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 Post Colonial Thought written by Hadi Enayat and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a theoretically and historically informed exploration of 'secularism' in Muslim contexts. It does this through a critical assessment of an influential tradition of thinking about Islam and secularism, derived from the work of anthropologist Talal Asad and his followers. The study employs the tools of comparative historical sociology and sociology of knowledge to engage with the assumptions of Asadian theory. Ultimately, Enayat argues against nativist assertions drawn from the experience of Western modernity and provides a qualified defense of secularism.
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 Questioning Secularism written by Hussein Ali Agrama and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.
Download or read book Islamic Exceptionalism written by Shadi Hamid and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 294 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 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.
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 Islam and Secularism written by Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas (Syed.) and published by Library of Islam, Limited. This book was released on 1997-12-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 The Crisis of Islamic Civilization written by Ali A. Allawi and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents—the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it—are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization. These forces have increasingly tested Islam and Islamic civilization for validity, adaptability, and the ability to hold on to the loyalty of Muslims, says Ali A. Allawi in his provocative new book. While the faith has proved resilient in the face of these challenges, other aspects of Islamic civilization have atrophied or died, Allawi contends, and Islamic civilization is now undergoing its last crisis. The book explores how Islamic civilization began to unravel under colonial rule, as its institutions, laws, and economies were often replaced by inadequate modern equivalents. Allawi also examines the backlash expressed through the increasing religiosity of Muslim societies and the spectacular rise of political Islam and its terrorist offshoots. Assessing the status of each of the building blocks of Islamic civilization, the author concludes that Islamic civilization cannot survive without the vital spirituality that underpinned it in the past. He identifies a key set of principles for moving forward, principles that will surprise some and anger others, yet clearly must be considered.
Download or read book Religious Secularity written by Naser Ghobadzadeh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Iran as a case study, Ghobadzadeh investigates the paradoxes of the Islamic state ideal. He develops the seemingly oxymoronic term "religious secularity" and uses it to describe the Islamic quest for a democratic secular state.
Download or read book The Other Muslims written by Z. Baran and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a unique collection of alternative Muslim voices, predominantly from Europe, who come from a variety of backgrounds - academia, theology, acting, activism - and who make a transformational contribution to the debate of the future of Islam and Muslims in the West.
Download or read book Saddam Husayn and Islam 1968 2003 written by Amatzia Baram and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saddam Hussein and Islam, 1968–2003, offers an intellectual history of the Bathi Party from the 1940s through 2003. Amatzia Baram focuses on the transition from its early insistence on "unity, freedom, and socialism" to its Islamization by the time it was toppled by U.S. forces in 2003, a change largely impelled by the need to rally Iraqis against Iran during their war of 1980–88. Baram reveals signs that Saddam Hussein himself became some sort of born-again Muslim, though these signs are inconclusive. Sources include open source material but also internal secret files and highly classified audiotapes of Saddam Hussein that were made available to researchers at the Conflict Records Research Center at National Defense University and some documents at the Hoover Institution.
Download or read book Pakistan Between Secularism and Islam written by Tarik Jan and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
