Author: Gabriele Marranci
Publisher: Berg
ISBN: 1845201582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
By observing the current crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, this book explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. In the end, jihad is what Muslims say it is. Marranci offers us a nuanced and anthropolitical understanding of Muslims' lives beyond the predictable clichés.
Author: Gabriele Marranci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189899
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Jihad' is a highly charged word. Often mistranslated as 'Holy War', it has become synonymous with terrorism. Current political events have entirely failed to take account of the subtlety and complexity of jihad. Like many concepts with a long history, different cultural ideas have influenced the religious aspects of jihad. As a result its original meaning has been adapted, modified and destabilized - never more than at the present time. How does jihad manifest itself in Muslims' everyday lives? What impact has 9/11 and its backlash had on jihad? By observing the current crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, this timely book explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. In the end, jihad is what Muslims say it is. Marranci offers us a nuanced and sophisticated anthropological understanding of Muslims' lives far beyond the predictable cliches.A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org
Author: Lamin O. Sanneh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199351619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and took hold, and what that tells us about the nature of religious and social change. At the heart of this process were clerics who used religious and legal scholarship to promote Islam. Once this clerical class emerged, it offered continuity and stability in the midst of political changes and cultural shifts, helping to inhibit the spread of radicalism, and subduing the urge to wage jihad. With its policy of religious and inter-ethnic accommodation, this pacifist tradition took Islam beyond traditional trade routes and kingdoms into remote districts of the Mali Empire, instilling a patient, Sufi-inspired, and jihad-negating impulse into religious life and practice. Islam was successful in Africa, Sanneh argues, not because of military might but because it was made African by Africans who adapted it to a variety of contexts.
Author: Kim Ezra Shienbaum
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
ISBN: 1933146192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
This collection of non Western scholarly voices is a long awaited remedy to the lack of critical commentary by Muslim intellectuals on the nature of modern Jihadi terrorism and the political debate within Islam over the direction of resistance to modernization and secularization of traditional societies. The work is divided into three parts: 1) Understanding the Islamist Mind. 2) Understanding Islamism and Politics. 3) Beyond Jihad: Expanding the Circle of Sanity. Major figures such as Dr. Ali Sina, Sayeed M. Said and Syed Kamran Mirza contribute previously unpublished essays; indeed the work has virtually new essays from all contributors. With historical introductions by Dr Kim Sheinbaum and Jamal Hasan. Introduction is by terrorism expert Dr.Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad and the PBS documentary " Jihad in America". " A long needed discussion by superb scholars...recommended for research libraries. Professor P duQuenoy, American University in Cairo.
Author: Abdul Gafoor Abdul Majeed Noorani
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781842772713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath have focused the world's attention on Islamic fundamentalism. This accessible volume aims to rebutt the misconceptions about Islam articulated by many European intellectuals down the centuries. For non-Muslims these still obstruct a clear understanding of both the nature of Islam and the history of Christian/Muslim interactions.
Author: Amina Wadud
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 178074451X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
A world-renowned professor of Islamic studies, Amina Wadud has long been at the forefront of what she calls the 'gender jihad,' the struggle for justice for women within the global Islamic community. In 2005, she made international headlines when she helped to promote new traditions by leading the Muslim Friday prayer in New York City, provoking a firestorm of media controversy and kindling charges of blasphemy among conservative Muslims worldwide. In this provocative book, "Inside the Gender Jihad", Wadud brings a wealth of experience from the trenches of the jihad to make a passionate argument for gender inclusiveness in the Muslim world. Knitting together scrupulous scholarship with lessons drawn from her own experiences as a woman, she explores the array of issues facing Muslim women today, including social status, education, sexuality, and leadership. A major contribution to the debate on women and Islam, Amina Wadud's vision for changing the status of women within Islam is both revolutionary and urgent.
Author: Michael Bonner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827388
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
What is jihad? Does it mean violence, as many non-Muslims assume? Or does it mean peace, as some Muslims insist? Because jihad is closely associated with the early spread of Islam, today's debate about the origin and meaning of jihad is nothing less than a struggle over Islam itself. In Jihad in Islamic History, Michael Bonner provides the first study in English that focuses on the early history of jihad, shedding much-needed light on the most recent controversies over jihad. To some, jihad is the essence of radical Islamist ideology, a synonym for terrorism, and even proof of Islam's innate violence. To others, jihad means a peaceful, individual, and internal spiritual striving. Bonner, however, shows that those who argue that jihad means only violence or only peace are both wrong. Jihad is a complex set of doctrines and practices that have changed over time and continue to evolve today. The Quran's messages about fighting and jihad are inseparable from its requirements of generosity and care for the poor. Jihad has often been a constructive and creative force, the key to building new Islamic societies and states. Jihad has regulated relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, in peace as well as in war. And while today's "jihadists" are in some ways following the "classical" jihad tradition, they have in other ways completely broken with it. Written for general readers who want to understand jihad and its controversies, Jihad in Islamic History will also interest specialists because of its original arguments.
Author: Olivier Roy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1849046980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
Islamic State has replaced Al Qaeda as the great global threat of the twenty-first century, the bogeyman we have all come to fear. But Daesh started as a local movement, rooted in the resentment of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria. It is they who have lost most in the geo-strategic shift in the balance of power in the region over the last thirty years, as Iranian-backed Shias have mobilised politically and advanced on the social and economic fronts. How has Islamic State been able to muster support far beyond its initial constituency in the Arab world and to attract tens of thousands of foreign volunteers, including converts to Islam, and seemingly countless supporters online? In this compelling intervention into the debate about Islamic State's origins and future prospects, the renowned French sociologist of religion, Olivier Roy, argues that the group mobilised a highly sophisticated narrative, reviving the myth of the Caliphate and recasting it into a modern story of heroism, death and nihilism, using a very contemporary aesthetic of violence, well entrenched amid a youth culture that has turned global and violent.
Author: Laurent Murawiec
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139474626
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
This book examines contemporary jihad as a cult of violence and power. All jihadi groups, whether Shiite or Sunni, Arab or not, are characterized by a similar bloodlust. Murawiec characterizes this belief structure as identical to that of Europe's medieval millenarians and apocalyptics, arguing that both jihadis and their European cousins shared in a Gnostic ideology: a God-given mission endowed the Elect with supernatural powers and placed them above the common law of mankind. Although the ideology of jihad is essentially Islamic, Murawiec traces the political technologies used by modern jihad to the Bolsheviks. Their doctrines of terror as a system of rule were appropriated by radical Islam through multiple lines of communication. This book brings history, anthropology, and theology to bear to understand the mind of jihad that has declared war on the West and the world.
Author: Asma Afsaruddin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199730938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
In popular and academic literature, jihad is predominantly assumed to refer exclusively to armed combat, and martyrdom in the Islamic context is understood to be invariably of the military kind. This perspective, derived mainly from legal texts, has led to discussions of jihad and martyrdom as concepts with fixed, universal meanings divorced from the socio-political circumstances in which they have been deployed through the centuries. Asma Afsaruddin studies in a more holistic manner the range of significations that can be ascribed to the term jihad from the earliest period to the present and historically contextualizes the competing discourses that developed over time. Many assumptions about the military jihad and martyrdom in Islam are thereby challenged and deconstructed. A comprehensive interrogation of varied sources reveals early and multiple competing definitions of a word that in combination with the phrase fi sabil Allah translates literally to "striving in the path of God." Contemporary radical Islamists have appropriated this language to exhort their cadres to armed political opposition, which they legitimize under the rubric of jihad. Afsaruddin shows that the multivalent connotations of jihad and shahid recovered from the formative period lead us to question the assertions of those who maintain that belligerent and militant interpretations preserve the earliest and only authentic understanding of these two key terms. Retrieval of these multiple perspectives has important implications for our world today in which the concepts of jihad and martyrdom are still being fiercely debated.
