Download or read book SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS written by Humeira Iqtidar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.
Download or read book Secularizing Islamists written by Humeira Iqtidar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.
Download or read book Secularism Confronts Islam written by Olivier Roy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-06 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French and, consequently, secular and liberal-society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society. Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences. Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy brilliantly demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis.
Download or read book Islam and Secularism in the Middle East written by Azzam Tamimi and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western civilization tends to view secularism as a positive achievement. From this perspective, benefits of secularizing trends include the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and freedom from organized religion. In the Arab Middle East, however, Islamist intellectuals increasingly cite Western-inspired secularism as the source of the region's social dislocation and political instability. While secularism in the West led to the spread of democratic values, in the Muslim world it has been associated with dictatorship, the violation of human rights, and the abrogation of civil liberties. Islam and Secularism in the Middle East examines the origins and growth of the movement to abolish the secularizing reforms of the past century by creating a political order guided by Shariah law. Contributors explain the Islamic rejection of secularism as a failed Western Christian ideal and also discuss how secularization was pioneered by those who thought Muslims could only advance politically by emulating Western practices, including the renunciation of religion.
Download or read book Islam Evolving written by Taner Edis and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An American physicist with a secular orientation who was raised in Turkey critiques attempts to import Western secularism into Muslim societies and offers an appreciation of Muslim forms of adapting to the modern world"--
Download or read book European Muslims and the Secular State written by Sean McLoughlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The institutionalization of Islam in the West continues to raise many questions for a range of different constituencies. Secularization represents much more than the legal separation of politics and religion in Europe; for important segments of European societies, it has become the cultural norm. Therefore, Muslims' settlement and their claims for the public recognition of Islam have often been perceived as a threat. This volume explores current interactions between Muslims and the more or less secularized public spaces of several European states, assessing the challenges such interactions imply for both Muslims and the societies in which they now live. Divided into three parts, it examines the impact of State-Church relations, 'Islamophobia' and 'the war on terrorism', evaluates the engagement of Muslim leaders with the State and civil society, and reflects on both individual and collective transformations of Muslim religiosity.
Download or read book Islamic Exceptionalism written by Shadi Hamid and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Islamic Exceptionalism, Brookings Institution scholar and acclaimed author Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Divides among citizens aren't just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state—and the vexing problem of religion’s role in public life. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different models of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying—and alarmingly successful—example of ISIS. With unprecedented access to Islamist activists and leaders across the region, Hamid offers a panoramic and ambitious interpretation of the region's descent into violence. Islamic Exceptionalism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Islam's past and present, and its outsized role in modern politics. We don't have to like it, but we have to understand it—because Islam, as a religion and as an idea, will continue to be a force that shapes not just the region, but the West as well in the decades to come.
Download or read book Islamic Revivalism in Syria written by Line Khatib and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes Syria' s present day Islamic groups ' particularly their social profile and ideology ' as well as offering an explanation of their resurgence. It also examines the government' s shift from promoting secularism to muting secularism and co-opting Islamic sectors.
Download or read book Faith and Power written by Lesslie Newbigin and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The issue . . . in the multicultural millennium is not so much the 'Islamization' of a once-Christian culture as the emergence, with state collusion, of discrete territories where vastly different norms prevail, shut off and resentful, a breeding ground for ferment and a target for hostility." In the aftermath of the London suicide bombings, this unusual book seems more prophetic than ever. Begun six years before 9/11, it examined the roots of political Islam and its offshoots in Britain. In describing the indifference of policy makers and government officials to religion, it warned of extremism taking root among disaffected young Muslims -- and offered a vision of hope tempered with realism that might have helped avert tragedy had it been more widely heeded. The book's timely republication offers another -- and a way out of it. Lamin Sanneh, himself a former Muslim, explores the history of Islam's always controversial accommodations with the West. Jenny Taylor's debut engages contribution critically at the grassroots level, looking in detail at Islam in Britain, its mission and tactics, and the State's inadequate response to them. "Neglect would appear to have been government policy." Lesslie Newbigin describes the loss of a sense of direction in the West as bankrupt secular ideologies confront fundamentalism with politically correct platitudes or coercive legislation that is destroying the West's historic freedoms. All three authors call for a radical Christian critique to replace the false and evidently failed policies of neutrality of the State.
Download or read book Faith and Feminism in Pakistan written by Afiya S. Zia and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are secular aims, politics, and sensibilities impossible, undesirable and impracticable for Muslims and Islamic states? Should Muslim women be exempted from feminist attempts at liberation from patriarchy and its various expressions under Islamic laws and customs? Considerable literature on the entanglements of Islam and secularism has been produced in the post-9/11 decade and a large proportion of it deals with the Woman Question. Many commentators critique the secular and Western feminism, and the racialising backlash that accompanied the occupation of Muslim countries during the War on Terror military campaign launched by the U.S. government after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Implicit in many of these critical works is the suggestion that it is Western secular feminism that is the motivating driver and permanent collaborator -- along with other feminists, secularists and human rights activists in Muslim countries -- that sustains the Wests actual and metaphorical war on Islam and Muslims. The book addresses this post-9/11 critical trope and its implications for womens movements in Muslim contexts. The relevance of secular feminist activism is illustrated with reference to some of the nation-wide, working-class womens movements that have surged throughout Pakistan under religious militancy: polio vaccinators, health workers, politicians, peasants and artists have been directly targeted, even assassinated, for their service and commitment to liberal ideals. Afiya Zia contends that Muslim womens piety is no threat against the dominant political patriarchy, but their secular autonomy promises transformative changes for the population at large, and thereby effectively challenges Muslim male dominance. This book is essential reading for those interested in understanding the limits of Muslim womens piety and the potential in their pursuit for secular autonomy and liberal freedoms.
Download or read book From Secularism to Jihad written by Adnan Musallam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-10-30 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern political idea of jihad—a violent struggle against corrupt or anti-Islamic regimes—is essentially the brainchild of one man who turned traditional Islamic precepts inside out and created the modern radical political Islamist movement. Using the evolution of Sayyid Qutb's life and writings, Musallam traces and analyzes Qutb's alienation and subsequent emergence as an independent Islamist within the context of his society and the problems that it faced. Radicalized following his stay in the United States in the late 1940s and during his imprisonment from 1954 to 1964, Qutb would pen controversial writings that would have a significant impact on young Islamists in Egypt for decades following his death and on global jihadist Islamists for the past quarter century. Since September 11, 2001, the West has dubbed Qutb the philosopher of Islamic terror and godfather ideologue of al-Qaeda. This is the first book to examine his life and thought in the wake of the events that ignited the War on Terrorism. A secular man of letters in the 1930s and 1940s, Qutb's outlook and focus on Quranic studies underwent drastic changes during World War II. The Quran became a refuge for his personal needs and for answers to the ills of his society. As a result, he forsook literature permanently for the Islamic cause and way of life. His stay in the United States from 1948 to 1950 reinforced his deeply held belief that Islam is man's only salvation from the abyss of Godless materialism he believed to be manifest in both capitalism and communism. Qutb's active opposition to the secular policies of Egyptian President Nasser led to his imprisonment from 1954 to 1964, during which his writings called for the overthrow of Jahili (pagan) governments and their replacement with a true and just Islamic society. A later arrest and trial resulted in his execution in August 1966.
Download or read book The Islamists are Coming written by Robin Wright and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are is the first book to survey the rise of Islamist groups in the wake of the Arab Spring. A wide range of experts from three continents cover the major countries where Islamist parties are redefining politics and the regional balance of power. They cover the origins, evolution, positions on key issues and the future in key countries. Robin Wright offers an overview, Olivier Roy explains how Islam and democracy are now interdependent, Annika Folkeson profiles the 50 Islamist parties, and 10 experts identify Islamists in Algeria, Egypt (two), Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Tunisia.
Download or read book Islam in a Post Secular Society written by Dustin Byrd and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam in the Post-Secular Society: Religion, Secularity and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith critically examines the unique challenges facing Muslims in Europe and North America. From the philosophical perspective of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, this book attempts not only to diagnose the current problems stemming from a marginalization of Islam in the secular West, but also to offer a proposal for a Habermasian discourse between the religious and the secular. By highlighting historical examples of Islamic and western rapprochement, and rejecting the ‘clash of civilization’ thesis, the author attempts to find a ‘common language’ between the religious and the secular, which can serve as a vehicle for a future reconciliation.
Download or read book Formations of the Secular written by Talal Asad and published by . This book was released on 2003-02-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might an anthropology of secularism look like?;Thinking about agency and pain;Reflections on cruelty and torture;Redeeming the "human" through human rights;Muslims as a "religious minority" in Europe;Secularism, nation state, religion;Reconfigurations of law and ethics in colonial Egypt
Download or read book Islam and the Governing of Muslims in France written by Frank Peter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Islam be able to adapt to France's secularity and its strict separation of public and private spheres? Can France accommodate Muslims? In this book, Frank Peter argues that the debate about “Islam” and “Muslims” is not simply caused by ignorance or Islamophobia. Rather, it is an integral part of how secularism is reasoned. Islam and the Governing of Muslims in France shows that understanding religion as separate from other aspects of life, such as politics, economy, and culture, disregards the ways religion has operated and been managed in “secular” societies such as France. This book uncovers the varying rationalities of the secular that have developed over the past few decades in France to “govern Islam,” in order to examine how Muslims engage with the secular regime and contribute to its transformation. This book offers a close analysis of French secularism as it has been debated by Islamic intellectuals and activists from the 1990s until the present. It will influence the study of secularism as well as the study of Islam in the French Republic, and reveal new connections between Islamic traditions and secular rationalities.
Download or read book Compulsion in Religion written by Samuel Helfont and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on newly available archives from the Iraqi state and Ba'th Party to present a revisionist history of Saddam Hussein's religious policies. The point of doing this, other than to correct the current understanding of Saddam's political use of religion through his presidency, is to argue that the policies promoted then directly contributed to the rise of religious insurgencies in post-2003 Iraq as well as the current and probably future crises in the country. In looking at Saddam's policies in the 1990s, many have interpreted his support for state religion as evidence of a dramatic shift away from Arab nationalism, toward political Islam. But this book shows that the 'Faith Campaign' he launched during this time was the culmination of a plan to use religion for political ends, begun upon his assumption of the Iraqi presidency in 1979. At this time, Saddam began constructing the institutional capacity to control and monitor Iraqi religious institutions. The resulting authoritarian structures allowed him to employ Islamic symbols and rhetoric in public policy, but in a controlled manner. By the 1990s, these policies became fully realized. Following the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, religion remained prominent in Iraqi public life, but the system that Saddam had put in place to contain it was destroyed. Sunni and Shi'i extremists who had been suppressed and silenced were now free. They thrived in an atmosphere where religion had been actively promoted, and formed militant organizations which have torn the country apart since.
Download or read book Muslim Becoming written by Naveeda Khan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoughtful ethnography of Islam in Pakistan moves from the smallest scale—a single worshiper striving to be a better Muslim who is seeking guidance at a neighborhood mosque—to the largest, examining the thought of poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, considered to be the spiritual visionary of the country.
