Rebranding Islam

Rebranding Islam PDF Author: James Bourk Hoesterey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804796386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar, known affectionately by Indonesians as "Aa Gym" (elder brother Gym), rose to fame via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. In Rebranding Islam James B. Hoesterey draws on two years' study of this charismatic leader and his message of Sufi ideas blended with Western pop psychology and management theory to examine new trends in the religious and economic desires of an aspiring middle class, the political predicaments bridging self and state, and the broader themes of religious authority, economic globalization, and the end(s) of political Islam. At Gymnastiar's Islamic school, television studios, and MQ Training complex, Hoesterey observed this charismatic preacher developing a training regimen called Manajemen Qolbu into Indonesia's leading self-help program via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. Hoesterey's analysis explains how Gymnastiar articulated and mobilized Islamic idioms of ethics and affect as a way to offer self-help solutions for Indonesia's moral, economic, and political problems. Hoesterey then shows how, after Aa Gym's fall, the former celebrity guru was eclipsed by other television preachers in what is the ever-changing mosaic of Islam in Indonesia. Although Rebranding Islam tells the story of one man, it is also an anthropology of Islamic psychology.

Rebranding Islam

Rebranding Islam PDF Author: James Bourk Hoesterey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804796386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar, known affectionately by Indonesians as "Aa Gym" (elder brother Gym), rose to fame via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. In Rebranding Islam James B. Hoesterey draws on two years' study of this charismatic leader and his message of Sufi ideas blended with Western pop psychology and management theory to examine new trends in the religious and economic desires of an aspiring middle class, the political predicaments bridging self and state, and the broader themes of religious authority, economic globalization, and the end(s) of political Islam. At Gymnastiar's Islamic school, television studios, and MQ Training complex, Hoesterey observed this charismatic preacher developing a training regimen called Manajemen Qolbu into Indonesia's leading self-help program via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. Hoesterey's analysis explains how Gymnastiar articulated and mobilized Islamic idioms of ethics and affect as a way to offer self-help solutions for Indonesia's moral, economic, and political problems. Hoesterey then shows how, after Aa Gym's fall, the former celebrity guru was eclipsed by other television preachers in what is the ever-changing mosaic of Islam in Indonesia. Although Rebranding Islam tells the story of one man, it is also an anthropology of Islamic psychology.

Sharia Transformations

Sharia Transformations PDF Author: Michael G. Peletz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520974476
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Few symbols in today’s world are as laden and fraught as sharia—an Arabic-origin term referring to the straight path, the path God revealed for humans, the norms and rules guiding Muslims on that path, and Islamic law and normativity as enshrined in sacred texts or formal statute. Yet the ways in which Muslim men and women experience the myriad dimensions of sharia often go unnoticed and unpublicized. So too do recent historical changes in sharia judiciaries and contemporary strategies on the part of political and religious elites, social engineers, and brand stewards to shape, solidify, and rebrand these institutions. Sharia Transformations is an ethnographic, historical, and theoretical study of the practice and lived entailments of sharia in Malaysia, arguably the most economically successful Muslim-majority nation in the world. The book focuses on the routine everyday practices of Malaysia’s sharia courts and the changes that have occurred in the court discourses and practices in recent decades. Michael G. Peletz approaches Malaysia’s sharia judiciary as a global assemblage and addresses important issues in the humanistic and social-scientific literature concerning how Malays and other Muslims engage ethical norms and deal with law, social justice, and governance in a rapidly globalizing world.

Islam in a Globalizing World

Islam in a Globalizing World PDF Author: Thomas W. Simons
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804748330
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
A former U.S. ambassador and author of The End of the Cold War? takes readers on a tour of Islamic history, reconstructing the complex historical and geopolitical trends that have created modern Islam. Simultaneous. (Islam)

Improvisational Islam

Improvisational Islam PDF Author: Nur Amali Ibrahim
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
"In this landmark account, Nur Amali Ibrahim paints a nuanced, detailed portrait of students seeking to reconcile some of the major social forces that inflect everyday life across the Muslim world—Islam, liberalism, radicalism, and secularism—as they strive to both find and define their place in a fast-changing, democratizing nation. Ibrahim demonstrates the critical importance of scholarly attention in both anthropology and religious studies to this vibrant country—the world’s largest Muslim nation." ―Daromir Rudnyckyj, Associate Professor, University of Victoria, and author of the award-winning Spiritual Economies Improvisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each trying to envision alternative ways of being Muslim independent from established religious and political authorities. One group draws from methods originating from the business world, like accounting, auditing, and self-help, to promote a puritanical understanding of the religion and spearhead Indonesia’s spiritual rebirth. A second group reads Islamic scriptures alongside the western human sciences. Both groups, he argues, show a great degree of improvisation and creativity in their interpretations of Islam. These experimental forms of religious improvisations and practices have developed in a specific Indonesian political context that has evolved after the deposal of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime in 1998. At the same time, Improvisational Islam suggests that the Indonesian case study brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on and are inspired by not only their holy scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those originating in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as uncompromising and adversarial to the West and where bans and walls are deemed necessary to keep them out, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell.

Expressing Islam

Expressing Islam PDF Author: Greg Fealy
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
ISBN: 9812308512
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
As the forces of globalisation and modernisation buffet Islam and other world religions, Indonesia's 200 million Muslims are expressing their faith in ever more complex ways. This book examines some of the ways in which Islam is expressed in contemporary Indonesian life and politics. Editors from Australian National University.

The Story of Reason in Islam

The Story of Reason in Islam PDF Author: Sari Nusseibeh
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503600580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In The Story of Reason in Islam, leading public intellectual and political activist Sari Nusseibeh narrates a sweeping intellectual history—a quest for knowledge inspired by the Qu'ran and its language, a quest that employed Reason in the service of Faith. Eschewing the conventional separation of Faith and Reason, he takes a fresh look at why and how Islamic reasoning evolved over time. He surveys the different Islamic schools of thought and how they dealt with major philosophical issues, showing that Reason pervaded all disciplines, from philosophy and science to language, poetry, and law. Along the way, the best known Muslim philosophers are introduced in a new light. Countering received chronologies, in this story Reason reaches its zenith in the early seventeenth century; it then trails off, its demise as sudden as its appearance. Thereafter, Reason loses out to passive belief, lifeless logic, and a self-contained legalism—in other words, to a less flexible Islam. Nusseibeh's speculations as to why this occurred focus on the fortunes and misfortunes of classical Arabic in the Islamic world. Change, he suggests, may only come from the revivification of language itself.

Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition

Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition PDF Author: Samira Haj
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804769753
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers—Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703–1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849–1905)—each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

The New Spirit of Islamism

The New Spirit of Islamism PDF Author: Ezgi Basaran
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755652967
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book explains the aspirations and concerns of Islamist actors in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings by looking at two sets of relationships between Turkey's ruling AKP and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the AKP and Tunisia's Ennahda. It presents a unique analysis of the interplay between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood, characterizing the actors, the structure and the main features of the relationship and thereby illuminating a political confluence among these three critical Islamist entities in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. Existing scholarship has assumed that this relationship revolves primarily around an ideological Islamist agenda, however, this research demonstrates a more complex and nuanced situation. Ezgi Basaran puts forward that the interplay was not based on an aspiration of building an ideological Islamist bloc in the MENA region, but rather revolved around the concept of political success and had a strong neoliberal ethos. Basaran draws on data collected from over 60 interviews with high-level members of the AKP, Ennahda and Muslim Brotherhood to demonstrate how, in the hope of achieving success and legitimization, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood have relied on the managerial prescriptions provided by the AKP. The contents of this success formula were derived from the AKP's experience as an Islamist party in power since 2002 and includes tactics on crisis evasion, legitimization, winning elections and maintaining power.

Between Muslims

Between Muslims PDF Author: J. Andrew Bush
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150361459X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Within the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.

Indonesian Pluralities

Indonesian Pluralities PDF Author: Robert W. Hefner
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268108633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The crisis of multiculturalism in the West and the failure of the Arab uprisings in the Middle East have pushed the question of how to live peacefully within a diverse society to the forefront of global discussion. Against this backdrop, Indonesia has taken on a particular importance: with a population of 265 million people (87.7 percent of whom are Muslim), Indonesia is both the largest Muslim-majority country in the world and the third-largest democracy. In light of its return to electoral democracy from the authoritarianism of the former New Order regime, some analysts have argued that Indonesia offers clear proof of the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Skeptics argue, however, that the growing religious intolerance that has marred the country’s political transition discredits any claim of the country to democratic exemplarity. Based on a twenty-month project carried out in several regions of Indonesia, Indonesian Pluralities: Islam, Citizenship, and Democracy shows that, in assessing the quality and dynamics of democracy and citizenship in Indonesia today, we must examine not only elections and official politics, but also the less formal, yet more pervasive, processes of social recognition at work in this deeply plural society. The contributors demonstrate that, in fact, citizen ethics are not static discourses but living traditions that co-evolve in relation to broader patterns of politics, gender, religious resurgence, and ethnicity in society. Indonesian Pluralities offers important insights on the state of Indonesian politics and society more than twenty years after its return to democracy. It will appeal to political scholars, public analysts, and those interested in Islam, Southeast Asia, citizenship, and peace and conflict studies around the world. Contributors: Robert W. Hefner, Erica M. Larson, Kelli Swazey, Mohammad Iqbal Ahnaf, Marthen Tahun, Alimatul Qibtiyah, and Zainal Abidin Bagir