Download or read book Islam and Religious Change in Pakistan written by Saadia Sumbal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival. This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries. Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia.
Download or read book Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan written by Taha Kazi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pakistan, religious talk shows emerged as a popular television genre following the 2002 media liberalization reforms. Since then, these shows have become important platforms where ideas about Islam and religious authority in Pakistan are developed and argued. In Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan, Taha Kazi reveals how these talk shows mediate changes in power, belief, and practice. She also identifies the sacrifices and compromises that religious scholars feel compelled to make in order to ensure their presence on television. These scholars, of varying doctrinal and educational backgrounds—including madrasa-educated scholars and self-taught celebrity preachers—are given screen time to debate and issue religious edicts on the authenticity and contemporary application of Islamic concepts and practices. In response, viewers are sometimes allowed to call in live with questions. Kazi maintains that these featured debates inspire viewers to reevaluate the status of scholarly edicts, thereby fragmenting religious authority. By exploring how programming decisions inadvertently affect viewer engagements with Islam, Religious Television and Pious Authority in Pakistan looks beyond the revivalist impact of religious media and highlights the prominence of religious talk shows in disrupting expectations about faith.
Download or read book Islam in Pakistan written by Muhammad Qasim Zaman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South Asia The first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. Islam in Pakistan is the first comprehensive book to explore Islam's evolution in this region over the past century and a half, from the British colonial era to the present day. Muhammad Qasim Zaman presents a rich historical account of this major Muslim nation, insights into the rise and gradual decline of Islamic modernist thought in the South Asian region, and an understanding of how Islam has fared in the contemporary world. Much attention has been given to Pakistan's role in sustaining the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, in the growth of the Taliban in the 1990s, and in the War on Terror after 9/11. But as Zaman shows, the nation's significance in matters relating to Islam has much deeper roots. Since the late nineteenth century, South Asia has witnessed important initiatives toward rethinking core Islamic texts and traditions in the interest of their compatibility with the imperatives of modern life. Traditionalist scholars and their institutions, too, have had a prominent presence in the region, as have Islamism and Sufism. Pakistan did not merely inherit these and other aspects of Islam. Rather, it has been and remains a site of intense contestation over Islam's public place, meaning, and interpretation. Examining how facets of Islam have been pivotal in Pakistani history, Islam in Pakistan offers sweeping perspectives on what constitutes an Islamic state.
Download or read book Religion and Politics in Muslim Society written by Akbar S. Ahmed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-10-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of Muslim unrest is based on an extended case study of northwestern Pakistan. Professor Ahmed examines power, authority, and religious status as the critical intermediary level of society: that of the district or Agency, which was the key unit of administration in British India. Amhed has joined his insights as anthropologist with his experience as a political agent in Waziristan to produce an innovative and detailed work. The book focuses on the emergence of a mullah in Waziristan who challenges the state. A religious leader's challenge of the state is not new; but contemporary Muslim society's widespread concern over these conflicts reveals that the influence of religion in a traditional society undergoing modernization is greater than many scholars have assumed. The author identifies three types of leaders: traditional leaders, usually elders; representatives of the established state authority; and religious functionaries. From this analysis he constructs an 'Islamic district paradigm,' which he uses not only in making sense of contemporary Muslim society, but also in understanding some aspects of the legacy of the colonial encounter.
Download or read book The Ulama in Contemporary Islam written by Muhammad Qasim Zaman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the `ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world. While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the `ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the `ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere. This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the `ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the `ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.
Download or read book The New Pakistani Middle Class written by Ammara Maqsood and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. In The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in contemporary Lahore, where she unravels these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition and the quest for identity among middle-class groups. Lahore’s traditional middle class has asserted its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. Recently, however, a more visibly religious, upwardly mobile social group has struggled to distinguish itself against this backdrop of conventional middle-class modernity, by embracing Islamic culture and values. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi. Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkha—The New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. Maqsood probes how the politics of modernity meets the practices of piety in the struggle among different middle-class groups for social recognition and legitimacy.
Download or read book Pakistan written by Mariam Abou Zahab and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays brings together two sets of articles and book chapters by Mariam Abou Zahab, the extraordinary late scholar of Islam in South Asia. The first part of the volume examines Shia-Sunni relations in Pakistan, while the second concerns violent Islamism in the country, covering both the Talibanisation of the Pashtun belt and the jihadi dimension of South Asian Salafism. Throughout these texts, Abou Zahab explores the many reasons why Pakistan has been the crucible of political Islam. She offers a historical view of this development, factoring in the impact of colonialism and conflict, including the Soviet-Afghan War and the post-9/11 Western military operations in Afghanistan. While making clear the major importance of these external influences, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the US, she also places Pakistan's political Islam in the context of local cultures, mobilising her anthropological erudition without ever indulging in culturalism. Finally, she emphasises the sociological determinants of sectarianism, Talibanism and jihadism, as well as the political economy of these ideologies. Abou Zahab's knowledge is exhaustive, but in these papers she offers an elegant synthesis in which each word matters. This volume is indispensable for understanding the present dynamics of Pakistan.
Download or read book Politics of Desecularization written by Sadia Saeed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The movement away from secularist practices and toward political Islam is a prominent trend across Muslim polities. Yet this shift remains under-theorized. Why do modern Muslim polities adopt policies that explicitly cater to religious sensibilities? How are these encoded in law and with what effects? Sadia Saeed addresses these questions through examining shifts in Pakistan's official state policies toward the rights of religious minorities, in particular the controversial Ahmadiyya community. Looking closely at the 'Ahmadi question', Saeed develops a framework for conceptualizing and explaining modern desecularization processes that emphasizes the critical role of nation-state formation, political majoritarianism, and struggles between 'secularist' and 'religious' ideologues in evolving political and legal fields. The book demonstrates that desecularization entails instituting new understandings of religion through processes and justifications that are quintessentially modern.
Download or read book The VanGuard of the Islamic Revolution written by Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and published by . This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the origins, historical development, and political strategies of one of the oldest and most influential Islamic revival movements. Founded in 1941, the Islamic Party soon became the most prominent political party in Pakistan. It became active during the partition of India and it continues to be a potent force in Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world. Focuses on the inherent tension between its central idealized vision of the nation as a holy community based on Islamic law, and its political agenda of socioeconomic change for Pakistani society. Identifies the significant issues in the politics of India's Muslim community that inspired the party on the eve of Partition.
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 Islam written by John Obert Voll and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a single-volume history of Islam. The opening chapters briefly discuss the historical background of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century, through the rise of the Islam in 18th through 20th centuries. The final two chapters cover the significant events of the 1980s and 1990s.
Download or read book Transforming Faith written by Sadaf Ahmad and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, there has been an increasing number of middle and upper-class urban Pakistani women actively turning toward Islam via Al-Huda, an Islamic school for women aiming to transform the women who absorb its message into “pious” subjects. Established in the early 1990s, Al-Huda is unique in its ability to attract a following among these women, a feat other religious groups have been unsuccessful in accomplishing. In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad deftly explores how Al-Huda is fostering a new generation of educated, urban, middle-class women to become veiled conservatives. She offers an engrossing and sensitive account of how the school’s aggressive recruiting methods through informal religious study groups and a one-year degree program combined with the school’s techniques of persuasive teaching methods have turned Al-Huda into a social movement. As a woman of Pakistani origin, Ahmad offers an in-depth look at the students and members of Al-Huda in ways that a cultural outsider would be excluded from doing. She reveals that although Pakistani women are better educated than ever before they still face social barriers that limit them from working or pursuing further education. Ahmad’s groundbreaking work demonstrates Al-Huda’s ever-widening teachings and influence in Pakistan and in its recent global extensions. More broadly, this book illuminates how Al-Huda uses the trappings of modernity to engage educated women in a kind of religious study that transforms their ideology, behavior, and lifestyle within a particular Islamic framework. Because of Al-Huda’s teachings, Pakistani society is changing, as is the rest of the Muslim world.
Download or read book The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution written by Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-09-23 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr examines the origins, historical development, and political strategies of one of the oldest and most influential Islamic revival movements, the Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan. He focuses on the inherent tension between the movement's idealized vision of the nation as a holy community based in Islamic law and its political agenda of socioeconomic change for Pakistani society. Nasr's work goes beyond the exploration of a single party to examine the diverse sociopolitical roots of contemporary Islamic revivalism, challenging many of the standard interpretations about political expressions of Islam.--Publisher description.
Download or read book Islam the Alternative written by Murad Wilfried Hofmann and published by Amana Corporation. This book was released on 1999 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume introduces Islam for "westerners who seek to understand Islam on a personal level." The author wrote this as his response to the claim that secular democracy and capitalism are the pinnacle of civilization. The book caused a public scandal when it first appeared in Europe because of people's shock that the author, a German, had accepted Islam. His stated primary objective is to build bridges between Islam and the West.
Download or read book Islam in India and Pakistan written by Murray Thurston Titus and published by . This book was released on 1930 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pakistan Social and Cultural Transformations in a Muslim Nation written by Mohammad Qadeer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English-language survey of Pakistan’s socio-economic evolution. Mohammad Qadeer gives an essential overview of social and cultural transformation in Pakistan since independence, which is crucial to understanding Pakistan’s likely future direction. Pakistan examines how tradition and family life continue to contribute long term stability, and explores the areas where very rapid changes are taking place: large population increase, urbanization, economic development, and the nature of civil society and the state. It offers an insightful view into Pakistan, exploring the wide range of ethnic groups, the countryside, religion and community, and popular culture and national identity. It concludes by discussing the likely future social development in Pakistan, captivating students and academics interested in Pakistan and multiculturalism. Qadeer’s impressive work is a comprehensive examination of social and cultural forces in Pakistani society, and is an important resource for anyone wanting to understand contemporary Pakistan.
Download or read book Religion and Politics in Pakistan written by Leonard Binder and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
