The tenets of Islam cannot be grasped without a proper understanding of the Qur'an. In this important new introduction, Muhammad Haleem examines its recurrent themes -- life and eternity, marriage and divorce, peace and war, water and nourishment -- and for the first time sets these in the context of the Qur'an's linguistic style. Professor Haleem examines the background to the development of the surahs (chapters) and the ayahs (verses) and the construction of the Qur'an itself. He shows that popular conceptions of Islamic attitudes to women, marriage and divorce, war and society, differ radically from the true teachings of the Qur'an.

Since the Second World War, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt faced periods of extensive state repression, between 1948-1951 and 1954-1970 and again after 2013. These mihan or "ordeals", as members call them, were characterised by a shift from overt political activity to clandestine organising, and despite their importance have remained little studied. This book uses extensive archival research to uncover what took place when the organisation was forced unground and how and why it survived. It combines social theory with a vast array of primary source material such as autobiographical accounts produced by members, Egyptian court documents accounts by members of the Egyptian military or intelligence officers, and reports by British and American diplomats and intelligence officers. The result is a new bottom-up perspective on the Brotherhood's structure that goes beyond the role of leaders such as Sayyid Qutb to reveal it as both an overt political organisation and a secretive one able to withstand extended and harsh periods of persecution.

Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization. It covers a wide range of intellectual activity in the first three centuries of Islam, such as the study of hadith, the Qur'an, Arabic language and literature, and history. Individually and taken together, the articles provide important new insights and make an important contribution to scholarship on early Islam. The authors, whose work reflects an affinity with Juynboll's research interests, are all experts in their fields. Pointing to the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and signalling lacunae, their contributions show how scholarship has advanced since Juynboll's days. Contributors: Camilla Adang, Monique Bernards, Leon Buskens, Ahmed El Shamsy, Maribel Fierro, Aisha Geissinger, Geert Jan van Gelder, Claude Gilliot, Robert Gleave, Asma Hilali, Michael Lecker, Scott Lucas, Christopher Melchert, Pavel Pavlovitch, Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Roberto Tottoli, and Peter Webb.

This book investigates, both theoretically and in considerable empirical detail, the teachings of Islam vis-a-vis politics. It defines the essence of Islamic civilization and highlights aspects of the colonial encounter as a background for understanding contemporary dynamics of the Muslim world. It shows, through textual, intellectual, and historical evidences, the linkage between Islam and politics and the nature of Islamic research methodology. Additionally it deals with a range of key issues and institutions including the law, the community, the legal and political order and the strategies and tactics of various Islamic movements. Useful distinctions are made between Islamic and Western perspectives which should prove illuminating to experienced professionals and students alike.

In this book we study The Tabligh Jama'at, an Islamic revivalist movement which, through participation in its preaching tours, provides satisfaction to individuals experiencing the crisis of modernity. Preaching tours enable Muslims to become workers for Allah and involved in the renewal of Allah's world. We explore the ideological underpinning of preaching and working for Allah through the application of Frame Theory. Through an analytic framework comprising framing tasks and framing processes we unpack how the ideas of Islamic revivalism found in key Tabligh Jama'at written and oral texts - the Faza'il-e-A'maal and bayans - are packaged and communicated in such a way as to attract individuals to participate in preaching tours. The book concludes that working for Allah provides Muslims with meaning, social solidarity, and satisfaction which modernity has failed to provide them. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, journalists, policy-makers, and research students interested in or working on Islamic revivalist movements.

This book explores the relationships between financial inclusion, poverty and inclusive development from Islamic perspectives. Financial inclusion has become an important global agenda and priority for policymakers and regulators in many Muslim countries for sustainable long-term economic growth. It has also become an integral part of many development institutions and multilateral development banks in efforts to promote inclusive growth. Many studies in economic development and poverty reduction suggest that financial inclusion matters. Financial inclusion, within the broader context of inclusive development, is viewed as an important means to tackle poverty and inequality and to address the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This book contributes to the literature on these topics and will be of interest to researchers and academics interested in Islamic finance and financial inclusion.

In the 'encyclopaedic' fourteenth century, Arabic chronicles produced in Mamluk cities bore textual witness to both recent and bygone history, including that of the Fatimids (969-1171CE). For in two centuries of rule over Egypt and North Africa, the Isma'ili Fatimids had left few self-generated historiographical records. Instead, it fell to Ayyubid and Mamluk historians to represent the dynasty to posterity. This monograph sets out to explain how later historians preserved, interpreted and re-organised earlier textual sources. Mamluk historians engaged in a sophisticated archival practice within historiography, rather than uncritically reproducing earlier reports. In a new diplomatic edition, translation and analysis of Mamluk historian Ibn al-Furat's account of late Fatimid rule in The History of Dynasties and Kings, a widely known but barely copied universal chronicle of Islamic history, Fozia Bora traces the survival of historiographical narratives from Fatimid Egypt. Through Ibn al-Furat's text, Bora demonstrates archivality as the heuristic key to Mamluk historical writing. This book is essential for all scholars working on the written culture and history of the medieval Islamic world, and paves the way for a more nuanced reading of pre-modern Arabic chronicles and of the epistemic environment in which they were produced.

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.

Today there are at least 15 million people in Western Europe who adhere to the Muslim faith or have close cultural or other affiliations with the Islamic world. Indeed, in the course of a few decades, Islam has emerged as Europe's second religion, after Christianity. What is remarkable about this phenomenon is that it has occurred gradually, generally peacefully, and, in some measure, as a consequence of the economic needs of European countries. Despite some difficulties, Islam is slowly but inexorably becoming part of Europe's social, cultural, and, to some degree, political landscape. The question today is not can Islam be uprooted and expelled from European soil, as was done six centuries ago during the period of "Reconquista" in Spain, but rather what is the best way of accommodating Islam in Europe and establishing cooperative relations between Muslims and the followers of other religious and/or secular value systems. This volume examines the situation and attempts to provide answers to these questions through a country-by-country analysis by recognized experts from each of the Western European nations examined. An invaluable resource and text for scholars, students, and other researchers involved with Islamic and European Studies.

With links to the global jihad, the indigenous insurgency and terrorism in Xinjiang challenges the security and stability of China. This book examines the prevailing scholarship on ethnic and minority conflicts and argues that the root cause of the conflict in China, especially in Xinjiang is not only about religious extremism, but also about the systematic violation of basic rights and insensitivity towards minority identities by the state. As our analysis demonstrates, the Islamist terrorist threat to China is manifestly clear and not ambiguous. However, Beijing needs to develop an appropriate counter-terrorism posture that is transparent, legitimate and fair and addresses the concerns of the international community.   

Sonic Encounters recounts the author's experience gathering field recordings of the Islamic Call to Prayer. It touches on key questions and problems faced along the way, as well as discussing technologies and methods for recording, what it means to develop art from ethnographic research, and the ethics and considerations of working with Islamic communities around the globe. The book uses a sound studies framework to explore artistic research methods and practices in ethnography as they relate to religious recitation.

This book analyzes perceptions of self, power, agency, and gender of Muslim women in a rural community of Bangladesh. Rural women's limited power and agency has been subsumed within the male dominated Islamic discourses on gender. However, many Muslim women have their own alternative discourses surrounding power and agency. Sarwar Alam intertwines an exploration of these power dynamics with reading of the Qur'an and Hadith, and analyzes how Muslim women's perception of power and gender are linked to their relationship with religion.

Nineteenth-century Istanbul was an intellectual hub of rich discussions about Islam, in which leading reformists had a significant role. Turkey today appears to be an intellectual vacuum to anyone searching for ongoing critical engagement with Islam. The main purpose of this book is to adjust this view of Turkey by showcasing the modern Turkish theologians who challenge mainstream Sunni interpretations of Islam. Labelling these theologians as 'rationalist' rather than 'reformist', the author reveals that their theology is inherently anti-establishment and thus a religiously-oriented challenge to the hegemony of the state-sanctioned Islam: for the rationalists, Turkey's problems have their origins in the Sunni interpretation of Islam. Contemporary Rationalist Islam in Turkey analyses nine prominent scholars of Islam who provide a religious opposition to the Sunni revival in Turkey: Huseyin Atay, Yasar Nuri OEzturk, M. Hayri Kirbasoglu, Ilhami Guler, R. Ihsan Eliacik, OEmer OEzsoy, Mustafa OEzturk, Israfil Balci, and Mehmet Azimli. These scholars' writings are almost exclusively published in Turkish, so this book makes their ideas available in English for the first time. It also examines the scope, methodology and argumentation of the scholars' theology, categorizing their theological interpretations from 'historicist' to 'universalist' and from 'empiricist' to 'rationalist'. In identifying a new 'rationalist' school of Turkish theology and outlining its different manifestations, the book breaks new ground. It fills a significant gap in the literature on Islamic studies and reveals an understudied dimension of Turkey and Turkish Islam beyond the well-known ideas of the AKP and the Gulenists.

This book provides a study of the attempts by the US and EU to develop meaningful political relations with Islamist movements in the Middle East and Balkans. The contributors draw on extensive research on Islamist parties and movements and Western policy towards them over the past decade.

Islam in France is often regarded as a political 'issue' and much of the scholarly and public debates about Islam in contemporary France over the last three decades have concentrated on the supposedly 'antagonistic' relationship between France, Islam and its Muslims. Against such a troubled backdrop, however, this book looks at the ways in which certain prominent French Muslim intellectuals seek to articulate a vision of multi-faith co-existence, which embraces a critical secularism, and which simultaneously draw on religious and secular humanist traditions. Intellectuals have historically played a major part in French public life, yet relatively little is known about the work of Abdelwahab Meddeb, Malek Chebel, Leila Babes, Dounia Bouzar and Abdennour Bidar, whose writings and public interventions this book examines. Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France will be of particular interest to specialists, undergraduate and post-graduate students working across the Humanities and Social Sciences from disciplines such as Francophone Studies, Anthropology, Religious Studies or Sociology. -- .

The Islamic resurgence in modern times has received extensive treatment in scholarly literature. Most of this literature, however, deals with the concept of jihad and disputes between radicals and their rivals over theological and political issues, and far less with martyrdom and death. Moreover, studies that do address the issue of martyrdom focus mainly on 'suicide' attacks - a phenomenon of the late twentieth century and onward - without sufficiently placing them within a historical perspective or using an integrative approach to illuminate their political, social and symbolic features. This book fills these lacunae by tracing the evolving Islamic perceptions of martyrdom, its political and symbolic functions, and its use of past legacies in both Sunni and Shi'i milieus, with comparative references to Judaism, Christianity and other non-Islamic domains. Based on wide-ranging primary sources, along with historical and sociological literature, the study provides an in-depth analysis of modern Islamic martyrdom and its various interpretations while also evaluating the historical realities in which such interpretations were molded and debated.

Why does Islam seem to dominate Egyptian politics, especially when the country's endemic poverty and deep economic inequality would seem to render it promising terrain for a politics of radical redistribution rather than one of religious conservativism? This book argues that the answer lies not in the political unsophistication of voters, the subordination of economic interests to spiritual ones, or the ineptitude of secular and leftist politicians, but in organizational and social factors that shape the opportunities of parties in authoritarian and democratizing systems to reach potential voters. Tracing the performance of Islamists and their rivals in Egyptian elections over the course of almost forty years, this book not only explains why Islamists win elections, but illuminates the possibilities for the emergence in Egypt of the kind of political pluralism that is at the heart of what we expect from democracy.

This text examines Muslim-European interactions in the interwar period and provides original insights into the emergence of geopolitical and intellectual East-West networks that transcended national, cultural, and linguistic borders.

Themistius' close relationship with Christian emperors from Constantius to Theodosius makes him one of the most important political thinkers and politicians of the later fourth century, and his dealings with Julian the Apostate have recently attracted much speculation. This volume presents a new critical edition, translation and analysis of Themistius' letter to Julian about kingship and government, which survives mainly in Arabic, together with texts, translations and analyses of Julian's Letter to Themistius and Sopater's Letter to Himerius. The volume is completed with a text, translation and analysis of the other genuine work of Greek political theory to survive in Arabic, the Letter of Aristotle to Alexander, which dates from an earlier period and throws into relief the particular concerns of Themistius, Julian, and the rulers of the fourth-century Roman world.

Can entertainment challenge divisive ideologies? Can we use theater, film, games, novels, and stories disarm the ideologies of fear? Ideological Battlegrounds: Entertainment to Disarm Divisive Propaganda introduces and develops Ideologically Challenging Entertainment (ICE) to challenge "us versus them" narratives. ICE counters polarizing perspectives by embracing multiple valid viewpoints without losing sight of facts. Additionally, this book explores the first ICE production, Two Merchants, The Merchant of Venice adapted to challenge ideologies related to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. A mixed-methods study of audience responses to this production showed that a significant number of audience members reconsidered their views, not only about the Arab-Israeli conflict but also about ideological divisions that were more personally relevant. Ideological Battlegrounds is unique, both in its conceptualization of entertainment as a means to address local and global conflicts and in its provision of evidence for the power of performance as a tool for confronting and influencing ideological change.This book offers a new approach to bridging dangerous ideological chasms that, without significant intervention, will only continue to worsen.

Kingdoms arose during the early centuries of the Common Era across a wide region of West Africa. A rich source of information about West Africa is available in the Arabic sources written by geographers and chroniclers in the Muslim world between the 8th and the 15th centuries. In this volume are the actual primary sources upon which much modern knowledge about the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Borno and their neighbors depends. Here is the story of the conversion of the western Sudan to Islam, as well as accounts of the famous medieval gold trade, testimonies about the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, and insightful introductions to many other less familiar personalities, activities and events.

The traditional approach to business and public management assumes that management decisions and outcomes will remain the same, irrespective of the environment in which they are applied. However, the value systems operating within a society can also influence the principles that govern modern management within organizations. Principles and Fundamentals of Islamic Management examines the concept of business and public management from the viewpoint of Islam, with close reference to the Quran and other illuminating Islamic sources. Seyed Mohammad Moghimi provides key insights from an Islamic perspective across a comprehensive range of management topics, including planning, decision making and policy making, organizing, human resources management, directing and organizational control. The book concludes by analyzing the role of a company director within an Islamic context. Through this in-depth exploration of Islamic management principles and fundamentals, the author creates a modern and practical framework suitable for use by international business managers. Providing a much-needed insight into the practicalities of management operations in an Islamic context, this book is essential reading for researchers, managers, and for students of Islamic management at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

In 2006 against the background of the increasing problematization of Muslims and Islam in German public debate, the German government established the German Islam Conference. In a post 9/11 world, this was a time period shaped by the global war on terror, changes in the German naturalization law, the proliferation of racism targeting Muslims, and the expansion of security apparatuses. In Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar critically analyzes the institutionalization of the Conference and the different projects this institution has set in motion to govern Islam and Muslims against the looming presence of racial representations of Muslims. The analysis begins with the foundation of the Conference until the end of its second phase in 2014.