Download or read book Muslims in the Western Imagination written by Sophia Rose Arjana and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam in the Western imagination -- The Muslim monster -- Medieval Muslim monsters -- Turkish monsters -- The monsters of Orientalism -- Muslim monsters in the Americas -- The monsters of September 11th.
Download or read book Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination written by Ebrahim Moosa and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-03-08 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abu Hamid al-Ghaz&257;l&299;, a Muslim jurist-theologian and polymath who lived from the mid-eleventh to the early twelfth century in present-day Iran, is a figure equivalent in stature to Maimonides in Judaism and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity. He is best known for his work in philosophy, ethics, law, and mysticism. In an engaged re-reading of the ideas of this preeminent Muslim thinker, Ebrahim Moosa argues that Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work has lasting relevance today as a model for a critical encounter with the Muslim intellectual tradition in a modern and postmodern context. Moosa employs the theme of the threshold, or dihliz, the space from which Ghaz&257;l&299; himself engaged the different currents of thought in his day, and proposes that contemporary Muslims who wish to place their own traditions in conversation with modern traditions consider the same vantage point. Moosa argues that by incorporating elements of Islamic theology, neoplatonic mysticism, and Aristotelian philosophy, Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work epitomizes the idea that the answers to life's complex realities do not reside in a single culture or intellectual tradition. Ghaz&257;l&299;'s emphasis on poiesis--creativity, imagination, and freedom of thought--provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectual renewal among Muslims, Moosa argues. Such a creative and critical inheritance, he concludes, ought to be heeded by those who seek to cultivate Muslim intellectual traditions in today's tumultuous world.
Download or read book Idols in the East written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims—the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist—and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Veiled Superheroes written by Sophia Rose Arjana and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study examines Muslim female superheroes within a matrix of Islamic theology, feminism, and contemporary political discourse. Through a close reading of texts including Ms. Marvel, Qahera, and The 99, Sophia Rose Arjana argues that these powerful and iconic characters reflect independence and agency, reflecting the diverse lives of Muslim girls and women in the world today.
Download or read book Framing Muslims written by Peter Morey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin dissect how stereotypes that depict Muslims as an inherently problematic presence in the West are constructed, deployed, and circulated in the public imagination, producing an immense gulf between representation and a considerably more complex reality.
Download or read book Saracens written by John Victor Tolan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Christian writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. This book provides a comprehensive study of Christian polemical responses to Islam in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Idea of the Muslim World written by Cemil Aydin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Superb... A tour de force.” —Ebrahim Moosa “Provocative... Aydin ranges over the centuries to show the relative novelty of the idea of a Muslim world and the relentless efforts to exploit that idea for political ends.” —Washington Post When President Obama visited Cairo to address Muslims worldwide, he followed in the footsteps of countless politicians who have taken the existence of a unified global Muslim community for granted. But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World considers its origins and reveals the consequences of its enduring allure. “Much of today’s media commentary traces current trouble in the Middle East back to the emergence of ‘artificial’ nation states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire... According to this narrative...today’s unrest is simply a belated product of that mistake. The Idea of the Muslim World is a bracing rebuke to such simplistic conclusions.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is here that Aydin’s book proves so valuable: by revealing how the racial, civilizational, and political biases that emerged in the nineteenth century shape contemporary visions of the Muslim world.” —Foreign Affairs
Download or read book Buying Buddha Selling Rumi written by Sophia Rose Arjana and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From jewellery to meditation pillows to tourist retreats, religious traditions – especially those of the East – are being commodified as never before. Imitated and rebranded as ‘New Age’ or ‘spiritual’, they are marketed to secular Westerners as an answer to suffering in the modern world, the ‘mystical’ and ‘exotic’ East promising a path to enlightenment and inner peace. In Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi, Sophia Rose Arjana examines the appropriation and sale of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam in the West today, the role of mysticism and Orientalism in the religious marketplace, and how the commodification of religion impacts people’s lives.
Download or read book The Book in the Islamic World written by George N. Atiyeh and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book in the Islamic World brings together serious studies on the book as an intellectual entity and as a vehicle of cultural development. Written by a group of distinguished scholars, it examines and reflects upon this unique tool of communication not as a physical artifact but as a manifestation of the aspirations, values, and wisdom of Arabs and Muslims in general. The Islamic system of book production differed from that of the West. This volume shows the peculiarities of book making and the intellectual principles that governed a book's inner structure, mysteries, and impact on culture. Investigated and explained are the issues involved in printing; the compilation of the Koran, the most important book in Islam; attitudes toward books; the oral versus the written tradition; metaphors of the book in literature; biographical dictionaries, an important genre of Islamic books; the grammatical tradition; women's contribution to calligraphy; scientific manuscripts; the transition from scribal to print culture; publishing in the modern Arab World; and the new electronic media, a non-book vehicle of communication, and its impact on education.
Download or read book Islam in Liberalism written by Joseph A. Massad and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Demonstrates that Western liberal ‘democracy’, portrayed as foreign to ‘Islam’, necessarily serves an imperial project. . . . timely and controversial.” —Politics, Religion & Ideology Islam is often associated with words like oppression, totalitarianism, intolerance, cruelty, misogyny, and homophobia, while its presumed antonyms are Christianity, the West, liberalism, individualism, freedom, citizenship, and democracy. In the most alarmist views, the West’s most cherished values—freedom, equality, and tolerance—are said to be endangered by Islam worldwide. Joseph Massad’s Islam in Liberalism explores what Islam has become in today’s world. He seeks to understand how anxieties about tyranny, intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia, seen in the politics of the Middle East, are projected onto Islam itself. Massad shows that through this projection Europe emerges as democratic and tolerant, feminist, and pro-LGBT rights—or, in short, Islam-free. Massad documents the Christian and liberal idea that we should missionize democracy, women’s rights, sexual rights, tolerance, equality, and even therapies to cure Muslims of their un-European, un-Christian, and illiberal ways. Along the way he sheds light on a variety of controversial topics, including the meanings of democracy—and the ideological assumption that Islam is not compatible with it while Christianity is. Islam in Liberalism is an unflinching critique of Western assumptions and of the liberalism that Europe and America present as salvation to Islam. “Essential reading for all scholars of Islam and Middle East politics.” —Cambridge Review of International Affairs “Reminds us that in order to move beyond scholarship revolving around a simplistic binarism between West and non-West, we must never forget how this opposition has shaped and continues to actively influence scholarship today.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Sons of Ishmael written by John Victor Tolan and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John V. Tolan is one of the world's foremost scholars in the field of early Christian/Muslim interactions. In ten essays, he explores "Sons of Ishmael," the epithet many Christian writers of the Middle Ages gave to Muslims, Sons of Ishmael focuses on the history of conflict and convergence between Latin Christendom and the Arab Muslim world during this period."--Book jacket.
Download or read book A Culture of Ambiguity written by Thomas Bauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
Download or read book Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire written by Seema Alavi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seema Alavi challenges the idea that all pan-Islamic configurations are anti-Western or pro-Caliphate. A pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility—a political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood today as it did in the last century.
Download or read book How Muslims Shaped the Americas written by Omar Mouallem and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Winner of the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction* *Selected as a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star* An insightful and perspective-shifting new book, from a celebrated journalist, about reclaiming identity and revealing the surprising history of the Muslim diaspora in the west—from the establishment of Canada’s first mosque through to the long-lasting effects of 9/11 and the devastating Quebec City mosque shooting. “Until recently, Muslim identity was imposed on me. But I feel different about my religious heritage in the era of ISIS and Trumpism, Rohingya and Uyghur genocides, ethnonationalism and misinformation. I’m compelled to reclaim the thing that makes me a target. I’ve begun to examine Islam closely with an eye for how it has shaped my values, politics, and connection to my roots. No doubt, Islam has a place within me. But do I have a place within it?” Omar Mouallem grew up in a Muslim household, but always questioned the role of Islam in his life. As an adult, he used his voice to criticize what he saw as the harms of organized religion. But none of that changed the way others saw him. Now, as a father, he fears the challenges his children will no doubt face as Western nations become increasingly nativist and hostile toward their heritage. In Praying to the West, Mouallem explores the unknown history of Islam across the Americas, traveling to thirteen unique mosques in search of an answer to how this religion has survived and thrived so far from the place of its origin. From California to Quebec, and from Brazil to Canada’s icy north, he meets the members of fascinating communities, all of whom provide different perspectives on what it means to be Muslim. Along this journey he comes to understand that Islam has played a fascinating role in how the Americas were shaped—from industrialization to the changing winds of politics. And he also discovers that there may be a place for Islam in his own life, particularly as a father, even if he will never be a true believer. Original, insightful, and beautifully told, Praying to the West reveals a secret history of home and the struggle for belonging taking place in towns and cities across the Americas, and points to a better, more inclusive future for everyone.
Download or read book Islam and the Rule of Justice written by Lawrence Rosen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the West, we tend to think of Islamic law as an arcane and rigid legal system, bound by formulaic texts yet suffused by unfettered discretion. While judges may indeed refer to passages in the classical texts or have recourse to their own orientations, images of binding doctrine and unbounded choice do not reflect the full reality of the Islamic law in its everyday practice. Whether in the Arabic-speaking world, the Muslim portions of South and Southeast Asia, or the countries to which many Muslims have migrated, Islamic law works is readily misunderstood if the local cultures in which it is embedded are not taken into account. With Islam and the Rule of Justice, Lawrence Rosen analyzes a number of these misperceptions. Drawing on specific cases, he explores the application of Islamic law to the treatment of women (who win most of their cases), the relations between Muslims and Jews (which frequently involve close personal and financial ties), and the structure of widespread corruption (which played a key role in prompting the Arab Spring). From these case studie the role of informal mechanisms in the resolution of local disputes. The author also provides a close reading of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged in an American court with helping to carry out the 9/11 attacks, using insights into how Islamic justice works to explain the defendant’s actions during the trial. The book closes with an examination of how Islamic cultural concepts may come to bear on the constitutional structure and legal reforms many Muslim countries have been undertaking.
Download or read book An Imaginary Racism written by Pascal Bruckner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Islamophobia’ is a term that has existed since the nineteenth century. But in recent decades, argues Pascal Bruckner in his controversial new book, it has become a weapon used to silence criticism of Islam. The term allows those who brandish it in the name of Islam to ‘freeze’ the latter, making reform difficult. Whereas Christianity and Judaism have been rejuvenated over the centuries by external criticism, Islam has been shielded from critical examination and has remained impervious to change. This tendency is exacerbated by the hypocrisy of those Western defenders of Islam who, in the name of the principles of the Enlightenment, seek to muzzle its critics while at the same time demanding the right to chastise and criticize other religions. These developments, argues Bruckner, are counter-productive for Western democracies as they struggle with the twin challenges of immigration and terrorism. The return of religion in those democracies must not be equated with the defence of fanaticism, and the right to religious freedom must go hand in hand with freedom of expression, an openness to criticism, and a rejection of all forms of extremism. There are already more than enough forms of racism; there is no need to imagine more. While all violence directed against Muslims is to be strongly condemned and punished, defining these acts as ‘Islamophobic’ rather than criminal does more to damage Islam and weaken the position of Muslims than to strengthen them.
Download or read book Muslim Politics written by Dale F. Eickelman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
