Download or read book Islam and Turks in Belgium written by Mehmet Orhan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Brussels, Wallonia and Flanders, Islam and Turks in Belgium examines the interdependence between Muslim community and association. With a focus on social groups, religious structures and circles within Turkish populations, this book demonstrates how communal and associative movements operate through a combination of relationships of proximity and distance. Proximity is a way in which Muslim organisations establish religious, social, and cultural ties with communities. Distance, on the other hand, takes into account social, historical, and political elements from abroad, and refers to the relationship with the Muslim world more broadly. As this reciprocal web of relations gives rise to Islamic mobilisations, it leads to the emergence or persistence of different figures of authority within associations and communities who articulate traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic legitimacies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of religion, migration, race, ethnicity and Islamic studies.
Download or read book Democracy Islam Secularism in Turkey written by Ahmet Kuru and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Turkey has grown as a world power, promoting the image of a progressive and stable nation, several policy choices have strained its relationship with the East and the West. Providing social, historical, and religious context for Turkey's singular behavior, the essays in Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey examine issues relevant to Turkish debates and global concerns, from the state's position on religion and diversity to its involvement in the European Union. Written by experts in a range of disciplines, the chapters explore the Ottoman toleration of diversity during its classical period; the erosion of ethno-religious diversity in modern, pre-democratic times; Kemalism and its role in modernization and nation building; the changing political strategies of the military; and the effect of possible EU membership on domestic reforms. They also conduct a cross-Continental comparison of "multiple secularisms" as well as political parties, considering the Justice and Development Party in Turkey in relation to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. The contributors tackle central research questions, such as what is the legacy of the Ottoman Empire's ethno-religious plurality and how can Turkey's assertive secularism be softened to allow greater space for religious actors. They address the military's "guardian" role in Turkey's secularism, the implications of recent constitutional amendments for democratization, and the consequences and benefits of Islamic activism's presence within a democratic system. No other collection confronts Turkey's contemporary evolution so vividly and thoroughly or offers such expert analysis of its crucial social and political systems.
Download or read book Journey into Europe written by Akbar Ahmed and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented, richly, detailed, and clear-eyed exploration of Islam in European history and civilization Tensions over Islam were escalating in Europe even before 9/11. Since then, repeated episodes of terrorism together with the refugee crisis have dramatically increased the divide between the majority population and Muslim communities, pushing the debate well beyond concerns over language and female dress. Meanwhile, the parallel rise of right-wing, nationalist political parties throughout the continent, often espousing anti-Muslim rhetoric, has shaken the foundation of the European Union to its very core. Many Europeans see Islam as an alien, even barbaric force that threatens to overwhelm them and their societies. Muslims, by contrast, struggle to find a place in Europe in the face of increasing intolerance. In tandem, anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination cause many on the continent to feel unwelcome in their European homes. Akbar Ahmed, an internationally renowned Islamic scholar, traveled across Europe over the course of four years with his team of researchers and interviewed Muslims and non-Muslims from all walks of life to investigate questions of Islam, immigration, and identity. They spoke with some of Europe’s most prominent figures, including presidents and prime ministers, archbishops, chief rabbis, grand muftis, heads of right-wing parties, and everyday Europeans from a variety of backgrounds. Their findings reveal a story of the place of Islam in European history and civilization that is more interwoven and complex than the reader might imagine, while exposing both the misunderstandings and the opportunities for Europe and its Muslim communities to improve their relationship. Along with an analysis of what has gone wrong and why, this urgent study, the fourth in a quartet examining relations between the West and the Muslim world, features recommendations for promoting integration and pluralism in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Millennial Sovereign written by A. Azfar Moin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the sixteenth century and the turn of the first Islamic millennium, the powerful Mughal emperor Akbar declared himself the most sacred being on earth. The holiest of all saints and above the distinctions of religion, he styled himself as the messiah reborn. Yet the Mughal emperor was not alone in doing so. In this field-changing study, A. Azfar Moin explores why Muslim sovereigns in this period began to imitate the exalted nature of Sufi saints. Uncovering a startling yet widespread phenomenon, he shows how the charismatic pull of sainthood (wilayat)—rather than the draw of religious law (sharia) or holy war (jihad)—inspired a new style of sovereignty in Islam. A work of history richly informed by the anthropology of religion and art, The Millennial Sovereign traces how royal dynastic cults and shrine-centered Sufism came together in the imperial cultures of Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India. By juxtaposing imperial chronicles, paintings, and architecture with theories of sainthood, apocalyptic treatises, and manuals on astrology and magic, Moin uncovers a pattern of Islamic politics shaped by Sufi and millennial motifs. He shows how alchemical symbols and astrological rituals enveloped the body of the monarch, casting him as both spiritual guide and material lord. Ultimately, Moin offers a striking new perspective on the history of Islam and the religious and political developments linking South Asia and Iran in early-modern times.
Download or read book Dilemmas of Inclusion written by Rafaela M. Dancygier and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Europe’s Muslim communities continue to grow, so does their impact on electoral politics and the potential for inclusion dilemmas. In vote-rich enclaves, Muslim views on religion, tradition, and gender roles can deviate sharply from those of the majority electorate, generating severe trade-offs for parties seeking to broaden their coalitions. Dilemmas of Inclusion explains when and why European political parties include Muslim candidates and voters, revealing that the ways in which parties recruit this new electorate can have lasting consequences. Drawing on original evidence from thousands of electoral contests in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain, Rafaela Dancygier sheds new light on when minority recruitment will match up with existing party positions and uphold electoral alignments and when it will undermine party brands and shake up party systems. She demonstrates that when parties are seduced by the quick delivery of ethno-religious bloc votes, they undercut their ideological coherence, fail to establish programmatic linkages with Muslim voters, and miss their opportunity to build cross-ethnic, class-based coalitions. Dancygier highlights how the politics of minority inclusion can become a testing ground for parties, showing just how far their commitments to equality and diversity will take them when push comes to electoral shove. Providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding the causes and consequences of minority political incorporation, and especially as these pertain to European Muslim populations, Dilemmas of Inclusion advances our knowledge about how ethnic and religious diversity reshapes domestic politics in today’s democracies.
Download or read book Islam Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment written by Ahmet T. Kuru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.
Download or read book Euro Turks written by Ayhan Kaya and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nationalism in Belgium written by Kas Deprez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about shifting national identities in Belgium. It is an attempt to show how these identities emerged and evolved. It aims at explaining why the Belgian identity, which in 1830 was so strong that it could create a new nation-state, has become so weak that today it has to accept a mere overarching role above and in competition with the new national loyalties. More and more people wonder whether this country will survive.
Download or read book Securitization of Islam A Vicious Circle written by Kathrin Lenz-Raymann and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diverse Islamic groups have triggered a »revival of Islam« in Central Asia in the last decades. As a result, there has been a general securitization of Islam by the governments: not only do they combat the terrorist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan but also outlaw popular groups such as the Gülen movement. However, strong repression of religion might lead to radicalization. Kathrin Lenz-Raymann tests this hypothesis with an agent-based computer simulation and enriches her study with interviews with international experts, leaders of political Islam and representatives of folk Islam. She concludes that ensuring religious rights is essential for national security.
Download or read book Islam Migration and Integration written by A. Kaya and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores contemporary debates on migration and integration, focussing on Euro-Muslims. It critically engages with republicanist and multiculaturalist policies of integration and claims that integration means more than cultural and linguistic assimilation of migrant communities.
Download or read book The Thirty Year Genocide written by Benny Morris and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Making of Salafism written by Henri Lauzière and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some Islamic scholars hold that Salafism is an innovative and rationalist effort at Islamic reform that emerged in the late nineteenth century but gradually disappeared in the mid twentieth. Others argue Salafism is an anti-innovative and antirationalist movement of Islamic purism that dates back to the medieval period yet persists today. Though they contradict each other, both narratives are considered authoritative, making it hard for outsiders to grasp the history of the ideology and its core beliefs. Introducing a third, empirically based genealogy, The Making of Salafism understands the concept as a recent phenomenon projected back onto the past, and it sees its purist evolution as a direct result of decolonization. Henri Lauzière builds his history on the transnational networks of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894–1987), a Moroccan Salafi who, with his associates, participated in the development of Salafism as both a term and a movement. Traveling from Rabat to Mecca, from Calcutta to Berlin, al-Hilali interacted with high-profile Salafi scholars and activists who eventually abandoned Islamic modernism in favor of a more purist approach to Islam. Today, Salafis tend to claim a monopoly on religious truth and freely confront other Muslims on theological and legal issues. Lauzière's pathbreaking history recognizes the social forces behind this purist turn, uncovering the popular origins of what has become a global phenomenon.
Download or read book The Caliphate of Man written by Andrew F. March and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?
Download or read book Islam and Turks in Belgium written by Mehmet Orhan and published by Palgrave Pivot. This book was released on 2021-02-07 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Brussels, Wallonia and Flanders, Islam and Turks in Belgium examines the interdependence between Muslim community and association. With a focus on social groups, religious structures and circles within Turkish populations, this book demonstrates how communal and associative movements operate through a combination of relationships of proximity and distance. Proximity is a way in which Muslim organisations establish religious, social, and cultural ties with communities. Distance, on the other hand, takes into account social, historical, and political elements from abroad, and refers to the relationship with the Muslim world more broadly. As this reciprocal web of relations gives rise to Islamic mobilisations, it leads to the emergence or persistence of different figures of authority within associations and communities who articulate traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic legitimacies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of religion, migration, race, ethnicity and Islamic studies.
Download or read book European Islam written by Samir Amghar and published by CEPS. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the place of the new Muslim minorities in society within the European Union. The authors explore the root causes of rising tensions and conflict between the new immigrant population and native Europeans over issues of Muslim identity, Islamist doctrines, and Islamophobia. They also provide integration models for the various EU countries and discuss the short- and long-range problems caused by socioeconomic discrimination against Muslims. Contributors include Imane Karich (International Crisis Group, Brussels), Isabelle Rigoni (Paris VIII University), Sara Silvestri (Cambridge University and City University, London), Valeria Amiraux (European University Institute, Florence), Chris Allen (University of Birmingham, UK), Tufyal Choudhury (Durham University, UK), and Bernard Godard (Ministry of Interior, Paris).
Download or read book Awakening Islam written by Stéphane Lacroix and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.
Download or read book Blind Spot written by Khaled Elgindy and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.
