremism and European counter-radicalisation policies are considered critically. This book will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies and political violence, political Islam, social movements, European politics and IR/security studies in general.

This volume locates the contemporary study of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such, it challenges the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this collection of articles makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits. The collection brings together a range of perspectives on this subject, including a comparison between Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first century Europe, an examination of the 'new anti-Semitism', and an analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

First published in 1991, this title explores the myths and misperceptions that have underpinned Muslim-Christian relations throughout history, and which endure to the current day. William Montgomery Watt describes how the myths originated and developed, and argues that both Muslims and Christians need to have a more accurate knowledge and positive appreciation of the other religion. Chapters discuss the Qur'anic perception of Christianity, attitudes to Greek philosophy and the relationship between Islam and Christianity in medieval Europe. Written by one of the leading authorities on Islam in the West, Muslim-Christian Encounters remains a relevant and vivid study and will be of particular value to students of Islam, religious history and sociology.

This is a study of the structure and composition of the official learning current in medieval Arabic culture. This comprises natural sciences both exoteric and esoteric (medicine, alchemy, astrology and others), traditional and religious sciences (such as theology, exegesis and grammar), philosophical sciences such as metaphysics and ethics, in addition to technical disciplines like political theory and medicine, and other fields of intellectual endeavour. The book identifies and develops a number of conceptual elements common to the various areas of official Arabic scientific discourse, and shows how these elements integrate these disparate sciences into an historical epistemic unity. The specific profile of each of these different sciences is described, in terms of its conceptual content, but especially with reference to its historical circumstances. These are seen to be embodied in a number of institutional supports, both intellectual and social: paradigms, schools of thought, institutions of learning, pedagogic techniques, and a body of professionals, all of which combine to form definite, albeit ever renewed, traditions of learning. Finally, an attempt is made to relate Arabic scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages to patterns of scientific and political authority. First published in 1986.

An examination of the place of religion, especially Islam, in political and cultural life took on a special urgency after the events of 9/11. The essays in this volume concentrate on the way that Islam impacts on the everyday lives of people who reside in societies where Islam plays a large part. The relationship between Islam and women has always been seen as problematic, and by highlighting women's negotiations with this religion, this volume seeks to understand the many and various strategies and connections that are made, and their political and cultural ramifications. By keeping an Asian focus, the authors also seek to understand the wide panorama that Islamic societies inhabit, and the manifold political and cultural expressions that ensue from this. The effort is not only to break the image of a monolithic structure and set of beliefs, but also to highlight on-the-ground negotiations, and the ways that women in particular find spaces within Islamic structures and discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine An exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Muslim womanhood that centers the lived experience of women of color For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women's rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women's identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Through archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, the author maps how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam's rich histories of mobilization and community, Being Muslim brings insight to the resistance that all Muslim women must engage in the post-9/11 United States. From the stories that she gathers, Chan-Malik demonstrates the diversity and similarities of Black, Arab, South Asian, Latina, and multiracial Muslim women, and how American understandings of Islam have shifted against the evolution of U.S. white nationalism over the past century. In borrowing from the lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, Chan-Malik offers us a new vocabulary for U.S. Muslim feminism, one that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.

Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests? Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.

The concept of jihad holds a prominent place in Islamic thought and history. Beyond its spiritual meanings, the term has historically been associated with the sweeping Arab-Believers conquests of the 7-8th century BCE. But given advances in our understanding of the historicity and chronology of the Qur'an and early Islamic texts, is it correct to identify jihad and Islam with violent conquest? In this book, Marco Demichelis explores the history of the concept of jihad in the early proto-Islamic centuries (7-8th). Deploying an interdisciplinary approach which combines the hermeneutical study of the famous 'Verses of the Sword' within the Qur'an itself, with historical writing by Islamic chroniclers as well as non-Islamic sources, numismatics, epigraphical and architectural evidence, the book questions the relationship between the religious concept of jihad and the conquests. The book argues that Christian Byzantine Foederati forices who previously fought against the Persians may have had a formative effect on the later emergence of more bellicose rhetoric. In so doing, it calls into question assumptions about warlike attitudes inherent within Islamic doctrine, and reveals a more nuanced and complicated history of religious violence in the pre, proto and early Islamic period.

The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflict, Global Islamophobia considers the role played by 'moral entrepreneurs' in orchestrating popular xenophobia and in agitating for greater surveillance, policing and cultural regulation of those deemed a threat to the nation's security or imagined community. This timely collection examines the interpenetration of the global and the local in the West's cultural politics towards Islam, highlighting parallels in the responses of governments and in the worrying reversion to a politics of coercion and assimilation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in race and ethnicity; citizenship and assimilation; political communication, securitisation and The War on Terror; and moral panics.

As Europe goes astray, deeply conflicted about where it is both within and with the world, it does not know what it wants to know about, or do, with the racial subject. It is into this context of anxiety, and the Muslim subject as its most intense source, that I write Islamophobia. Islamophobia represents not merely a species of the racism constitutive of European modernity, but is rather symptomatic of deep contemporary transformations in (racist) power, knowledge and governance, propelled by technologies and economies of seemingly endless wars on/of terror. The Muslim, who is at once the terrifying object and dehumanised subject of race, is called to answer for Europe's existential fear of relegation. But who, or rather what is s/he? How might the Muslim speak about the world, its past and unfolding terror(s)? Which questions must s/he answer, and which answers are deemed acceptable? Presenting a speculative theory of the (post)racial subject of Islamophobia, this book is an attempt to build an adequate vocabulary for analysing the complexities of racism today, its potential futurity, and (Muslim) techniques for its dismantling.

Until currently there have been no specific publications, particularly in English, on women in traditional Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia, known as pesantren, which played a significant role in shaping the gender issues in the Indonesian Muslim community. This informative and insightful book contributes to two booming fields in Indonesian studies: the study of Islam and the study of Muslim women. It also adds a new perspective to the English-language literature on Muslim women outside the Middle-Eastern or Sub-Indian continent communities context, which used to dominate the scholarly discussion or publication in this field.

Islamophobia is the name given to the virulent anti-Islamic prejudice that has been hyped by the news media and seized upon by cynical politicians. Five essays by six specialists on Islam in America provide important insights into Islamophobia as a conflict over American identity during a time of crisis. The authors clarify the way that differences of religion, race, and gender have been used to portray Muslims as threatening "out-groups," just as other minorities (Catholics, Jews, blacks) have been attacked in the past. The result is a valuable and thought-provoking analysis of the tactics for denying full citizenship to a minority religious group.

With the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, France has faced a number of critiques in its attempts to assimilate Muslims into an ostensibly secular (but predominantly Catholic) state and society. This book challenges traditional analyses that emphasise the conflict between Muslims and the French state and broader French society, by exploring the intersection of Muslim faith with other identities, as well as the central roles of Muslims in French civil society, politics and the media. The tensions created by attacks on French soil by Islamic State have contributed to growing acceptance of the Islamophobic discourse of Marine Le Pen and her far-right Front National party, and debates about issues such as headscarves and burkinis have garnered worldwide attention. Downing addresses these issues from a new angle, eschewing the traditional us-and-them narrative and offering a more nuanced account based on people's actual lived experiences. French Muslims in Perspective will be of interest to students and scholars across sociology, politics, international relations, cultural studies, European Studies and French studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners involved in immigration, education, and media.

This is the first detailed study of the life and thought of Shaykh Mahmud Shaltut (1897-1963). Shaltd=ut was an Egyptian scholar and reformer who held the most senior position open to Sunni Muslim religious scholars - that of Rector of the Azhar University in Cairo. His period of office (1958-63) was a turbulent time in Egypt and within the Azhar itself, with President Nasser's socialist government initiatinga radical reorganization of that institution in accordance with its policy of exerting greater control over the forces of Islam in Egypt. One of the most popuar and progressive Rectors of the Azhar in recent times, his writings have received extremely wide readership throughout the Muslim world. They reflect both his traditional religious background and his great concern with the contemporary problems of Muslims, thus providing an insight into some of the tensions which arise in the confrontation with modernity. In his important work in the areas of Islamic jurisprudence and Qur'anic commentary, he strove to demystify Islamic scholarship and make its fruits available to ordinary Muslims. He issued fatwas on a wide range of topics of particular relevance in the modern age, such as financial transactions and family planning. By focusing on the work of an essentially traditional religious scholar, this study will fill a serious gap in modern Islamic studies. Set against the wider context of the cultural and revolutionary changes of Egypt at this time, it will also provide valuable insights for students charting the development of the modern Middle East.

This Reader offers a comprehensive overview of the variety of methodological and theoretical approaches involved in, and relevant to, the emerging field of Anthropology of Islam. It pays particular attention to the study of ethnographic cases, featuring various forms of Islam as practiced in different social and cultural contexts. The Anthropology of Islam Reader also explores topics of great current interest such as the body and cultural politics, the veil and the public sphere and key practices and festivals such as the Hajj and Eid. In his selections, Jens Kreinath highlights the diversity of practices and themes that were formative for this field of study, making this essential reading for students of Islam at undergraduate and graduate level.

The first eleven essays in this collection treat the application of Islamic law in qadi courts in the Maghrib in the period between 1100 and 1500 CE. Based on preserved legal documents and the expert opinions of Muslim jurists (Muftis), the essays examine family law cases involving legal minority, guardianship, divorce, inheritance, bequests, and endowments. Cumulatively, the cases bear witness to the effectiveness and efficiency of the Islamic judicial system in this period. Contrary to popular perceptions, the cases demonstrate that Muslim jurists placed a high value on reasoned thought and were sensitive to the manner in which law, society, and culture interacted with, and shaped, each other. The final essay shows how the treatment of family endowments by colonial regimes in Algeria and India at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries shaped, or misshaped the modern western scholarly understanding of Islamic law.

Fakhr al-Din Razi's "Tafsir", "The Great Exegesis', also known as "Mafatih al-Ghayb", is one of the great classics of Arabic and Islamic scholarship. Written in the twelfth century, this commentary on the Qur'an has remained until today an indispensable reference work. "The Great Exegesis" is a compendium not only of Qur'anic sciences and meanings, but also Arabic linguistics, comparative jurisprudence, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, dialectic theology and the spirituality of Sufism.---The present volume is the first ever translation into English from "The Great Exegesis" and focuses on the first chapter of the Qur'an, the "Fatiha". This scholarly yet accessible translation gives readers a thorough understanding of the most commonly recited chapter of the Qur'an; it also opens up for readers a window into the thought and practice of one of Islam's greatest theologians. This volume includes a foreword by Professor M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, King Fahd Professor of Islamic Studies, University of London.

Muslim countries experience wide variation in levels of Islamist political mobilization, including such political activities as protest, voting, and violence. Institutional Origins of Islamist Political Mobilization provides a theory of the institutional origins of Islamist politics, focusing on the development of religious common knowledge, religious entrepreneurship, and coordinating focal points as critical to the success of Islamist activism. Examining Islamist politics in more than 50 countries over four decades, the book illustrates that Islamist political activism varies a great deal, appearing in specific types of institutional contexts. Detailed case studies of Turkey, Algeria, and Senegal demonstrate how diverse contexts yield different types of Islamist politics across the Muslim world.

"Hadith Literature: Its Origin, Development & Special Features", written by Professor Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, is an introduction which presents the various aspects of the subject of Hadith and its importance within Islam. Hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, form a sacred literature which for Muslims ranks second in importance only to the Qur'an itself. As a source of law, ethics and doctrine, the vast corpus of Hadith continues to exercise decisive influence. "Hadith Literature: Its Origin, Development & Special Features" explains the origin of Hadith literature, the evolution of the "isnad" system, the troubled relationship between scholars and the state, the problem of falsification, and the gradual development of a systematic approach to the material. An interesting appendix demonstrates that a high proportion of the medieval Hadith scholars were women. This edition is a fully revised and updated version of the original, which was first published in 1961 to considerable scholarly acclaim.