Little has been published in English about Islam in Denmark although interest grew after the cartoons crisis of 2005-6. Danish research on the subject is extensive, and this volume aims to present some of the most recent to an international audience. While many of the circumstances which apply across western Europe - the history of immigration and refugees, settlement, the growth of Muslim organizations and international links, challenges of social and cultural encounter, and more recently Islam as a security issue - also apply in Denmark, there are also differences. A small, compact country with no recent imperial history, Denmark's unified institutional, religious and social culture can make it difficult for newcomers to integrate. The fourteen chapters in this book cover the topic in three parts. The first part deals with the history and statistics of immigration and settlement, and the religious institutional responses, Christian and Muslim. Part two looks at specific issues and the interaction with the developing national debate about identity and minority. Finally part three presents the experience of four active participants in the processes of integration: youth work and hospital chaplaincy, interreligious dialogue, and the views of an imam.

Using the methodology of modern scholars in the fields of Arabic lexicography, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, Tunisian feminist scholar Olfa Youssef investigates the rulings about inheritance, marriage, and homosexuality in the Qur'anic text itself and compares them with the interpretations provided by male Muslim theologians and legal scholars from medieval times to the present. In this book, she makes five central arguments: (1) There is a discrepancy between the layered signification in the Qur'anic text itself and the sutured explanations by religious scholars which have been enacted into law in many Muslim countries today; (2) the plurality of meanings is the quintessential essence of the Qur'an as evidenced in the absence of any sura over which there was unanimous agreement among Muslim scholars; (3) when male privilege was at stake, male legal scholars, to protect their own interests, ignored the divine text and based their rulings on human consensus; (4) Muslim medieval views on gender and homosexuality were more tolerant than contemporary ones; and finally (5), preferring indetermination and perplexity over the finality and certainties found in the judgements of male theologians, Youssef argues that only God knows the Qur'an's true meaning. Her job as a Muslim female scholar is only to raise questions over those human interpretations that many Muslim societies mistake for divine will.

This book explores one of the most topical and controversial issues of recent years -jihadist terrorist infiltration of irregular migrant flows to Europe. Utilizing robust sampling criteria, more than a hundred such cases are identified and rigorously assessed. The analysis reveals the characteristics of offenders, their travel patterns and operational activities, and critically evaluates subsequent law enforcement and judicial responses. The author draws upon interviews with a range of European security officials, as well as non-governmental organization employees, and a recent refugee, in order to provide a series of practical recommendations.

This collection of arresting and innovative chapters applies the techniques of anthropology in analyzing the role played by Islam in the social lives of the world's Muslims. The volume begins with an introduction that sets out a powerful case for a fresh approach to this kind of research, exhorting anthropologists to pause and reflect on when Islam is, and is not, a central feature of their informants' life-worlds and identities. The chapters that follow are written by scholars with long-term, specialist research experience in Muslim societies ranging from Kenya to Pakistan and from Yemen to China: thus they explore and compare Islam's social significance in a variety of settings that are not confined to the Middle East or South Asia alone. The authors assess how helpful current anthropological research is in shedding light on Islam's relationship to contemporary societies.Collectively, the contributors deploy both theoretical and ethnographic analysis of key developments in the anthropology of Islam over the last 30 years, even as they extrapolate their findings to address wider debates over the anthropology of world religions more generally. Crucially, they also tackle the thorny question of how, in the current political context, anthropologists might continue conducting sensitive and nuanced work with Muslim communities. Finally, an afterword by a scholar of Christianity explores the conceptual parallels between the book's key themes and the anthropology of world religions in a broader context. This volume has key contemporary relevance: for example, its conclusions on the fluidity of people's relations with Islam will provide an important counterpoint to many commonly held assumptions about the incontestability of Islam in the public sphere.

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This groundbreaking book explores resistance against the harsh policing of sexuality in some Muslim societies. Many Muslim majority countries still use religious discourse to enforce stigmatization and repression of those, especially women, who do not conform to sexual norms promoted either by the state or by non-state actors. In this context, Islam is often stigmatized in Western discourse for being intrinsically restrictive with respect to women's rights and sexuality. The authors show that conservative Muslim discourse does not necessarily match practices of believers or of citizens and that women's empowerment is facilitated where indigenous and culturally appropriate strategies are developed. Using case studies from Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Israel and India, they argue persuasively that Muslim religious traditions do not necessarily lead to conservative agendas but can promote emancipatory standpoints. An intervention to the construction of 'Muslim women' as uniformly subordinate, this collection spearheads an unprecedented wake of organizing around sexualities in Muslim communities.

Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as "terrorist" on the one hand, and "model minority" on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection.

An estimated 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently volunteer to serve in the Israeli military, a force fighting other Palestinians just miles away in occupied territories. "Surrounded" takes a close look at this controversial group of soldiers, examining the complex reasons these people join the army and the wider implications of their decisions in terms of security and citizenship.
Most observers perceive a clear and powerful divide in the political tensions and open hostilities between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, but often fail to notice those who straddle this divide--Palestinian citizens of Israel. These soldiers comprise no more than half a percent of this population, but their stories provide a powerful vantage point from which to consider a question faced by all Palestinians in Israel: to what extent are they, in fact, Israeli?
"Surrounded" contains over seventy interviews with soldiers, and provides a unique glimpse of their conflicting experiences of acceptance, integration, and marginalization within the Israeli military. Concluding with comparisons to similar situations around the world, the book upends nationalist understandings of how wars and those who fight in them work. A key to a more complex understanding of ethnic conflict, this gripping and revealing look at a select group of soldiers will immensely alter ideas about the reasons why people choose to fight, particularly on "the wrong side" of a war.

The Hizmet (Service) Movement of Fethullah Gulen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gulen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey, and has become more controversial as it spreads across the world. In Gulen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that when analyzed in accordance with its political and economic impact, the Gulen Movement, despite both praise and criticism, should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the U.S., Hendrick examines the Gulen Movement's role in Turkey's recent rise, as well as its strategic relationship with Turkey's Justice and Development Party-led government. He argues that the movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a post political turn in twenty-first century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular. Joshua D. Hendrick is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

The spread of Salafism-often referred to as Wahhabism-in the West has intrigued and alarmed observers since the attacks of 9/11. Many see it as a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that condones the subjugation of women and fuels Jihadist extremism. This view depicts Salafi women as the hapless victims of a fanatical version of Islam. Yet in Britain, growing numbers of educated women-often converts or from less conservative Muslim backgrounds-are actively choosing to embrace Salafism's literalist beliefs and strict regulations, including heavy veiling, wifely obedience, and seclusion from non-related men. How do these young women reconcile such difficult demands with their desire for university education, fulfilling careers, and suitable husbands? How do their beliefs affect their love lives and other relationships? And why do they become Salafi in the first place? Anabel Inge has gained unprecedented access to Salafi womens groups in the United Kingdom to provide the first in-depth account of their lives. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in London, she examines why Salafism is attracting so many young Somalis, Afro-Caribbean converts, and others. But she also reveals the personal dilemmas they confront. This ground-breaking, lucid, and richly detailed book will be of vital interest to scholars, policy-makers, journalists, and general readers.

When Guinean Muslims leave their homeland, they encounter radically new versions of Islam and new approaches to religion more generally. In Remaking Islam in African Portugal, Michelle C. Johnson explores the religious lives of these migrants in the context of diaspora. Since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago, Muslims in this region have long conflated ethnicity and Islam, such that to be Mandinga or Fula is also to be Muslim. But as they increasingly encounter Muslims not from Africa, as well as other ways of being Muslim, they must question and revise their understanding of "proper" Muslim belief and practice. Many men, in particular, begin to separate African custom from global Islam. Johnson maintains that this cultural intersection is highly gendered as she shows how Guinean Muslim men in Lisbon-especially those who can read Arabic, have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and attend Friday prayer at Lisbon's central mosque-aspire to be cosmopolitan Muslims. By contrast, Guinean women-many of whom never studied the Qur'an, do not read Arabic, and feel excluded from the mosque-remain more comfortably rooted in African custom. In response, these women have created a "culture club" as an alternative Muslim space where they can celebrate life course rituals and Muslim holidays on their own terms. Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion.

Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims have received unprecedented attention since 9/11. In many predominantly non-Muslim countries intense debates have focused on international relations with Muslim-majority states, but dilemmas of national policy and practice in incorporating domestic Muslim minorities have also provoked heated argument. Meanwhile, within predominantly Muslim societies, and within Muslim diasporas, relationships with non-Muslims have posed pressing questions about compatibility, antagonism or adaptation of beliefs, identities and customs. The essays forming this multidisciplinary collection analyse concerns arising from clashing perceptions of Muslims in the political and cultural spheres: the majority of chapters deal with non-Muslim representations of Muslims, but several chapters reverse the perspective by examining Muslims own understandings of their relationships with non-Muslim societies. Contributors include: Ahmed K. al-Rawi, Ebru . Canan-Sokullu, Tereza Capelos, Gaetan Clavien, Danila Genovese, Matteo Gianni, Signe Kjaer J rgensen, Priyasha Kaul, Chloe Patton, Timothy Peace, Mirjam Shatanawi, Dunya van Troost, and John Turner.

This book is a sociological study of Muslim youth culture in two global cities in the Asia Pacific: Singapore and Sydney. Comparing young Muslims' participation in and reflections on various elements of popular culture, this study illuminates the range of attitudes and strategies they adopt to reconcile popular youth culture with piety.

This book charts the evolution of Islamic dialectical theory (jadal) over a four-hundred year period. It includes an extensive study of the development of methods of disputation in Islamic theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. The author uses the theoretical writings of Islamic theologians, jurists, and philosophers to describe the concept Overall, this investigation looks at the extent to which the development of Islamic modes of disputation is rooted in Aristotle and the classical tradition. The author reconstructs the contents of the earliest systematic treatment of the subject by b. al-Riwandi. He then contrasts the theological understanding of dialectic with the teachings of the Arab Aristotelians-al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. Next, the monograph shows how jurists took over the theological method of dialectic and applied it to problems peculiar to jurisprudence. Although the earliest writings on dialectic are fairly free of direct Aristotelian influence, there are coincidences of themes and treatment. But after jurisprudence had assimilated the techniques of theological dialectic, its own theory became increasingly influenced by logical terminology and techniques. At the end of the thirteenth century there arose a new discipline, the adab al-bahth. While the theoretical underpinnings of the new system are Aristotelian, the terminology and order of debate place it firmly in the Islamic tradition of disputation.

This book shows the results of my doctoral thesis in Social Sciences about the construction of Muslim identities in Sao Paulo, the state which receives more Muslim immigrants in Brazil. The issue of construction of identities of this religious minority was undertaken in relation to: a) the pressures of Brazilian society, characterized by the strong presence of Catholicism, the growth of Protestantism, the fundamentally Western culture, the secular state, the dependency of the USA and the tradition of welcoming immigrants and absorbing them in a process of Brazilianization; b) the impact of globalization over this minority group, both in the sense of the propagation of negative stereotypes in relation to Islam and its faithful, as a consequence of the influence of the Orientalist media and academia, as well as the sense of strengthening of the bonds of the diaspora with the rest of the Muslim world; c) the internal negotiations between immigrants and converts and between men and women for the definition of what is a Muslim; and d) the possible appearance of different Islamic practices and discourses generated by diversified occupations, ethnicities and spatial distributions, through the comparative study of the Muslim communities of Campinas and Sao Paulo city. Besides illustrating the variety of values, conceptions and beliefs Muslims have in Brazil, this work intends to facilitate the perception of what is a product of the national and cultural context and what is a product of global tendencies that influence Muslim minorities throughout the world, presenting a comparative research between the Muslim communities in Brazil and the Netherlands.

Presents oral histories and interviews of women who belong to Nation of Islam With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60 years of scholarship have perpetuated that notion. Yet, women have been pivotal in the NOI's development, playing a major role in creating the public image that made it appealing and captivating. Women of the Nation draws on oral histories and interviews with approximately 100 women across several cities to provide an overview of women's historical contributions and their varied experiences of the NOI, including both its continuing community under Farrakhan and its offshoot into Sunni Islam under Imam W.D. Mohammed. The authors examine how women have interpreted and navigated the NOI's gender ideologies and practices, illuminating the experiences of African-American, Latina, and Native American women within the NOI and their changing roles within this patriarchal movement. The book argues that the Nation of Islam experience for women has been characterized by an expression of Islam sensitive to American cultural messages about race and gender, but also by gender and race ideals in the Islamic tradition. It offers the first exhaustive study of women's experiences in both the NOI and the W.D. Mohammed community.

Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice explores the field of Israeli Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) sociologically and politically, as a window onto the relationship between Orientalism, Zionism and academia. The book draws special attention to neoliberal discourse and praxis in everyday higher education, the interests of scholars, and the political form that commercialisation takes in specific disciplinary and geopolitical conditions by deconstructing structural and historical presuppositions and effective ideologies that overdetermine this junction of academia, orientalism and Zionism. The multi-layered study draws on various scholarly traditions and offers new evidence for, and insights in, historical and cultural-discursive discussions. It highlights paradigmatic gaps in reading Saidian orientalism, re-evaluates the origins and evolution of the local field, contributes to the study of everyday academic culture in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), and unveils the presupposed and the unsaid of the general and the specific field, exploring the intersection of an orientalist expertise, in a settler-colonial society, and everyday academic capitalism. The expertise of this sociological and discursive study make it an invaluable resource for academics and students interested in Israel and Middle East studies, Higher Education and the Sociology of Academia.

The Convergence of Neoliberalism and Islam in Turkey critically analyses the travel of neoliberal ideas, policies, experts and institutions from the West to Turkey and how they are being adopted and transformed in their new Islamic settings through an ethnographic investigation of the newly established tobacco market. The February 2001 crisis, the most severe economic downturn in the history of Turkey, generated an emergency situation in which a series of sweeping neoliberal policies were implemented to prop up the collapsed economy.To receive the necessary loans from the international financial institutions, the Turkish government hastily enacted a number of neoliberal laws, including the notorious tobacco law. The book not only explores the repercussions of the new tobacco law, such as the emergence of a new regulatory institution, there making of a liberalized market, and the tobacco workers' resistance to neoliberal reforms but also the smoking ban governing the bodies and spaces of the Muslim citizens.Although the enacted law and smoking ban aimed to comply with requirements set out by the European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, the strict and fast implementation of the law also united with the Islamic-rooted government's distaste for tobacco and alcohol consumption. This analysis of the governance of healthy/good/obedient Muslim citizens though the smoking-ban in Turkey provides an innovative contribution to Middle-Eastern studies, filling the gap for anthropological research in Muslim countries on local economic relations and their connections with the global econom

This volume explores the dominant types of relationships between Muslim minorities and states in different parts of the world, the challenges each side faces, and the cases and reasons for exemplary integration, religious tolerance, and freedom of expression. By bringing together diverse case studies from Europe, Africa, and Asia, this book offers insight into the nature of state engagement with Muslim communities and Muslim community responses towards the state, in turn. This collection offers readers the opportunity to learn more about what drives government policy on Muslim minority communities, Muslim community policies and responses in turn, and where common ground lies in building religious tolerance, greater community cohesion and enhancing Muslim community-state relations.

This volume explores the extraordinary variety of Islamic organizations in Europe and the United States. It focuses on the question of how local, national and transnational environments and changing public discourses on Muslims and Islam affect Islamic organizations and their members. The contributions all employ a bottom-up research approach and uncover diverse reactions of Islamic organizations in their forms of organization, strategies and practices. Compiling twelve studies from researchers of a variety of disciplines, this volume provides theoretical and empirical findings on Islamic organizations from the Baltic States, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

In The Second Canonization of the Qur'an, Nasser studies the transmission and reception of the Qur'anic text and its variant readings through the work of Ibn Mujahid (d. 324/936), the founder of the system of the Seven Eponymous Readings of the Qur'an. The overarching project aims to track and study the scrupulous revisions the Qur'an underwent, in its recited, oral form, through the 1,400-year journey towards a final, static, and systematized text. For the very first time, the book offers a complete and detailed documentation of all the variant readings of the Qur'an as recorded by Ibn Mujahid. A comprehensive audio recording accompanies the book, with more than 3,500 audio files of Qur'anic recitations of variant readings.

The immigration of Muslims to the United States and European countries has created challenges of integration and political participation as well as opportunities for increased understanding and acceptance. Through a systematic survey of Muslim immigrant views of Islam, democracy, and pluralism, Cesari examines their interactions with host countries and home communities. Particular attention is given to differences among host countries' policies towards citizenship, state-religion relations, and social tolerance of ethnic or national differences.

This book presents an innovative analysis of the solidarity/social economy among low-income religious women in Iran. For years, the role of low-income women in community care and poverty reduction has been underestimated and under-researched in the broader academic community, due to the "invisible" nature of these informal and predominantly religious networks. As economic hardship in Iran increases, women in the community have mobilized to bring assistance to those struggling to make ends meet. The culmination of years of fieldwork in different parts of the country, this book sheds light on how religious women form the backbone of Iran's social safety net as the welfare state fails and social protection policies dwindle.

"Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics" is an analysis of how ideas, or political ideology, can threaten states and how states react to ideational threats. It examines the threat perception and policies of two Arab, Muslim majority states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in response to the rise and activities of two revolutionary "Islamic states," established in Iran (1979) and Sudan (1989).
Using these comparative case studies the book provides important insight about the role of religious ideology for the international and domestic politics of the Middle East and, in doing so, advances our understanding of how, why, and when ideology affects threat perception and state policy.
Rubin makes clear that transnational ideologies may present a greater and more immediate national security threat than shifts in the military balance of power: first because ideology, or ideational power, triggers threat perception and affects state policy; second because states engage in ideational balancing in response to an ideological threat.
The book has significant implications for international relations theory and engages important debates in comparative politics about authoritarianism and Islamic activism. Its findings about how an Islamist regime or state behaves will provide vital insight for policy creation by the US and its Middle East allies should another such regime or state emerge.

During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption. The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions.