Veiling in Fashion enters the worlds of women who wear the hijab, both as an aspect of their religious observance and community belonging, and as a fashion statement, drawing upon global Islamic fashion history. The book uses rich ethnographic investigation of everyday veiling practices among Muslim women in the city of Helsinki as a lens through which to reflect on and advance understanding of matters concerning Muslim dress in international Muslim minority contexts. The book provides an innovative approach to studying veiling by connecting varied realms of practice, demonstrating how domains as apparently separate as fashion, materiality, city spaces, private life, religious beliefs, and cosmopolitan social conditions are all tightly bound up together in ways that only a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach can reveal. It will appeal to scholars and students in fashion, gender, religion, material cultures, and the construction of space.

Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.

What is it like to grow up as a South Asian British Muslim today? What are the experiences of South Asian Muslim parents bringing up their children in contemporary Britain? Identity and Upbringing in South Asian Muslim Families explores these questions within the context of the series of events which, from 9/11 to the recent upsurge of the Islamic State, have affected the perceptions and the identity of Muslims around the world. Franceschelli reveals the complex range of negotiations behind the coming of age of South Asian Muslim teenagers and reflects on the changes and continuities between their life experiences, priorities and aspirations compared to their parents' generation. Based on primary research with South Asian Muslim young people and parents, this book highlights the importance of Islam to upbringing; the shifting value of South Asian cultural norms in Britain; and the persistent influence of class in shaping inequalities amongst families and on young people's experiences of growing up.

The spectre of Boko Haram and its activities in Nigeria dominates both media and academic analysis of Islam in the region. But, as Alexander Thurston argues here, beyond the sensational headlines this group generates, the dynamics of Muslim life in northern Nigeria remain poorly understood. Drawing on interviews with leading Salafis in Nigeria as well as on a rereading of the history of the global Salafi movement, this volume explores how a canon of classical and contemporary texts defines Salafism. Examining how these texts are interpreted and - crucially - who it is that has the authority to do so, Thurston offers a systematic analysis of curricula taught in Saudi Arabia and how they shape religious scholars' approach to religion and education once they return to Africa. Essential for scholars of religion and politics, this unique text explores how the canon of Salafism has been used and refined, from Nigeria's return to democracy to the jihadist movement Boko Haram.

One of the most innovative thinkers in the field of Islamic Studies was John Wansbrough (1928-2002), Professor of Semitic Studies and Pro-Director of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. Critiquing the traditional accounts of the origins of Islam as historically unreliable and heavily influenced by religious dogma, Wansbrough suggested radically new interpretations very different from the views of both the Muslim orthodoxy and most Western scholars. In The Sectarian Milieu Wansbrough "analyses early Islamic historiography - or rather the interpretive myths underlying this historiography - as a late manifestation of Old Testament 'salvation history.'" Continuing themes that he treated in a previous work, Quranic Studies, Wansbrough argued that the traditional biographies of Muhammad (Arabic sira and maghazi) are best understood, not as historical documents that attest to "what really happened," but as literary texts written more than one hundred years after the facts and heavily influenced by Jewish, and to a lesser extent Christian, interconfessional polemics. Thus, Islamic "history" is almost completely a later literary reconstruction, which evolved out of an environment of competing Jewish and Christian sects. As such, Wansbrough felt that the most fruitful means of analyzing such texts was literary analysis. Furthermore, he maintained that it was next to impossible to extract the kernel of historical truth from works that were created principally to serve later religious agendas. Although his work remains controversial to this day, his fresh insights and approaches to the study of Islam continue to inspire scholars. This new edition contains a valuable assessment of Wansbrough's contributions and many useful textual notes and translations by Gerald Hawting (University of London), plus the author's 1986 Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture, "Res Ipsa Loquitur."

Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.

The Beginnings of Islamic Law is a major and innovative contribution to our understanding of the historical unfolding of Islamic law. Scrutinizing its historical contexts, the book proposes that Islamic law is a continuous intermingling of innovation and tradition. Salaymeh challenges the embedded assumptions in conventional Islamic legal historiography by developing a critical approach to the study of both Islamic and Jewish legal history. Through case studies of the treatment of war prisoners, circumcision, and wife-initiated divorce, she examines how Muslim jurists incorporated and transformed 'Near Eastern' legal traditions. She also demonstrates how socio-political and historical situations shaped the everyday practice of law, legal education, and the organization of the legal profession in the late antique and medieval eras. Aimed at scholars and students interested in Islamic history, Islamic law, and the relationship between Jewish and Islamic legal traditions, this book's interdisciplinary approach provides accessible explanations and translations of complex materials and ideas.

The US Global War on Terror and earlier US counterterrorism efforts prompted a variety of responses from Muslim states despite widespread Islamic opposition. Some cooperated extensively, some balked at US policy priorities, and others vacillated between these extremes. This book explains how differing religion-state relationships, regimes' political calculations, and Islamic politics combined to produce patterns of tensions and cooperation between the United States and Muslim states over counterterrorism, using rigorous quantitative analysis and case studies of Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. The book combines recent advances in the study of political institutions with work on religion and politics to advance a novel theory of religion and international relations that will be of value to anyone studying religion, terrorism, or Islamic politics. It also provides numerous insights into current events in the Middle East by extending its analysis to the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State.

This book traces the expansion of Islamisation within a modern and plural state such as Malaysia. It elaborates on how elements of theology, sacred space, resources, and their interactivity with secular instruments such as legislative, electoral, and new social technological platforms are all instrumentally employed to consolidate a divine bureaucracy. The book makes the point that religious social movements and political parties are only few of the important agents of Islamisation in society. The other is the modern and secular state structure itself. Weber's legal rational bureaucracy or Hegel's ethical bureaucracy predominantly characterises a modern feature of governmentality. In this instance an Islamic bureaucracy is advantageously situated not only within an ambit of modernity and therefore legality, but divinity and therefore sacrality as well. This positioning gives religious state agents more salience than any other form of bureaucracy leading to their unquestioned authority in the current contexts of societies with Muslim majority rule. One of the requisites of this condition is the homogenisation of Islam followed by ring-fencing of its constituents. The latter can involve contestations with women, other genders, 'secular' Muslims, non-Muslims as well as dissenting Muslims with their differing truthful 'Islams'.

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.

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.

Transoxania, Khurasan, and ?ukharistan - which comprise large parts of today's Central Asia - have long been an important frontier zone. In the late antique and early medieval periods, the region was both an eastern political boundary for Persian and Islamic empires and a cultural border separating communities of sedentary farmers from pastoral-nomads. Given its peripheral location, the history of the 'eastern frontier' in this period has often been shown through the lens of expanding empires. However, in this book, Robert Haug argues for a pre-modern Central Asia with a discrete identity, a region that is not just a transitory space or the far-flung corner of empires, but its own historical entity. From this locally specific perspective, the book takes the reader on a 900-year tour of the area, from Sasanian control, through the Umayyads and Abbasids, to the quasi-independent dynasties of the Tahirids and the Samanids. Drawing on an impressive array of literary, numismatic and archaeological sources, Haug reveals the unique and varied challenges the eastern frontier presented to imperial powers that strove to integrate the area into their greater systems. This is essential reading for all scholars working on early Islamic, Iranian and Central Asian history, as well as those with an interest in the dynamics of frontier regions.

This text is the product of dialogue between a group of leading British Muslim and Christian scholars concerned about the alleged danger to the West of Islamic fundamentalism. It analyzes the ethical and legal principles, rooted in both traditions, underlying any use of armed force in the modern world. After chapters on the history, theology and laws of war as seen from both sides, the book applies its conclusions to firstly, the 1990-91 Gulf War and secondly, the Bosnian conflict. It concludes that Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a myth.

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.

Muhammad Hasan al-Husayni, also known as Hasan 'Ali Shah and, more generally, as the Aga Khan (1804-1881), was the 46th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis and the first Ismaili Imam to bear the title of Aga Khan, bestowed on him by the contemporary Qajar monarch of Persia. This book is the first English translation of his memoirs, the 'Ibrat-afza, `A Book of Exhortation, or Example', and includes a new edition of the Persian text and a detailed introduction to the work and its context. The 'Ibrat-afza was composed in the year 1851, following the Ismaili Imam's departure from Persia and his permanent settlement in India. The text recounts the Aga Khan's early life and political career as the governor of the province of Kirman in Persia, and narrates the dramatic events of his conflict with the Qajar establishment followed by his subsequent travels and exploits in Afghanistan and British India. The 'Ibrat-afza provides a rare example of an autobiographical account from an Ismaili Imam and a first-hand perspective on the regional politics of the age. It offers a window into the history of the Ismailis of Persia, India and Central Asia at the dawn of the modern era of their history. Consequently, the book will be of great interest to both researchers and general readers interested in Ismaili history and in the history of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century.

This book, based on the study of original archives, discusses the roots and specificities of urban governance in the Ottoman Empire and proposes innovative interpretations of the ambiguous impact of this old regime municipal system with modernity. Cet ouvrage, fonde sur la consultation d'archives originales, propose une etude des racines et de la specificite de la gouvernance municipale d'ancien regime dans l'empire ottoman et analyse l'impact ambigu de ce systeme avec la modernite.

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.

Paul Gilroy's After Empire - in many ways a sequel to his classic study of race and nation, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack - explores Britain's failure to come to terms with the loss of its empire and pre-eminent global standing. Drawing on texts from the writings of Fanon and Orwell to Ali G. and The Office, After Empire shows that what we make of the country's postcolonial opportunity will influence the future of Europe and the viability of race as a political category. Taking the political language of the post 9/11 world as a new point of departure he defends beleaguered multiculturalism against accusations of failure. He then takes the liberal discourse of human rights to task, finding it wanting in terms of both racism and imperialism. Gilroy examines how this imperial dissolution has resulted not only in hostility directed at blacks, immigrants and strangers, but also in the country's inability to value the ordinary, unruly multi-culturalism that has evolved organically and unnoticed in its urban centres. A must-read for students of cultural studies, and Britain in the post 9/11 era.

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.

How have states in the Middle East and North Africa responded to the War on Terror? While much scholarship has focused on terrorism in the region, there is need for critical studies of Middle Eastern states' counter-terrorism policies. This book addresses that need by investigating Morocco's unique approach to counter-terrorism: the bureaucratization of religion. Morocco's strategy is unique in the degree to which it relies on reforms that seek to make the country's religious institutions into tools for rewarding loyalty and discouraging dissent from religious elites. Through these measures they have limited opposition through an enduring form of institutional control, accommodating some of the country's most virulent critics. This book will be of great use to researchers and scholars of Middle Eastern politics, and it will also appeal to those policymakers interested in security studies and counter-terrorism policies.

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.