Secularizing Islamists?

Secularizing Islamists? PDF Author: Humeira Iqtidar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226384705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Secularizing Islamists?

Secularizing Islamists? PDF Author: Humeira Iqtidar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226384705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Sufis, Salafis and Islamists

Sufis, Salafis and Islamists PDF Author: Sadek Hamid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857727109
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
British Muslim activism has evolved constantly in recent decades. What have been its main groups and how do their leaders compete to attract followers? Which social and religious ideas from abroad are most influential? In this groundbreaking study, Sadek Hamid traces the evolution of Sufi, Salafi and Islamist activist groups in Britain, including The Young Muslims UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Salafi JIMAS organisation and Traditional Islam Network. With reference to second-generation British Muslims especially, he explains how these groups gain and lose support, embrace and reject foreign ideologies, and succeed and fail to provide youth with compelling models of British Muslim identity. Analyzing historical and firsthand community research, Hamid gives a compelling account of the complexity that underlies reductionist media narratives of Islamic activism in Britain.

Political Islam in the Age of Democratization

Political Islam in the Age of Democratization PDF Author: K. Bokhari
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137313498
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
The continued prominence of Islam in the struggle for democracy in the Muslim world has confounded Western democracy theorists who largely consider secularism a prerequisite for democratic transitions. Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai offer a comprehensive view of the complex nature of contemporary political Islam and its relationship to democracy.

Rethinking Political Islam

Rethinking Political Islam PDF Author: Shadi Hamid
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190649216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
For years, scholars hypothesized about what Islamists might do if they ever came to power. Now, they have answers: confusing ones. In the Levant, ISIS established a government by brute force, implementing an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tunisia's Ennahda Party governed in coalition with two secular parties, ratified a liberal constitution, and voluntarily stepped down from power. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's oldest Islamist movement, won power through free elections only to be ousted by a military coup. The strikingly disparate results of Islamist movements have challenged conventional wisdom on political Islam, forcing experts and Islamists to rethink some of their most basic assumptions. In Rethinking Political Islam, two of the leading scholars on Islamism, Shadi Hamid and William McCants, have gathered a group of leading specialists in the field to explain how an array of Islamist movements across the Middle East and Asia have responded. Unlike ISIS and other jihadist groups that garner the most media attention, these movements have largely opted for gradual change. Their choices, however, have been reshaped by the revolutionary politics of the region. The groups depicted in the volume capture the contradictions, successes, and failures of Islamism, providing a fascinating window into a rapidly changing Middle East. It is the first book to systematically assess the evolution of mainstream Islamist groups since the Arab uprisings and the rise of ISIS, covering 12 country cases. In each instance, contributors address key questions, including: gradual versus revolutionary approaches to change; the use of tactical or situational violence; attitudes toward the nation-state; and how ideology, religion, and political variables interact. For the first time in book form, readers will also hear directly from Islamist activists and leaders themselves, as they offer their own perspectives on the future of their movements. Islamists will have the opportunity to challenge the assumptions and arguments of some of the leading scholars of Islamism, in the spirit of constructive dialogue. Rethinking Political Islam includes three of the most important country cases outside the Middle East-Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan-allowing readers to consider a greater diversity of Islamist experiences. The book's contributors have immersed themselves in the world of political Islam and conducted original research in the field, resulting in rich accounts of what animates Islamist behavior.

Civil Democratic Islam

Civil Democratic Islam PDF Author: Cheryl Benard
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 0833036203
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
In the face of Islam's own internal struggles, it is not easy to see who we should support and how. This report provides detailed descriptions of subgroups, their stands on various issues, and what those stands may mean for the West. Since the outcomes can matter greatly to international community, that community might wish to influence them by providing support to appropriate actors. The author recommends a mixed approach of providing specific types of support to those who can influence the outcomes in desirable ways.

Imagining Pakistan

Imagining Pakistan PDF Author: Rasul Bakhsh Rais
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498553966
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Imagining Pakistan argues that the creation of Pakistan is a result of Muslim modernism in the Subcontinent, as it defined the struggle for identity, nationalism, and empowerment of Muslim communities. This modernist movement represented the ideals of inclusivity, equal rights, a liberal constitutional framework, and a shared sense of political community among diverse ethnic and regional groups. However, while this modernity was the ideal of Pakistan’s founders, it faced resistance from Islamists obsessed with recovering a past legacy of lost Muslim glory. A major threat to political modernism also came from the military that wanted to create a strong and secure Pakistan through ‘controlled’ democracy. Multiple interventions by the military and deviations from the foundational republican ideas left Pakistan in the rough sea of power struggles, causing institutional decay and creating space for the rise of radical Islam. Imagining Pakistan analyzes the institutional imbalance between the military and the civilian groups, the idea of the security state, and the Islamist social forces and movements that have been engaged in the politics of Islamic revival. It argues that Pakistan’s stability, security and progress will depend on pursuing the path of political modernity. Although the restoration of parliamentary democracy and the resilience of the Pakistani society are hopeful signs, resolving the critical issues that Pakistan faces today will require consolidation of democracy, better leadership, and a moderate and modernist vision of both, the state and the society.

Islamic Law and Human Rights

Islamic Law and Human Rights PDF Author: Moataz El Fegiery
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898449
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This book explores the development of the Muslim Brotherhood’s thinking on Islamic law and human rights, and argues that the Muslim Brotherhood has exacerbated, rather than solved, tensions between the two in Egypt. The organisation and its scholars have drawn on hard-line juristic opinions and reinvented certain concepts from Islamic traditions in ways that limit the scope of various human rights, and advocate for Islamic alternatives to international human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood’s practices in opposition and in power have been consistent with its literature. As an opposition party, it embraced human rights language in its struggle against an authoritarian regime, but advocated for broad restrictions on certain rights. However, its recent and short-lived experience in power provides evidence of its inclination to reinforce restrictions on religious freedom, freedom of expression and association, and the rights of religious minorities, and to reverse previous reforms related to women’s rights. The book concludes that the peaceful management of political and religious diversity in society cannot be realised under the Muslim Brotherhood’s model of a Shari‘a state. The study advocates for the drastic reformation of traditional Islamic law and state impartiality towards religion, as an alternative to the development of a Shari‘a state or exclusionary secularism. This transformation is, however, contingent upon significant long-term political and socio-cultural change, and it is clear that successfully expanding human rights protection in Egypt requires not the exclusion of Islamists, but their transformation. Islamists still have a large constituency and they are not the only actors who are ambivalent about human rights. Meanwhile, Islamic law also appears to continue to influence Egypt’s law. The book explores the prospects for certain constitutional and institutional measures to facilitate an evolutionary interpretation of Islamic law, provide a baseline of human rights and gradually integrate international human rights into Egyptian law.

Revival from Below

Revival from Below PDF Author: Brannon D. Ingram
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298004
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The Deoband movement—a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that quickly spread from colonial India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and even the United Kingdom and South Africa—has been poorly understood and sometimes feared. Despite being one of the most influential Muslim revivalist movements of the last two centuries, Deoband’s connections to the Taliban have dominated the attention it has received from scholars and policy-makers alike. Revival from Below offers an important corrective, reorienting our understanding of Deoband around its global reach, which has profoundly shaped the movement’s history. In particular, the author tracks the origins of Deoband’s controversial critique of Sufism, how this critique travelled through Deobandi networks to South Africa, as well as the movement’s efforts to keep traditionally educated Islamic scholars (`ulama) at the center of Muslim public life. The result is a nuanced account of this global religious network that argues we cannot fully understand Deoband without understanding the complex modalities through which it spread beyond South Asia.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory PDF Author: Leigh K. Jenco
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190253754
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description
Chapters emphasize exploration of substantive questions about political life in a range of global contexts, with attention to whether and how those questions may be shared, contested, or reformulated across differences of time, space, and experienceAn interdisciplinary volume that bridges the gaps between various traditions, regions, and concerns regarding political theoryProvides tags and keywords to aid navigation of the handbook and help readers trace disruptions, thematic connections, and conceptual contrasts across entries.

Scholars of Faith

Scholars of Faith PDF Author: Usha Sanyal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199099898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Since the late twentieth century, new institutions of Islamic learning for South Asian women and girls have emerged rapidly, particularly in urban areas and in the diaspora. This book reflects upon the increased access of Muslim girls and women to religious education and the purposes to which they seek to put their learning. Scholars of Faith is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two institutions of religious learning: the Jami‘a Nur madrasa in Shahjahanpur, North India, and Al-Huda International, an NGO that offers online courses on Islam, especially the Qur’an. In this monograph, Sanyal argues that Islamic religious education in the early twenty-first century—particularly for women—is thoroughly ‘modern’ and that this modernity, reflected in both old and new interpretations of religious texts, allows young South Asian women to evaluate their place in traditional structures of patriarchal authority in the public and private spheres in novel ways.