This important book investigates the emergence and development of a distinct concept of self-awareness in post-classical, pre-modern Islamic philosophy. Jari Kaukua presents the first extended analysis of Avicenna's arguments on self-awareness - including the flying man, the argument from the unity of experience, the argument against reflection models of self-awareness and the argument from personal identity - arguing that all these arguments hinge on a clearly definable concept of self-awareness as pure first-personality. He substantiates his interpretation with an analysis of Suhrawardi's use of Avicenna's concept and Mulla Sadra's revision of the underlying concept of selfhood. The study explores evidence for a sustained, pre-modern and non-Western discussion of selfhood and self-awareness, challenging the idea that these concepts are distinctly modern, European concerns. The book will be of interest to a range of readers in history of philosophy, history of ideas, Islamic studies and philosophy of mind.

Muslim Belonging in Secular India surveys the experience of some of India's most prominent Muslim communities in the early postcolonial period. Muslims who remained in India after the Partition of 1947 faced distrust and discrimination, and were consequently compelled to seek new ways of defining their relationship with fellow citizens of India and its governments. Using the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad in 1948 as a case study, Taylor C. Sherman reveals the fragile and contested nature of Muslim belonging in the decade that followed independence. In this context, she demonstrates how Muslim claims to citizenship in Hyderabad contributed to intense debates over the nature of democracy and secularism in independent India. Drawing on detailed new archival research, Dr Sherman provides a thorough and compelling examination of the early governmental policies and popular strategies that have helped to shape the history of Muslims in India since 1947.

The Islamization of politics in Indonesia after 1998 presents an underexplored puzzle: why has there been a rise in the number of shari'a laws despite the electoral decline of Islamist parties? Michael Buehler presents an analysis of the conditions under which Islamist activists situated outside formal party politics may capture and exert influence in Muslim-majority countries facing democratization. His analysis shows that introducing competitive elections creates new pressures for entrenched elites to mobilize and structure the electorate, thereby opening up new opportunities for Islamist activists to influence politics. Buehler's analysis of changing state-religion relations in formerly authoritarian Islamic countries illuminates broader theoretical debates on Islamization in the context of democratization. This timely text is essential reading for students, scholars, and government analysts.

*New Edition of the Leading Work on Modern Turkey* In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicentre. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Since 2002, Erdogan has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdogan the licence to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdogan's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey.

Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become part of popular culture. Despite a direct continuity in their production from the eighteenth century to the present, they remain virtually unknown to people outside the region. This remarkable and rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language. The book sheds light not only on the character of Tamerlane and how he was remembered and championed by many generations after his demise, but also on the era in which the biographies were written and how they were conceived and received by the local populace during an age of crisis in their own history.

This work charts the political, sociological and demographic factors that have shaped the position of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islam in the past and today. Focusing on the Arab world and on Turkey, the authors show how Christianity and Judaism survived and, at times, even prospered in the region, thus modifying the view of Islam as an inevitably unbending and radical religion. They also demonstrate that the position of the minorities was badly affected in the wake of confrontations with the Christian West - at the time of the Crusades, after the first victories of the Spanish Reconquista, with the humiliations meted out to the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and North Africa, and once again with the creation of the state of Israel.

For most young people religion and religiosity is something latent or private activated by private events or the passing of years. For Muslim young people it can be activated by an incessant Islamaphobic discourse that requires fundamental questions of relationships and belonging to be addressed in the public gaze whilst being positioned as representatives and 'explainers' of their religion and their communities. Written by a leading practitioner and academic in the field of youth and community work this multidisciplinary book reflects the way theoretical, the social and the religious impacts on the lives of Muslim young people.

For most young people religion and religiosity is something latent or private activated by private events or the passing of years. For Muslim young people it can be activated by an incessant Islamaphobic discourse that requires fundamental questions of relationships and belonging to be addressed in the public gaze whilst being positioned as representatives and 'explainers' of their religion and their communities. Written by a leading practitioner and academic in the field of youth and community work this multidisciplinary book reflects the way theoretical, the social and the religious impacts on the lives of Muslim young people.

This book provides a concise yet panoramic overview of Islam, unlike most introductory books, which focus mainly on the development of Islamic institutions in the classical period.

To place Islam in perspective, Neal Robinson discusses the problems raised by Western perceptions of Islam and provides a brief account of Islamic history down to the present. He then explains major topics in Islamic worship to help readers understand it as a living faith. Appendices guide the novice through the structure of Arabic names, transliteration, and the Islamic calendar and festivals.

In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam - the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic world history.

After the abolition of slavery in 1897, Islamic courts in Zanzibar (East Africa) became central institutions where former slaves negotiated socioeconomic participation. By using difficult-to-read Islamic court records in Arabic, Elke E. Stockreiter reassesses the workings of these courts as well as gender and social relations in Zanzibar Town during British colonial rule (1890-1963). She shows how Muslim judges maintained their autonomy within the sphere of family law and describes how they helped advance the rights of women, ex-slaves, and other marginalised groups. As was common in other parts of the Muslim world, women usually had to buy their divorce. Thus, Muslim judges played important roles as litigants negotiated moving up the social hierarchy, with ethnicisation increasingly influencing all actors. Drawing on these previously unexplored sources, this study investigates how Muslim judges both mediated and generated discourses of inclusion and exclusion based on social status rather than gender.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

Long viewed as Spain's "most Moorish city," Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explores how Muslim-themed tourism and Islamic cultural institutions coexist with anti-Muslim sentiments.

Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

Examining the role played by ideology, internal politics and key figures within Sudan after the 1989 coup, this book analyses policymaking in the Sudanese administration in-depth and studies its effect on international and domestic politics and foreign policy. The military coup undertaken in June 1989 by the Sudanese Islamist movement, known to them as the 'National Salvation Revolution', established Sudan as a central actor in the instability of the region. This book explores the foreign policy, international and domestic politics of the new government, from post-coup Sudan to the present day. The intriguing political issues in Sudanese foreign policy during the period pose many questions regarding the dynamics of the government's domestic and international policymaking. Studying the fragmentation of the Islamist movement into various political bodies, this book examines the role of foreign policy as a contentious point of Sudanese domestic politics. Islamist Foreign Policy in Sudan also looks at the major factors in the relations of Sudan, such as the civil war, terrorism and human rights issues. Islamist Foreign Policy in Sudan will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, African politics, human rights studies and Islamic studies.

The popularity of the Muslim League and its idea of Pakistan has been measured in terms of its success in achieving the goal of a sovereign state in the Muslim majority regions of North West and North East India. It led to an oversight of Muslim leaders and organizations which were opposed to this demand, predicating their opposition to the League on its understanding of the history and ideological content of the Muslim nation. This volume takes stock of multiple narratives about Muslim identity formation in the context of debates about partition, historicizes those narratives, and reads them in the light of the larger political milieu of the period. Focusing on the critiques of the Muslim League, its concept of the Muslim nation, and the political settlement demanded on its behalf, it studies how the movement for Pakistan inspired a contentious, influential conversation on the definition of the Muslim nation.

Eighth- and ninth-century Armenia and Caucasian Albania were largely Christian provinces of the then Islamic Caliphate. Although they formed a part of the Iranian cultural sphere, they are often omitted from studies of both Islamic and Iranian history. In this book, Alison Vacca uses Arabic and Armenian texts to explore these Christian provinces as part of the Caliphate, identifying elements of continuity from Sasanian to caliphal rule, and, more importantly, expounding on significant moments of change in the administration of the Marwanid and early Abbasid periods. Vacca examines historical narrative and the construction of a Sasanian cultural memory during the late ninth and tenth centuries to place the provinces into a broader context of Iranian rule. This book will be of benefit to historians of Islam, Iran and the Caucasus, but will also appeal to those studying themes of Iranian identity and Muslim-Christian relations in the Near East.

This book presents an in-depth exploration of the administration of justice during Islam's founding period, 632-1250 CE. Inspired by the scholarship of Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and composed in his honor, this volume brings together ten leading scholars of Islamic law to examine the history of early Islamic courts. This approach draws attention to both how and why the courts and the people associated with them functioned in early Islamic societies: When a dispute occurred, what happened in the courts? How did judges conceive of justice and their role in it? When and how did they give attention to politics and procedure? Each author draws on diverse sources that illuminate a broader and deeper vision of law and society than traditional legal literature alone can provide, including historical chronicles, biographical dictionaries, legal canons, exegetical works, and mirrors for princes. Altogether, the volume offers both a substantive intervention on early Islamic courts and on methods for studying legal history as social history. It illuminates the varied and dynamic legal landscapes stretching across early Islam, and maps new approaches to interdisciplinary legal history.

The Ayyubid and Mamluk periods were two of the most intellectually vibrant in Islamic history. Megan H. Reid's book, which traverses three centuries from 1170 to 1500, recovers the stories of medieval men and women who were renowned not only for their intellectual prowess but also for their devotional piety. Through these stories, the book examines trends in voluntary religious practice that have been largely overlooked in modern scholarship. This type of piety was distinguished by the pursuit of God's favor through additional rituals, which emphasized the body as an instrument of worship, and through the rejection of worldly pleasures, and even society itself. Using an array of sources including manuals of law, fatwa collections, chronicles, and obituaries, the book shows what it meant to be a good Muslim in the medieval period and how Islamic law helped to define holy behavior. In its concentration on personal piety, ritual, and ethics the book offers an intimate perspective on medieval Islamic society.

Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past. The figure of the Jew as trader and financier dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the economy has been central to Jewish life and the Jewish image in the world; Jews not only made money but spent money. This book is the first to investigate the intersection between consumption, identity, and Jewish history in Europe. It aims to examine the role and place of consumption within Jewish society and the ways consumerism generated and reinforced Jewish notions of belonging from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. It shows how the advances of modernization and secularization in the modern period increased the importance of consumption in Jewish life, making it a significant factor in the process of redefining Jewish identity.

Since 9/11, al-Qaida has become one of the most infamous and widely discussed terrorist organizations in the world, with affiliates spread across the globe. However, little-known are the group's activities within Afghanistan itself, something which Anne Stenersen examines in this book. Using an array of unique primary sources, she presents an alternative narrative of al-Qaida's goals and strategies prior to 9/11. She argues that al-Qaida's actions were not just an ideological expression of religious fanaticism and violent anti-Americanism, but that they were actually far more practical and organised, with a more revolutionary and Middle Eastern-focused agenda than previously thought. Through Stenersen's analysis, we see how al-Qaida employed a dual strategy: with a small section focused on staging international terrorist attacks, but at the same time a larger part dedicated to building a resilient and cohesive organization that would ultimately serve as a vanguard for future Islamist revolutions.

What happens to policies when a president dies in office? Do they get replaced by the new president, or do advisers carry on with the status quo? In November 1963, these were important questions for a Kennedy-turned-Johnson administration. Among these officials was a driven National Security Council staffer named Robert Komer, who had made it his personal mission to have the United States form better relations with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser after diplomatic relations were nearly severed during the Eisenhower years. While Kennedy saw the benefit of having good, personal relations with the most influential leader in the Middle East-believing that it was the key to preventing a new front in the global Cold War-Johnson did not share his predecessor's enthusiasm for influencing Nasser with aid. In US-Egypt Diplomacy under Johnson, Glickman brings to light the diplomatic efforts of Komer, a masterful strategist at navigating the bureaucratic process. Appealing to scholars of Middle Eastern history and US foreign policy, the book reveals a new perspective on the path to a war that was to change the face of the Middle East, and provides an important "applied history" case study for policymakers on the limits of personal diplomacy.

This book explores how medieval and modern Muslim religious scholars ('ulama') interpret gender roles in Qur'anic verses on legal testimony, marriage, and human creation. Citing these verses, medieval scholars developed increasingly complex laws and interpretations upholding a male-dominated gender hierarchy; aspects of their interpretations influence religious norms and state laws in Muslim-majority countries today, yet other aspects have been discarded entirely. Karen Bauer traces the evolution of their interpretations, showing how they have been adopted, adapted, rejected, or replaced over time, by comparing the Qur'an with a wide range of Qur'anic commentaries and interviews with prominent religious scholars from Iran and Syria. At times, tradition is modified in unexpected ways: learned women argue against gender equality, or Grand Ayatollahs reject sayings of the Prophet, citing science instead. This innovative and engaging study highlights the effects of social and intellectual contexts on the formation of tradition, and on modern responses to it.

Constanze Volkmann develops an innovative new gender theory labeled doing and undoing gender. Based on empirical findings she examines the highly debated intersection of gender and Islam. The analysis of interviews with various Muslim women unravels the many different ways in which gender is done and undone. Especially with regard to potential gender hierarchies, the results reveal that the category 'gender' is irrelevant to many Muslim women and is even used as a means to foster their status and power as women. This book makes a substantial contribution to a differentiated social debate at eye level with Muslim women.