Download or read book What Is Islam written by Shahab Ahmed and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new conceptualization of Islam that reflects its contradictions and rich diversity What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an analytical term? In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation—one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory. A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

Download or read book Encyclopaedia Britannica written by Hugh Chisholm and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 1090 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Download or read book Africanity Redefined written by Ali AlʼAmin Mazrui and published by Africa World Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in a three volume set of Mazrui's most important essays, this volume redefines the meaning of Africanity across geographical space, time and cultures. The resulting definition forces us to reject neo-imperialist paradigms and ontologies of what it means to be African. By encouraging us to think about Africanity as an idea rather than as point of origin, the ideas contained in these essays force us to reposition ourselves in the debate of our place in global cultures and civilisations, and prepare us to take an active role in social and political affairs.

Download or read book Defining Islam written by Andrew Rippin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since a group of people came into existence who called themselves Muslims and followed Islam, questions of what it means to be a member of this group - who is to be included/excluded and what the requirements for membership are - have proven to be both divisive and defining. For scholars and critics, the issue of what constitutes or defines 'Islam' - whether examining the history of the religion, its specific traditions, sectarian politics, or acts of terrorist - is central to any understanding of issues, cultures and ideas. 'Defining Islam' brings together key classic and contemporary writings on the nature of Islam to provide student readers with the ideal collection of both primary and critical sources.

Download or read book Towards a Re Definition of Development written by Alain Birou and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards a Re-Definition of Development: Essays and Discussion on the Nature of Development in an International Perspective reconsiders the generally accepted definition of development based on the assumption that there is no universal method for comprehending development and no one major principle for elucidating its evolution. The emphasis is on the so-called white, Western, and wealthy developed countries. Divided into two parts, this book begins with a critical analysis of the nature of development and the conditions necessary for a developed world. The irreversibility of technical and industrial evolution is considered, along with the role of science and technology in development; the control of evolution and the meaning of progress; the role of the major political and economic units in world development; and conditions for the economic and political independence of developing countries. The second part explores various facets of development strategy and theory, paying particular attention to conceptions and misconceptions of development as well as the notion of peace. This monograph should be of interest to economists, social and political scientists, and social and economic policymakers.

Download or read book Islam in Perspective RLE Politics of Islam written by Patrick Bannerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a significant upsurge of western interest in the political manifestations and significance of Islam in the last decade, fuelled by the notion of Islamic ‘revival’, the Iranian revolution and by events in countries as diverse as Egypt, Pakistan and Sudan. Oil power and its effect on the international economic order, the relationship of Muslim countries with the superpowers and the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict have also served to focus attention on Islamic politics and, in particular, on the notion of Islamic reassertion. As the author of this book argues, one result of this interest has been the development of a view of Islam as monolithic and implacable. He takes a broad view of the intellectual and cultural history of Islam, emphasising the extraordinary diversity of Islamic societies and the ways in which the ideal is often pragmatically adapted to reality. In this wider social and historical context, the nature of Islamic revival is then reassessed. First published in 1988.

Download or read book Speaking Qur an written by Timur R. Yuskaev and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how Muslims in the United States have interpreted the Qur'an in ways that make it speak to their American realities In Speaking Qur'an: An American Scripture, Timur R. Yuskaev examines how Muslim Americans have been participating in their country's cultural, social, religious, and political life. Essential to this process, he shows, is how the Qur'an has become an evermore deeply American text that speaks to central issues in the lives of American Muslims through the spoken-word interpretations of Muslim preachers, scholars,and activists. Yuskaev illustrates this process with four major case studies that highlight dialogues between American Muslim public intellectuals and their audiences. First, through an examination of the work of Fazlur Rahman, he addresses the question of how the premodern Qur'an is translated across time into modern, American settings. Next the author contemplates the application of contemporary concepts of gender to renditions of the Qur'an alongside Amina Wadud's American Muslim discourses on justice.Then he demonstrates how the Qur'an becomes a text of redemption in W. D. Mohammed's oral interpretation of the Qur'an as speaking directly to the African American experience. Finally he shows how, before and after 9/11, Hamza Yusuf invoked the Qur'an as a guide to the political life of American Muslims. Set within the rapidly transforming contexts of the last half century, and central to the volume, are the issues of cultural translation and embodiment of sacred texts that Yuskaev explores by focusing on the Qur'an as a spoken scripture. The process of the Qur'an becoming an American sacred text, he argues, is ongoing. It comes to life when the Qur'an is spoken and embodied by its American faithful.

Download or read book Islam Is a Foreign Country written by Zareena Grewal and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

Download or read book Muslim Cool written by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Download or read book African Religion Defined written by Anthony Ephirim-Donkor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition updates the scholarship on ancestor worship—with the addition of three new chapters. Beginning with Akan theology and ending with sacrifices, the study examines Akan conception of God, the abosom (gods and goddesses) relative to creation, centrality of the ancestors’ stool as the ultimate religious symbol housing the soul of the Akan, and organized annual propitiatory festivities carried out among the Akan in honor of the ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo) and abosom. The book, therefore, serves as an invaluable resource for those interested in the phenomenon of African religion, because it provides real insight into ancestor worship in ways that are meaningful, practical, systematic, and as a way of life by an Akan Traditional ruler (Ↄdikro) and a professor of Africana studies.

Download or read book Islam and the Question of Reform written by Benjamin Macqueen and published by Academic Monographs. This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reform, by definition, is not a complete break with tradition, but a determination by scholars, activists, politicians and critical thinkers to re-claim the tenets of their faith. Muslim communities have historically displayed a tendency to preserve the status quo. By contrast, the individuals and movements in Islam and the Question of Reform are determined-often at great personal risk-to push aside existing political and social elites and the historically accepted interpretations of Islam and its place in society. The perspectives examined in this volume avoid superficial or apologetic examinations of Islam's political and social role. Instead, they meticulously scrutinise the religion's public role, often questioning the validity of dogmas that have acted as tools of empowerment for existing elites for centuries. Islam and the Question of Reform is an engaging book about the evolving and dynamic discourse that surrounds the question of Islamic reform.

Download or read book iMuslims written by Gary R. Bunt and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the increasing impact of the Internet on Muslims around the world, this book sheds new light on the nature of contemporary Islamic discourse, identity, and community. The Internet has profoundly shaped how both Muslims and non-Muslims perceive Islam and how Islamic societies and networks are evolving and shifting in the twenty-first century, says Gary Bunt. While Islamic society has deep historical patterns of global exchange, the Internet has transformed how many Muslims practice the duties and rituals of Islam. A place of religious instruction may exist solely in the virtual world, for example, or a community may gather only online. Drawing on more than a decade of online research, Bunt shows how social-networking sites, blogs, and other "cyber-Islamic environments" have exposed Muslims to new influences outside the traditional spheres of Islamic knowledge and authority. Furthermore, the Internet has dramatically influenced forms of Islamic activism and radicalization, including jihad-oriented campaigns by networks such as al-Qaeda. By surveying the broad spectrum of approaches used to present dimensions of Islamic social, spiritual, and political life on the Internet, iMuslims encourages diverse understandings of online Islam and of Islam generally.

Download or read book Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition written by Samira Haj and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers—Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703–1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849–1905)—each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

Download or read book Islam 4 volumes written by Cenap Çakmak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 1938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This expansive four-volume encyclopedia presents a broad introduction to Islam that enables learning about the fundamental role of Islam in world history and promotes greater respect for cultural diversity. One of the most popular and widespread religions in the world, Islam has attracted a great deal of attention in recent times, particularly in the Western world. With the ongoing tensions in the Middle East and a pervasive sense of hostility toward Arab Americans, there is ever increasing need to examine and understand Islam as a religion and historical force. Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopedia provides some 700 entries on Islam written by expert contributors that cover the religion from the birth of Islam to the present time. The set also includes 16 pages of color images per volume that serve to illustrate the diverse expressions of this important religious tradition. Each entry begins with a basic introduction, followed by a general discussion of the subject and a conclusion. Each entry also features a further readings list for readers. In addition to supplying a comprehensive, authoritative overview of Islam, this work also specifically addresses many controversial related issues, including jihad, violence in Islam, polygamy, and apostasy.

Download or read book Islam in Transition written by Jessica Jacobson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-08-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam in Transition focuses on the ways in which Islamic religion still engenders powerful loyalties within what is now a predominantly secular society and how, in their continual adherence to their religion, many young British Pakistanis find a welcome sense of stability and permanence. By presenting material collected in field-work study and by using extensive quotations from interviews, the author argues that in a world where concepts of identity are always being challenged traditional sources of authority and allegiance still survive.

Download or read book The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam written by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and published by Islam International. This book was released on 1996 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally written for the Conference of Great Religions held at Lahore on December 26-29, 1896, the Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam has since served as an introduction to Islam for seekers after the truth and religious knowledge in different parts of the world. The present issue includes several "lost" pages not included in the essay that was read out at Lahore. It deals with the following five broad themes, set by the moderators of the Conference: 1. The physical, moral and spiritual states of man 2. The state of man after death 3. The object of man's life and the means to its attainment 4. The operation of the practical ordinances of the Law in this life and the next 5. Sources of Divine knowledge."--Publisher's description.

Download or read book Islam the Straight Path written by Kenneth W. Morgan and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1987 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam--the Straight Path is a concise presentation of the history and spread of Islam and of the beliefs and obligations of Muslims as interpreted by some outstanding Muslim scholars of our time from Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and China. The essays present a vivid picture of this faith which exerts tremendous influence on its votaries and has found its home from Morocco to Indonesia and China. The work is a portrayal of Islam as it is, with chapters devoted to subjects such as The Origin of Islam, Ideas and Movements in Islamic History, Islamic Beliefs and Code of Laws, The Rational and Mystical Interpretations of Islam, Shi'a, Islamic Culture in Arab and African Countries, Islamic Culture in Turkish Areas, Muslim Culture in Pakistan and India, Islamic Culture in China, Islam in Indonesia, and, Unity in Diversity in Islam. Each chapter epitomizes a subject which could scarcely be covered adequately in a whole book .