Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy PDF Author: Nader Hashemi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199717514
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Islam's relationship to liberal-democratic politics has emerged as one of the most pressing and contentious issues in international affairs. In Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, Nader Hashemi challenges the widely held belief among social scientists that religious politics and liberal-democratic development are structurally incompatible. This book argues for a rethinking of democratic theory so that it incorporates the variable of religion in the development of liberal democracy. In the process, it proves that an indigenous theory of Muslim secularism is not only possible, but is a necessary requirement for the advancement of liberal democracy in Muslim societies.

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy PDF Author: Nader Hashemi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199717514
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Islam's relationship to liberal-democratic politics has emerged as one of the most pressing and contentious issues in international affairs. In Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, Nader Hashemi challenges the widely held belief among social scientists that religious politics and liberal-democratic development are structurally incompatible. This book argues for a rethinking of democratic theory so that it incorporates the variable of religion in the development of liberal democracy. In the process, it proves that an indigenous theory of Muslim secularism is not only possible, but is a necessary requirement for the advancement of liberal democracy in Muslim societies.

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy

Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy PDF Author: Nader Hashemi
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195321243
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Arguing for a review of democratic theory to incorporate religion in the development of liberal democracy, the author challenges the widely held belief among social scientists that religious politics are structurally incompatible with the advancement of liberal democracy in Muslim societies.

Muslim Secular Democracy

Muslim Secular Democracy PDF Author: Lily Zubaidah Rahim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137282053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The book offers a nuanced and innovative analyses of the emergence of an inclusive secular democratic state paradigm which incorporates the sacred within the framework of secular democracy in the Muslim World.

Islamic Exceptionalism

Islamic Exceptionalism PDF Author: Shadi Hamid
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466866721
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
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.

Islam and Liberal Citizenship

Islam and Liberal Citizenship PDF Author: Andrew F. March
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199838585
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Some argue that Muslims have no tradition of separation of church and state and therefore can't participate in secular, pluralist society. At the other extreme, some Muslims argue that it is the duty of all believers to resist western forms of government and to impose Islamic law. Andrew F. March demonstrates that there are very strong and authentically Islamic arguments for accepting the demands of citizenship in a liberal democracy, many of them found even in medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he shows, it is precisely the fact that Rawlsian political liberalism makes no claim.

Islam in Liberalism

Islam in Liberalism PDF Author: Joseph A. Massad
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620636X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
“Demonstrates that Western liberal ‘democracy’, portrayed as foreign to ‘Islam’, necessarily serves an imperial project. . . . timely and controversial.” —Politics, Religion & Ideology Islam is often associated with words like oppression, totalitarianism, intolerance, cruelty, misogyny, and homophobia, while its presumed antonyms are Christianity, the West, liberalism, individualism, freedom, citizenship, and democracy. In the most alarmist views, the West’s most cherished values—freedom, equality, and tolerance—are said to be endangered by Islam worldwide. Joseph Massad’s Islam in Liberalism explores what Islam has become in today’s world. He seeks to understand how anxieties about tyranny, intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia, seen in the politics of the Middle East, are projected onto Islam itself. Massad shows that through this projection Europe emerges as democratic and tolerant, feminist, and pro-LGBT rights—or, in short, Islam-free. Massad documents the Christian and liberal idea that we should missionize democracy, women’s rights, sexual rights, tolerance, equality, and even therapies to cure Muslims of their un-European, un-Christian, and illiberal ways. Along the way he sheds light on a variety of controversial topics, including the meanings of democracy—and the ideological assumption that Islam is not compatible with it while Christianity is. Islam in Liberalism is an unflinching critique of Western assumptions and of the liberalism that Europe and America present as salvation to Islam. “Essential reading for all scholars of Islam and Middle East politics.” —Cambridge Review of International Affairs “Reminds us that in order to move beyond scholarship revolving around a simplistic binarism between West and non-West, we must never forget how this opposition has shaped and continues to actively influence scholarship today.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Why the West Fears Islam

Why the West Fears Islam PDF Author: J. Cesari
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137121203
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Jocelyne Cesari examines the idea that Islam might threaten the core values of the West through testimonies from Muslims in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the US. Her book is an unprecedented exploration of Muslim religious and political life based on several years of field work in Europe and in the United States.

Liberalism Without Secularism?

Liberalism Without Secularism? PDF Author: Brian Glancy
Publisher: Dublin
ISBN: 9781856075619
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The problem of democratisation in the Arab Middle East has recently been a topic of great debate. Theories on the compatibility of Islam with democracy have been put forward, from within the Arab world and outside it, with accomodationist and rejectionist views available in both spheres. The rise of political Islam (or 'Islamism') since the late seventies has complicated the picture significantly, with new organisations calling for greater fidelity to Islamic principles on the part of the ruling regimes, with some suggesting that the divine revelation in itself provides sufficient guidance for even a modern Muslim polity. Such claims raise a challenge to the conventional wisdom that has long prevailed in Western countries, and has since spread to many others, which is that religion ought to be excluded from politics, for the good of both. As the title suggests, the big question that the present work seeks to address is whether liberal democracy can live without secularism.

Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective

Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective PDF Author: Jocelyne Cesari
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019878855X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The relationship between secularism, democracy, religion, and gender equality has been a complex one across Western democracies and still remains contested. When we turn to Muslim countries, the situation is even more multifaceted. In the views of many western commentators, the question of Women Rights is the litmus test for Muslim societies in the age of democracy and liberalism. Especially since the Arab Awakening, the issue is usually framed as the opposition between liberal advocates of secular democracy and religious opponents of women's full equality. Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective critically re-engages this too simple binary opposition by reframing the debate around Islam and women's rights within a broader comparative literature. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of disciplines, it examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality. Part One addresses the nexus of religion, law, gender, and democracy through different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, anthropology, political science, law). Part Two localizes the implementation of this nexus between law, gender, and democracy and provides contextualized responses to questions raised in Part One. The contributors explore the situation of Muslim women's rights in minority conditions to shed light on the gender politics in the modernization of the nation and to ponder on the role of Islam in gender inequality across different Muslim countries.

Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy

Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy PDF Author: Jean L. Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540736
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.