Download or read book Reliving Karbala written by Syed Akbar Hyder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 680 C.E., a small band of the Prophet Muhammads family and their followers, led by his grandson, Husain, rose up in a rebellion against the ruling caliph, Yazid. The family and its supporters, hopelessly outnumbered, were massacred at Karbala, in modern-day Iraq. The story of Karbala is the cornerstone of institutionalized devotion and mourning for millions of Shii Muslims. Apart from its appeal to the Shii community, invocations of Karbala have also come to govern mystical and reformist discourses in the larger Muslim world. Indeed, Karbala even serves as the archetypal resistance and devotional symbol for many non-Muslims. Until now, though, little scholarly attention has been given to the widespread and varied employment of the Karbala event. In Reliving Karbala, Syed Akbar Hyder examines the myriad ways that the Karbala symbol has provided inspiration in South Asia, home to the worlds largest Muslim population. Rather than a unified reading of Islam, Hyder reveals multiple, sometimes conflicting, understandings of the meaning of Islamic religious symbols like Karbala. He ventures beyond traditional, scriptural interpretations to discuss the ways in which millions of very human adherents express and practice their beliefs. By using a panoramic array of sources, including musical performances, interviews, nationalist drama, and other literary forms, Hyder traces the evolution of this story from its earliest historical origins to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Today, Karbala serves as a celebration of martyrdom, a source of personal and communal identity, and even a tool for political protest and struggle. Hyder explores how issues related to gender, genre, popular culture, class, and migrancy bear on the cultivation of religious symbols. He assesses the manner in which religious language and identities are negotiated across contexts and continents. At a time when words like martyrdom, jihad, and Shiism are being used and misused for political reasons, this book provides much-needed scholarly redress. Through his multifaceted examination of this seminal event in Islamic history, Hyder offers an original, complex, and nuanced view of religious symbols.
Download or read book Reliving Karbala Martyrdom in South Asian Memory written by Syed Akbar Hyder Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Islamic Studies University of Texas at Austin N.U.S. and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 680 C.E., a small band of the Prophet Muhammads family and their followers, led by his grandson, Husain, rose up in a rebellion against the ruling caliph, Yazid. The family and its supporters, hopelessly outnumbered, were massacred at Karbala, in modern-day Iraq. The story of Karbala is the cornerstone of institutionalized devotion and mourning for millions of Shii Muslims. Apart from its appeal to the Shii community, invocations of Karbala have also come to govern mystical and reformist discourses in the larger Muslim world. Indeed, Karbala even serves as the archetypal resistance and devotional symbol for many non-Muslims. Until now, though, little scholarly attention has been given to the widespread and varied employment of the Karbala event. In Reliving Karbala, Syed Akbar Hyder examines the myriad ways that the Karbala symbol has provided inspiration in South Asia, home to the worlds largest Muslim population. Rather than a unified reading of Islam, Hyder reveals multiple, sometimes conflicting, understandings of the meaning of Islamic religious symbols like Karbala. He ventures beyond traditional, scriptural interpretations to discuss the ways in which millions of very human adherents express and practice their beliefs. By using a panoramic array of sources, including musical performances, interviews, nationalist drama, and other literary forms, Hyder traces the evolution of this story from its earliest historical origins to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Today, Karbala serves as a celebration of martyrdom, a source of personal and communal identity, and even a tool for political protest and struggle. Hyder explores how issues related to gender, genre, popular culture, class, and migrancy bear on the cultivation of religious symbols. He assesses the manner in which religious language and identities are negotiated across contexts and continents. At a time when words like martyrdom, jihad, and Shiism are being used and misused for political reasons, this book provides much-needed scholarly redress. Through his multifaceted examination of this seminal event in Islamic history, Hyder offers an original, complex, and nuanced view of religious symbols.
Download or read book Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism written by EMILIA. BACHRACH and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of reading inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women written by Asma Afsaruddin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Islam and Women" is a very broad topic and as complex as the lives of women that it encompasses in a broad swath of the world. In its wide-ranging coverage of issues subsumed under this umbrella topic, this volume is purposefully multi-disciplinary. The chapters are authoritative contributions from well-known scholars who are at the cutting-edge of scholarship on inter alia Qur'anic hermeneutics and hadith studies, women's legal and social rights, women's scholarly, cultural, economic, and political activities in the pre-modern and modern Islamic societies, the rise of Islamic feminism and women's activism and movements in a number of contemporary Muslim-majority countries and regions, including Egypt and North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, South and Southeast Asia, and in Muslim-minority contexts in western Europe, the United States, and China. The politicized portrayal of Muslim women, especially of those who wear the headscarf (hijab), in the global Western-dominated media and the weaponization of their bodies in certain kinds of political and feminist discourses also receive attention. These chapters delineate a broad spectrum of views on these key issues that are prevalent inside and outside of academia and provide sophisticated and careful analysis of textual sources and of broad sociological and political trends. Many of these essays emphasize above all the diversity present in Muslim women's lives, both in the pre-modern and modern periods, and pay close attention to the historical and political contexts that shaped their lives and framed the thinking and actions of key female figures throughout Islamic history. Such an approach results in fine-grained macro- and micro-studies of Muslim women's lives that problematize reified assumptions of gender and agency in the context of Muslim-majority societies"--
Download or read book Everyday Shi ism in South Asia written by Karen G. Ruffle and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first textbook to focus on the history of lived Shi'ism in South Asia Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia is an introduction to the everyday life and cultural memory of Shi’i women and men, focusing on the religious worlds of both individuals and communities at particular historical moments and places in the Indian subcontinent. Author Karen Ruffle draws upon an array primary sources, images, and ethnographic data to present topical case studies offering broad snapshots Shi'i life as well as microscopic analyses of ritual practices, material objects, architectural and artistic forms, and more. Focusing exclusively on South Asian Shi'ism, an area mostly ignored by contemporary scholars who focus on the Arab lands of Iran and Iraq, the author shifts readers' analytical focus from the center of Islam to its periphery. Ruffle provides new perspectives on the diverse ways that the Shi'a intersect with not only South Asian religious culture and history, but also the wider Islamic humanistic tradition. Written for an academic audience, yet accessible to general readers, this unique resource: Explores Shi’i religious practice and the relationship between religious normativity and everyday religious life and material culture Contextualizes Muharram rituals, public performances, festivals, vow-making, and material objects and practices of South Asian Shi'a Draws from author's studies and fieldwork throughout India and Pakistan, featuring numerous color photographs Places Shi'i religious symbols, cultural values, and social systems in historical context Includes an extended survey of scholarship on South Asian Shi’ism from the seventeenth century to the present Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia is an important resource for scholars and students in disciplines including Islamic studies, South Asian studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, material culture studies, history, and gender studies, and for English-speaking members of South Asian Shi'i communities.
Download or read book Drinking from Love s Cup written by Rahuldeep Singh Gill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (d. 1636 CE) is widely considered the most important non-canonical poet in Sikh history, having shaped the theology and ethics of the tradition for centuries. Not only are his beautiful poems considered an authoritative illustration of Sikh life, they also defined Sikh identity during a tumultuous period of upheaval in the early seventeenth century. In Drinking from Love's Cup Rahuldeep Gill brings together for the first time a collection of the revered poet's early work, masterfully translated it into English, along with the original Punjabi text.
Download or read book The Shi a in Modern South Asia written by Justin Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores various Shi'i communities in the subcontinent as well as South Asian Shi'i diasporas in East Africa.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Sacred Places 2 volumes written by Norbert C. Brockman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now thoroughly revised and updated, this encyclopedia documents the diversity of shrines, temples, holy places, and pilgrimage sites sacred to the world's major religious traditions, and illustrates their elemental place in human culture. As interest increases in the role of world religions in history and international affairs, the new edition of Encyclopedia of Sacred Places—which arrives 15 years after the publication of the original edition—provides new and updated information on site-specific religious practice and spiritually significant locations around the globe. While many of the entries describe specific places, like the Erawan Shrine and the Rock of Cashel, others examine types of sacred sites, pilgrimages, and practices. With articles that describe both the places and their associated traditions and history, this reference book reveals the enormous diversity and cultural significance of religious practice worldwide. For students and teachers of classes ranging from high school geography to university-level courses in religious studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology, this book provides essential reference on places of great significance to the world's various faith traditions.
Download or read book Islam After Liberalism written by Faisal Devji and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss how 'Islam' and 'liberalism' have been entwined historically and politically and how Muslims have thought about this longstanding relationship.
Download or read book The Festival of Pirs written by Afsar Mohammad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about a popular manifestation of Islamic devotion that embraces a pluralist setting, keeping itself in a dynamic dialogue with non-Muslim practices. With evidence from various public devotional narratives and ritual practices, the author argues that even universal understanding of living Islam remains incomplete if we do not consider this locally produced pluralised devotional setting that surrounds it. He seeks to address various aspects of local and localised Islam through an examination of Gugudu's local and popular transformation of normative Islam, giving particular focus to the various devotional rituals that blend Muslim and Hindu practices in the public event of Muharram.
Download or read book Martyrdom and Sacrifice in Islam written by Meir Hatina and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the years, the belief system around self sacrifice has become key to understanding the Middle East and its political relationships with the West although much of the literature and conversation has been restricted to modern concepts of jihadism. The recent spate of scholarship relating to suicide bombers and jihadists studies these concepts without a broader understanding of the principle of martyrdom. This book expands on the chronology of self-sacrifice within Islam and contextualises the use of suicide bombings using details of the rise of martyrdom in places such as Iraq, Lebanon, Chechnya and Pakistan. It historicises the background in which 'jihad' has been glorified while also exploring contemporary methods of recruitment, like the use of the internet. The authors pay close attention to the different sects and factions of Islam and the differing interpretations of jihad that accompany these ideologies. In the current political climate, a book that explores martyrdom within the framework of historical perspectives, geographical regions and the influence of outside cultures is essential.
Download or read book Shi ism In South East Asia written by Chiara Formichi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first work available in any language to extensively document and critically discuss traditions of 'Alid piety and their modern contestations in the region. The concept of 'Alid piety allows for a reframing of our views on the widespread reverence for 'Ali, Fatima and their progeny that emphasizes how such sentiments and associated practices are seen as part of broad traditions shared by many Muslims, which might or might not have their origins in a specifically Shi'a identity. In doing so, it facilitates the movement of academic discussions out from under the shadow of polemical sectarian discourses on 'Shi'ism' in Southeast Asia. The chapters include presentations of new material from previously unpublished early manuscript sources from Muslim vernacular literatures in the Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Acehnese and Bugis languages, as well as rich new ethnography from across the region. These studies engage with cultural, intellectual, and performative traditions, as well as the ways in which 'Alid piety has been transformed in relation to more strictly sectarian identifications since the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Download or read book The Bengal Diaspora written by Claire Alexander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India’s partition in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 saw the displacement and resettling of millions of Muslims and Hindus, resulting in profound transformations across the region. A third of the region’s population sought shelter across new borders, almost all of them resettling in the Bengal delta itself. A similar number were internally displaced, while others moved to the Middle East, North America and Europe. Using a creative interdisciplinary approach combining historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to migration and diaspora this book explores the experiences of Bengali Muslim migrants through this period of upheaval and transformation. It draws on over 200 interviews conducted in Britain, India, and Bangladesh, tracing migration and settlement within, and from, the Bengal delta region in the period after 1947. Focussing on migration and diaspora ‘from below’, it teases out fascinating ‘hidden’ migrant stories, including those of women, refugees, and displaced people. It reveals surprising similarities, and important differences, in the experience of Muslim migrants in widely different contexts and places, whether in the towns and hamlets of Bengal delta, or in the cities of Britain. Counter-posing accounts of the structures that frame migration with the textures of how migrants shape their own movement, it examines what it means to make new homes in a context of diaspora. The book is also unique in its focus on the experiences of those who stayed behind, and in its analysis of ruptures in the migration process. Importantly, the book seeks to challenge crude attitudes to ‘Muslim’ migrants, which assume their cultural and religious homogeneity, and to humanize contemporary discourses around global migration. This ground-breaking new research offers an essential contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Society and Culture Studies.
Download or read book Myriad Shades of Life in Mirza Ghalib written by Tasleem A. War and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an anthology of seven critical essays on the work of Mirza Ghalib, and considers a number of issues such as comparisons between him and Muhammad Iqbal, William Shakespeare and John Donne. It also foregrounds the most distinguishing features in his poetry, including his art of dialectical poetics, the obsession with the theme of death throughout his poetry, and the representation of Karbala and Ahle-Bayt in his work. The book thus highlights the different shades of meaning in both his poetry and letters. These myriad shades are embedded in Ghalib’s vision of life. Like Shakespeare and Sophocles, Ghalib details the colourfulness of life in all its horror and glory. Just as life itself is colourful in its myriad shades, Ghalib’s poetry offers us a vision of life which is pluralistic, multifarious and universal at the same time.
Download or read book Islamic Images and Ideas written by John Andrew Morrow and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These 24 studies on specific symbols, images and icons from the Muslim tradition are authored by scholars from around the world. Divided into four sections, the Divine, the Spiritual, the Physical, and the Societal, they examine theological issues, such as divine unity, creation, wrath, and justice, as well as spiritual subjects, such as the straight path, servitude, perfection, the jinn, intoxication, and the status of Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Essays also explore the symbolism of physical elements such as water, trees, seas, ships, food, the male sexual organ, eyebrows, and camels; and the significance of more socially-centered subjects such as the center, ijtihad, governance, otherness, Ashura, and Arabic. Drawing from the Qur'an and Sunnah, the essays address these topics with tact and respect from a position that appreciates exegetical diversity while remaining within the realm of unity.
Download or read book Shadows at Noon written by Joya Chatterji and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking view of South Asian history in the twentieth century that underlines the similarities and intertwined cultures of India and Pakistan “[A] definitive new 20th-century thematic history of the Indian subcontinent that rejects hegemonic conceptions of national ‘difference.’”—Financial Times This radically original and ambitious history of the Indian subcontinent explores the region’s unique twentieth-century history and foregrounds the deep connections, rather than the well-publicized fissures, between the cultures of India and Pakistan. Taking the partitions of British India rather than the two world wars as the century’s inflection points, Joya Chatterji examines how issues of nationalism, internal and external migration, and technological innovation contributed to South Asia’s tumultuous twentieth century. Chatterji weaves together elements of her autobiography and family history; stories of such legendary figures as Tagore, Jinnah, Gandhi, and Nehru; and, in particular, the accounts of the many who were left behind and marginalized in relentless nation-building projects. Chatterji examines the countries’ mirroring patterns in state building, social and cultural life, modes of leisure, consumption, and oppression, and offers a timely course correction to our understanding of the dynamics of South Asian history. It reframes the events of the twentieth century that are continuing to play out in the present day.
Download or read book Shi a Islam in Colonial India written by Justin Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in Shi'a Islam has increased greatly in recent years, although Shi'ism in the Indian subcontinent has remained largely underexplored. Focusing on the influential Shi'a minority of Lucknow and the United Provinces, a region that was largely under Shi'a rule until 1856, this book traces the history of Indian Shi'ism through the colonial period toward independence in 1947. Drawing on a range of new sources, including religious writing, polemical literature and clerical biography, it assesses seminal developments including the growth of Shi'a religious activism, madrasa education, missionary activity, ritual innovation and the politicization of the Shi'a community. As a consequence of these significant religious and social transformations, a Shi'a sectarian identity developed that existed in separation from rather than in interaction with its Sunni counterparts. In this way the painful birth of modern sectarianism was initiated, the consequences of which are very much alive in South Asia today.
