Pilgrimage, travel for learning, visits to shrines, exile, and labour migration shape the religious imagination and in turn are shaped by it. Some travel, such as pilgrimage, explicitly intended for religious purposes, has equally important economic and political consequences. Other travel, not primarily motivated by religious concerns and thus neglected by many scholars, nonetheless profoundly influences religious symbols, metaphors, practices and senses of community. These studies, encompassing Muslim societies from Malaysia to West Africa, also suggest how encounters with Muslim `others' have been as important in shaping community self-definition as encounters with European 'others'. This volume brings together historians, social scientists and jurists concerned with pilgrimage, scholarly travel and migration in both medieval and contemporary Muslim societies and explores basic issues. Can 'Muslim travel' be regarded as a distinct form of social action? What role does religious doctrine play in motivating travel and how do doctrinal interpretations differ across time and place? What are the strengths and limitations of various approaches to understanding the transnational and local significance of pilgrimage, migration and other forms of travel? An image of Muslim tradition and change in local communities in relation to travel emerges, which competes with the myth of the universality of the Islamic community.

The revival of madrasas in the 1980s coincided with the rise of political Islam and soon became associated with the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. This volume examines the rapid expansion of madrasas across Asia and the Middle East and analyses their role in society within their local, national and global context. Based on anthropological investigations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, and Pakistan, the chapters take a new approach to the issue, examining the recent phenomenon of women in madrasas; Hui Muslims in China; relations between the Iran's Shia seminary after the 1979-Islamic revolution and Shia in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and South Asian madrasas. Emphasis is placed on the increased presence of women in these institutions, and the reciprocal interactions between secular and religious schools in those countries. Taking into account social, political and demographic changes within the region, the authors show how madrasas have been successful in responding to the educational demand of the people and how they have been modernized their style to cope with a changing environment. A timely contribution to a subject with great international appeal, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, political Islam, Middle East and Asian studies and anthropology.

Pilgrimage, travel for learning, visits to shrines, exile, and labour migration shape the religious imagination and in turn are shaped by it. Some travel, such as pilgrimage, explicitly intended for religious purposes, has equally important economic and political consequences. Other travel, not primarily motivated by religious concerns and thus neglected by many scholars, nonetheless profoundly influences religious symbols, metaphors, practices and senses of community. These studies, encompassing Muslim societies from Malaysia to West Africa, also suggest how encounters with Muslim `others' have been as important in shaping community self-definition as encounters with European 'others'. This volume brings together historians, social scientists and jurists concerned with pilgrimage, scholarly travel and migration in both medieval and contemporary Muslim societies and explores basic issues. Can 'Muslim travel' be regarded as a distinct form of social action? What role does religious doctrine play in motivating travel and how do doctrinal interpretations differ across time and place? What are the strengths and limitations of various approaches to understanding the transnational and local significance of pilgrimage, migration and other forms of travel? An image of Muslim tradition and change in local communities in relation to travel emerges, which competes with the myth of the universality of the Islamic community.

The revival of madrasas in the 1980s coincided with the rise of political Islam and soon became associated with the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. This volume examines the rapid expansion of madrasas across Asia and the Middle East and analyses their role in society within their local, national and global context. Based on anthropological investigations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, and Pakistan, the chapters take a new approach to the issue, examining the recent phenomenon of women in madrasas; Hui Muslims in China; relations between the Iran's Shia seminary after the 1979-Islamic revolution and Shia in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and South Asian madrasas. Emphasis is placed on the increased presence of women in these institutions, and the reciprocal interactions between secular and religious schools in those countries. Taking into account social, political and demographic changes within the region, the authors show how madrasas have been successful in responding to the educational demand of the people and how they have been modernized their style to cope with a changing environment. A timely contribution to a subject with great international appeal, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, political Islam, Middle East and Asian studies and anthropology.

Over the last two decades we have seen a vast number of books published in the West that treat Islamic fundamentalism as a rising threat to the western values of secularism and democracy. In the last decade scholars began proclaiming an existent or emerging "clash" between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or in the case of Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad and "McWorld." More recently, some western scholars have offered another interpretation. Focusing on the work of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, these scholars have begun to argue that what we are witnessing, in Islamic contexts, is tantamount to a Reformation. An Islamic Reformation attempts to evaluate this claim through the work of emerging and top scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy, anthropology, religion, history and Middle Eastern studies. The overall goal of this volume is to question the impact of various reformist trends throughout the Middle East. Are we witnessing a growth in fundamentalism or the emergence of an Islamic Reformation? What does religious practice in this region reflect? What is the usefulness of approaching these questions through Christian/Islamic and West/East dichotomies? Unique in its focus and scope, An Islamic Reformation represents an emerging vanguard in the discussion of Islamic religious heritage and practice and its effect on world politics.

Before 1970 Oman was one of teh more isolated countries on the Arab peninsula. The growth of the oil economy during the seventies, however, has brought rapid change to the small towns and villages that make up the country.

In "Women and Community in Oman" Chritine Eickelman captures the tone and feel of this desert culture on the verge of substantial, and probably irreversible, change. During 1979 and 1980 she lived in Hamra, an oasis of 2,500 persons and the capital of the Abriyin tribe. Situated on the western edge of the Jabal al-Akhdar region of inner Oman, this was formerly one of the most inaccessible areas of the peninsula. Eickelman lived there among the people of Hamra, visiting Omani, this was formerly one of the most inaccessible areas of the peninsula. Eickelman lived there among the people of Hamra, visiting Omani homes, and speaking daily with the men and women - especially the women. The result is a lively and very personal firsthand account of day-to-day life in the Omani interior.

The book looks at the practical changes in the life of the Omanis, and at the roles, concerns, and aspirations of the women there. Eickelman explores key concepts in the Omani community and family life, from choosing a spouse and "negotiating" a marriage to giving birth and raising children; from work and status within the community to rituals, mores and sociability in the neighborhood.

Eickelman's study stands as a discriminateing and sympathetic view of a sturdily independent culture. This perceptive and informative account will be of lasting importance and interest to Middle East specialists, anthroupoligists, those concerned with women's studies, and to al persons who want tolearn more about the implications of political and social change in the Third World.

"It is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful, balanced, orcomprehensive treatment of this extremely elusive and difficult subject." --Digest of Middle East Studies

This second edition of a widelyacclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media -- fax machines, satellitetelevision, and the Internet -- and the new uses of older media -- cassettes, pulpfiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press -- shape belief, authority, andcommunity in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chaptersdealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities inthe United States and elsewhere. The extent to which today's new media havetranscended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understandings of gender, authority, social justice, identities, and politics in Muslim societies emerges fromthis timely and provocative book.

This intensive social biography of a rural Moroccan judge discusses Islamic education, the concept of knowledge it embodies, and its communication from the early years of colonial rule in twentieth-century Morocco to the present. The work sensitively combines the outlooks and perceptions of the author and those of the shrewd and reflective Abd ar-Rahman, supplementing our knowledge of resurgent militant Islamic movements by describing other popularly supported Islamic attitudes toward the contemporary world.

In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere. As they examine the role of women in public life and Islamic perspectives on modernization and free speech, the authors probe the diversity of the contemporary Islamic experience, suggesting general trends and challenging popular Western notions of Islam as a monolithic movement. In so doing, they clarify concepts such as tradition, authority, ethnicity, pro-test, and symbolic space, notions that are crucial to an in-depth understanding of ongoing political events.

This book poses questions about ideological politics in a variety of transnational and regional settings throughout the Muslim world. Europe and North America, for example, have become active Muslim centers, profoundly influencing trends in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. The authors examine the long-term cultural and political implications of this transnational shift as an emerging generation of Muslims, often the products of secular schooling, begin to reshape politics and society--sometimes in defiance of state authorities. Scholars, mothers, government leaders, and musicians are a few of the protagonists who, invoking shared Islamic symbols, try to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate and public life. These symbolic politics explain why political actions are recognizably Muslim, and why "Islam" makes a difference in determining the politics of a broad swath of the world.

Focusing on travel in Muslim societies from Malaysia to West Africa to Western Europe from the first centuries of Islam to the present, the contributors to this edition investigate the role of religious doctrine in motivating travel. While pilgrimage is usually seen as travel with a uniquely religious purpose, this exploration of the role of travel in Muslim societies and in Islamic doctrine shows that other forms of travel--for learning, visits to shrines, exile, and labor migration--also shape the religious imagination. Conversely, travel for specifically religious purposes often has important economic and political consequences.
The contributors explore the transnational and local significance of pilgrimage and migration, showing how these journeys heighten a universal sense of "being Muslim" while also inspiring the redefinition of the frontiers of sect, language, territory, and nation. In this way, encounters with Muslim "others" have been as important in shaping community self-definition as encounters with European "others."
Linking pilgrimage and migration to issues such as class, ethnicity, and gender, "Muslim Travellers" will be of special value to students of history and anthropology and to those in cross-disciplinary courses such as Islamic civilization and world religions.

This book is one of the first comprehensive studies of Islam as locally understood in the Middle East. Specifically, it is concerned with the prevalent North African belief that certain men, called marabouts, have a special relation to God that enables them to serve as intermediaries and to influence the well-being of their clients and kin. Dale F. Eickelman examines the Moroccan pilgrimage center of Boujad and unpublished Moroccan and French archival materials related to it to show how popular Islam has been modified by its adherents to accommodate new social and economic realities. In the course of his analysis he demonstrates the necessary interrelationship between social history and the anthropological study of symbolism. Eickelman begins with an outline of the early development of Islam in Morocco, emphasizing the "maraboutic crisis" of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. He also examines the history and social characteristics of the Sherqawi religious lodge, on which the study focuses, in preprotectorate Morocco. In the central portion of the book, he analyzes the economic activities and social institutions of Boujad and its rural hinterland, as well as some basic assumptions the townspeople and tribesmen make about the social order. Finally, there is an intensive discussion of maraboutism as a phenomenon and the changing local character of Islam in Morocco. In focusing on the "folk" level of Islam, rather than on "high culture" tradition, the author has made possible a more general interpretation of Moroccan society that is in contrast with earlier accounts that postulated a marked discontinuity between tribe and town, past and present.

"Readers will find fresh and thought-provoking studies: thediffering approaches of the U.S. and the [former] Soviet Union to Middle Eastpolicy, Central Asia, and South Asia... provide grounds for self-criticism and theexploration of new directions." -- John L. Esposito

..".recommended highly for its expert analyses of political Islam." -- Journal ofThird World Studies

Russian, Central Asian, and American scholarsappraise recent political and religious developments among Russia's Muslimneighbors.