In the first decade of the twenty-first century Turkey experienced an extraordinary set of transformations. In 2001, in the midst of financial difficulties, the country was under IMF stewardship, yet it has recently emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. And on the international stage, Turkey has managed to enhance its position from being a backseat NATO member and outside candidate for EU membership to being an influential regional power, determining and developing its own individual foreign policy. Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog explore how these and other changes have shaped the way people in Turkey perceive themselves and how the country's self-image shapes its actions. In the modern age, the sovereign nation-state still continues to be one of the basic building blocks of social or political identity. The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, is a good example. In weaving together and selecting certain elements of memory, myth, tradition and symbols, the narratives of national identity in Turkey have been, to a large extent, socially constructed.This volume offers analysis of the ways in which these narratives have been created, maintained and negotiated, and how current economic and political interests have been incorporated into the construction of a modern identity. External forces such as those of cultural and economic globalisation have also been influential agents in this process. As a result, the space and opportunity for social and cultural expression has increasingly widened while alternative identities and life-style choices at both the collective and individual levels have also become more visible. Bearing this in mind, this book examines issues such as those of alternative gender identity and sexual orientation, formerly taboo issues. Through different approaches engaging with politics, economy, society, culture and history, Turkey and the Politics of National Identity offers new perspectives on the transformation of national identity in this increasingly influential country in the Middle East.

Abrahamic scriptures serve as cultural pharmakon, prescribing what can act as both poison and remedy. This collection shows that their sometimes veiled but eternally powerful polemics can both destroy and build, exclude and include, and serve as the ultimate justification for cruelty or compassion. Here, scholars not only excavate these works for their formative and continuing cultural impact on communities, identities, and belief systems, they select some of the most troubling topics that global communities continue to navigate. Their analysis of both texts and their reception help explain how these texts promote norms and build collective identities. Rejecting the notion of the sacred realm as separate from the mundane realm and beyond critical challenge, this collection argues-both implicitly and sometimes transparently-for the presence of the sacred within everyday life and open to challenge. The very rituals, prayers, and traditions that are deemed sacred interweave into our cultural systems in infinite ways. Together, these authors explore the dynamic nature of everyday life and the often-brutal power of these texts over everyday meaning.

The scholarly study of Islam has become ever more insular and apologetic. Academic Islamic Studies has tried to maintain a focus on truth, authenticity, experience and meaning and has effectively avoided discussion of larger social, cultural and ideological issues. Many scholars of Islam have presented themselves to their colleagues, the media and the public as the interpreters of Islam and have done so with an interpretation which tends, almost universally, to the liberal and egalitarian. The ignorance and hostility which the Islamic faith has faced since 9/11 has partly necessitated the taking of such a position. But, as Theorizing Islam argues, the issue remains that only one interpretation of Islam is generally being presented and, as with any interpretation, this has its own assumptions. The aim of Theorizing Islam is to explore the potential for a fuller, more honest and more sophisticated approach to both theory and methodology in the academic study of Islam.

This book analyzes the cosmopolitan lives of British Asian Muslim women. Drawing on interview and online data, the book debunks stereotypical assumptions and explores the multiple and meaningful links that British Asian Muslim women establish within and outside their communities.

This book invites to rethink certain aspects of halal, and in particular the issue of the halal market and halal certification in Muslim-minority contexts. Rather than limiting itself to elucidating the doctrinal traditions relating to halal/haram, or on the contrary, focusing only on the external economic, financial, political or demographic factors that explain the changes taking place, Rethinking Halal shows the need to underline the points of balance between the aspects of religious doctrine on the one hand and the economic or political contextual aspects on the other hand. Through the study of various countries, Rethinking Halal demonstrates that Islam underwent a process of positivisation, that is, a kind of reframing of its rules and principles through the lens of a characteristically modern standardising, scientificising, and systematising mind. Contributors are Ayang Utriza Yakin, Louis-Leon Christians, Baudouin Dupret, Jajat Burhanudin, Syafiq Hasyim, Zaynab El Bernoussi, En-Chieh Chao, Rossella Bottoni, Lauren Crossland-Marr, Konrad Pedziwiatr, Matteo Benussi, Harun Sencal and Mehmet Asutay.

For more than a millennium, Islam has been a vital part of Western civilization. Today, however, it is sometimes assumed that Islam is a foreign element inside the West, and even that Islam and the West are doomed to be in perpetual conflict. The need for accurate, reliable scholarship on this topic has never been more urgent. The Bloomsbury Reader on Islam in the West brings together some of the most important, up-to-date scholarly writings published on this subject. The Reader explores not only the presence of Muslim religious practitioners in Europe and the Americas but also the impact of Islamic ideas and Muslims on Western politics, societies, and cultures. It is ideal for use in the university classroom, with an extensive introduction by Edward E. Curtis IV and a timeline of key events in the history of Islam in the West. A brief introduction to the author and the topic is provided at the start of each excerpt. Part 1, on the history of Islam in the West, probes the role of Muslims and the significance of Islam in medieval, early modern, and modern settings such as Islamic Spain, colonial-era Latin America, sixteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Crimea, interwar Albania, the post-World War II United States, and late twentieth-century Germany. Part 2 focuses on the contemporary West, examining debates over Muslim citizenship, the war on terrorism, anti-Muslim prejudice, and Islam and gender, while also providing readers with a concrete sense of how Muslims practise and live out Islamic ideals in their private and public lives.

Western civilization tends to view secularism as a positive achievement. From this perspective, benefits of secularizing trends include the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and freedom from organized religion.

In the Arab Middle East, however, Islamist intellectuals increasingly cite Western-inspired secularism as the source of the region's social dislocation and political instability. While secularism in the West led to the spread of democratic values, in the Muslim world it has been associated with dictatorship, the violation of human rights, and the abrogation of civil liberties.

Islam and Secularism in the Middle East examines the origins and growth of the movement to abolish the secularizing reforms of the past century by creating a political order guided by Shariah law. Contributors explain the Islamic rejection of secularism as a failed Western Christian ideal and also discuss how secularization was pioneered by those who thought Muslims could only advance politically by emulating Western practices, including the renunciation of religion.

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

This highly topical book aims to undermine unsubstantiated myths by examining Muslim integration in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, states which dominate the debate on minority integration and the practice of Muslim religious traditions. These nations have a range of alternative relationships between religion and the state, as well as strategies for coordinating individuals' ethnic and state identities. Using the European Parliament's benchmarking guidelines, surveys and other non-official data, the authors find that in some areas Muslims are in fact more integrated than popularly assumed and suggest that, instead of failing to integrate, Muslims find their access to integration blocked in ways that reduce their life chances in the societies in which they are now permanent residents. The book will have an impact on research and policy especially with the commencement of the EU-wide integration benchmarking effort and will be an excellent resource for researchers, academics and policy makers.

This book provides a rare and authoritative glimpse at the splendid decorative military art of the Ottomans, and art that is both insufficiently known and insufficiently appreciated. Professor Zygulski describes in detail masterpieces from collections around the world, including the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul, the National Museum In Cracow, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, and elsewhere.

Few studies of Middle East wars go beyond a narrative of events and most tend to impose on this subject the rigid scheme of superpower competition. The Gulf War of 1991, however, challenges this view of the Middle East as an extension of the global conflict. The failure of the accord of both superpowers to avoid war even once regional superpower competition in the Middle East had ceased must give rise to the question: Do regional conflicts have their own dynamic? Working from this assumption, the book examines local-regional constraints of Middle East conflict and how, through escalation and the involvement of extra-regional powers, such conflicts acquire an international dimension. The theory of a regional subsystem is employed as a framework for conceptualising this interplay between regional and international factors in Tibi's examination of the Middle East wars in the period 1967-91. Tibi also provides an outlook into the future of conflict in the Middle East in the aftermath of the most recent Gulf War.

This study examines and clarifies the relationship between Islam and modernization in the Muslim world. Through a comparative analysis of Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey, the author analyzes the ideas and conceptions which are inculcated and propagated in Islamic countries as Islamic religious thought, practice, orientation, tradition, and ways-of-life. Saeed explains that the chaotic conditions existing in the Muslim world are largely a result of a crisis of thought, that the grossly distorted and misunderstood Islam, as presently practiced, is a major obstacle to the development of Muslim countries--but that Muslim countries can develop and progress only through Islam.

This book is a study of the objectives of Islamic Finance in the modern banking space and offers insight into the effects of changes and developments occurring in Islamic banking products and services.

This work of research by Taj Hashmi puts the issue of women's position in society in historical as well as Islamic perspectives to relate it to the objective conditions in Bangladesh. In eight chapters, he narrates how Quranic edicts about women have through the ages been misinterpreted by the power elites and the "mullahs" to suppress women. Even NGOs are not immune from exploiting them. Hope, according to the author, lies in the literacy and economic self reliance of the Bangladeshi women.

In the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.

Addressing the specific contexts of communal leadership, educational policy, inter-communal relations, legal reform, media production, public discourse, public opinion, and responses to government policy, this volume examines Western-Muslim relations and makes proposals for enhancing Self-Other interaction to improve societal harmony.

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.

In recent decades Russia has played an increasingly active role in the Middle East as states within the region continue to diversify their relations with major external powers. Yet the role of specific Russian regions, especially those that share an 'Islamic identity' with the GCC has been overlooked. In this book Diana Galeeva examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. Using the Republic of Tatarstan, one of Russia's Muslim polities as a case study, Galeeva demonstrates the emergence of relations between modern Tatarstan and the GCC States, evolving from concerns with economic survival to a rising paradiplomacy reliant on shared Islamic identities. Having conducted fieldwork in the Muslim Republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Dagestan, the book includes interviews with high-ranking political figures, heads of religious organisations and academics. Moving beyond solely economic and geopolitical considerations, the research in this book sheds light on the increasingly important role that culture and shared Islamic identity play in paradiplomacy efforts.

Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Muqarnas articles are published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.

In 1979, Abdus Salam became the first Muslim, and the first citizen of Pakistan, to win a Nobel Prize. Branded a heretic at home, he pioneered the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, a vital focus of Third World science which remains as his monument. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Salam's truly remarkable multi-faceted character is well mirrored here. The book is beautifully written, and handles many delicate political and personal issues with sensitivity and understanding. Very authoritative and insightful, giving a rounded picture of a very complex man. -- Tom Kibble, Imperial College London

In a world where the strident demands of Islamic extremists capture the media's attention, the courageous protests of Muslim reformers barely receive any notice. These include a surprising number of women who are prepared to challenge institutionalized persecution, risking derision, arrest, physical harm, and even death.
In this inspiring compilation of Muslim women's stories from around the world, the voices of these long-oppressed women ring loud and clear as they question ideology and culture, patriarchal and religious beliefs, and demand the social and political rights women lack in many Muslim countries. The reformers speak out with passion, humanity, and sometimes humor in these compact and often poignant biographies, bringing alive the harsh realities for women in many parts of the world.
By surveying a wide range of Muslim reformers, not only in the Middle East but also in Europe and North America, author Ida Lichter uncovers some significant emerging trends. For example, she notes that the majority of Muslim feminists would like to see reform contained within Islam. Many criticize their patriarchal culture for suppressing egalitarian views that they believe the Koran expresses and so they advocate a reinterpretation of the holy text. Some demand changes to discriminatory Sharia-based laws. Others campaign openly for political and educational reforms.
Complete with a glossary and a list of helpful Web sites, this vibrant anthology makes use of reliable translations from original languages to demonstrate the groundswell of grassroots change that promises eventually to bring even the most conservative sectors of Islam into the twenty-first century.

Islamic theology had to wait a long time before being granted a place in the European universities. That happened above all in German-speaking areas, and this led to the development of new theological and religious pedagogical approaches. This volume presents one such approach and discusses it from various perspectives. It takes up different theological and religious pedagogical themes and reflects on them anew from the perspective of the contemporary context. The primary focus is on contemporary challenges and possible answers from the perspective of Islamic theology and religious pedagogy. It discusses general themes like the location of Islamic theology and religious pedagogy at secular European universities. The volume also explores concrete challenges, such as the extent to which Islamic religious pedagogy can be conceptualised anew, how it should deal with its own theological tradition in the contemporary context, and how a positive attitude towards worldview and religious plurality can be cultivated. At issue here are foundations of a new interpretation of Islam that takes into account both a reflective approach to the Islamic tradition and the contemporary context. In doing so, it gives Muslims the opportunity to take their own thinking further.

This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish. It is based on the author's knowledge, experience and continuing study of the language, history, and people of Turkey. That transformation of the Turkish language is probably the most thorough-going piece of linguistics engineering in history. Its prelude came in 1928, when the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. It began in earnest in 1930 when Ataturk declared: Turkish is one of the richest of languages. It needs only to be used with discrimination. The Turkish nation, which is well able to protect its territory and its sublime independence, must also liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages. A government-sponsored campaign was waged to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin by words collected from popular speech, or resurrected from ancient texts, or coined from native roots and suffixes. The snag - identified by the author as one element in the catastrophic aspect of the reform - was that when these sources failed to provide the needed words, the reformers simply invented them. The reform was central to the young republic's aspiration to be western and secular, but it did not please those who remained wedded to their mother tongue or to the Islamic past. The controversy is by no means over, but Ottoman Turkish is dead. Professor Lewis both acquaints the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic but never dull story of the reform, and provides a lively and incisive account for students of Turkish and the relations between culture, politics and language with some stimulating reading. The author draws on his own wide experience of Turkey and his personal knowledge of many of the leading actors. The general reader will not be at a disadvantage, because no Turkish word or quotation has been left untranslated. This book is important for the light it throws on twentieth-century Turkish politics and society, as much as it is for the study of linguistic change. It is not only scholarly and accessible; it is also an extremely good read.

The twenty-first century exploded into the global imagination with unforgettable scenes of death and destruction. An apocalyptic 'clash of civilizations' seemed to be waged between two old foes - 'the West' and 'Islam.' However, the decade-long and ruinous 'war on terror' has prompted re-assessments of the militaristic approach to Western-Muslim relations. A growing number of academics, policymakers, religious leaders, journalists, and activists view the struggles as resulting from a 'clash of ignorance.' Re-imagining the Other examines the ways in which knowledge is manipulated by dominant Western and Muslim discourses. Authors from several disciplines study how the two societies have constructed images of each other in historical and contemporary times. The complexities and subtleties of their mutually productive relationship are overshadowed by portrayals of unremitting clash, thus serving as encouragement for the promotion of war and terrorism. The book proposes specific approaches to re-imagine the Other in order to mitigate Western-Muslim conflict.