Rethinking Reform in Higher Education

Rethinking Reform in Higher Education PDF Author: Ziauddin Sardar
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN: 1565647262
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The Reform in Higher Education in Muslim Societies is in sum a paradigm shift in perspective driven by important considerations including the aims of education itself. It may require reforming existing disciplines, inventing new ones, as well as working in conjunction with current knowledge(s) and discourses by taking effective account of the ethical, spiritual norms of Muslim society, the guiding principles that it operates under, which in turn mark the underlying basis of its makeup and spiritual identity. Rather than creating divisions, reform of Higher Education in Muslim Societies recognizes the plurality and diversity of the modern networked world, and seeks to replace sterile and uniform approaches to knowledge with a broader and more creative understanding of reality as lived on different soils and different cultures. Moderation, balance and effective communication are paramount features of the underlying philosophy.

Young Muslim America

Young Muslim America PDF Author: Muna Ali
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190664436
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Introduction -- Divergent origins and converging histories -- The "identty crisis" of younger Muslims -- "Pure/true Islam" vs "cultural Islam" -- The "Islamization of America" -- Crafting an American Muslim community -- Creating an American Muslim culture -- Closing thoughts.

The Making of Islamic Heritage

The Making of Islamic Heritage PDF Author: Trinidad Rico
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811040710
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Offering key insights into critical debates on the construction, management and destruction of heritage in Muslim contexts, this volume considers how Islamic heritages are constructed through texts and practices which award heritage value. It examines how the monolithic representation of Islamic heritage (as a singular construct) can be enriched by the true diversity of Islamic heritages and how endangerment and vulnerability in this type of heritage construct can be re-conceptualized. Assessing these questions through an interdisciplinary lens including heritage studies, anthropology, history, conservation, religious studies and archaeology, this pivot covers global and local examples including heritage case studies from Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Pakistan.

Rethinking Reform in Higher Education

Rethinking Reform in Higher Education PDF Author: Ziauddin Sardar
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN: 1565647262
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Reform in Higher Education in Muslim Societies is in sum a paradigm shift in perspective driven by important considerations including the aims of education itself. It may require reforming existing disciplines, inventing new ones, as well as working in conjunction with current knowledge(s) and discourses by taking effective account of the ethical, spiritual norms of Muslim society, the guiding principles that it operates under, which in turn mark the underlying basis of its makeup and spiritual identity. Rather than creating divisions, reform of Higher Education in Muslim Societies recognizes the plurality and diversity of the modern networked world, and seeks to replace sterile and uniform approaches to knowledge with a broader and more creative understanding of reality as lived on different soils and different cultures. Moderation, balance and effective communication are paramount features of the underlying philosophy.

American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences PDF Author: Jonathan Brown
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), established in 1984, is a quarterly, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world including subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam.

Suburban Islam

Suburban Islam PDF Author: Justine Howe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863064
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
For many American Muslims, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror marked a rise in intense scrutiny of their religious lives and political loyalties. In Suburban Islam, Justine Howe explores the rise of "third spaces," social surroundings that are neither home nor work, created by educated, middle-class American Muslims in the wake of increased marginalization. Third spaces provide them the context to challenge their exclusion from the American mainstream and to enact visions for American Islam different from those they encounter in their local mosques. One such third space is the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation, a family-oriented Muslim institution in Chicago's suburbs. Howe uses Webb as a window into how Muslim American identity is formed through the interplay of communal interpretive practices, institutional rituals, and everyday life. The diverse Muslim families of the Webb Foundation have transformed hallmark secular suburbanite activities like football games, apple picking, and camping trips into acts of piety--rituals they describe as the enactment of "proper" American Muslim identity. Howe analyzes the relationship between these consumerist practices and the Webb Foundation's adult educational programs, through which participants critique what they call "cultural Islam." They envision creating an "indigenous" American Islam characterized by gender equality, reason, and pluralism. Through changing configurations of ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class, Webb participants imagine a "seamless identity" that marries their Muslim faith to an idealized vision of suburban middle-class America. Suburban Islam captures the fragile optimism of educated, cosmopolitan American Muslims during the Obama presidency, as they imagined a post-racial, pluralistic, and culturally resonant American Islam. Even as this vision aims to be more inclusive, it also reflects enduring inequalities of race, class, and gender.

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.

Speaking Qur'an

Speaking Qur'an PDF Author: Timur R. Yuskaev
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611177952
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
An exploration of how Muslims in the United States have interpreted the Qur'an in ways that make it speak to their American realities In Speaking Qur'an: An American Scripture, Timur R. Yuskaev examines how Muslim Americans have been participating in their country's cultural, social, religious, and political life. Essential to this process, he shows, is how the Qur'an has become an evermore deeply American text that speaks to central issues in the lives of American Muslims through the spoken-word interpretations of Muslim preachers, scholars,and activists. Yuskaev illustrates this process with four major case studies that highlight dialogues between American Muslim public intellectuals and their audiences. First, through an examination of the work of Fazlur Rahman, he addresses the question of how the premodern Qur'an is translated across time into modern, American settings. Next the author contemplates the application of contemporary concepts of gender to renditions of the Qur'an alongside Amina Wadud's American Muslim discourses on justice.Then he demonstrates how the Qur'an becomes a text of redemption in W. D. Mohammed's oral interpretation of the Qur'an as speaking directly to the African American experience. Finally he shows how, before and after 9/11, Hamza Yusuf invoked the Qur'an as a guide to the political life of American Muslims. Set within the rapidly transforming contexts of the last half century, and central to the volume, are the issues of cultural translation and embodiment of sacred texts that Yuskaev explores by focusing on the Qur'an as a spoken scripture. The process of the Qur'an becoming an American sacred text, he argues, is ongoing. It comes to life when the Qur'an is spoken and embodied by its American faithful.

Defending Muḥammad in Modernity

Defending Muḥammad in Modernity PDF Author: SherAli Tareen
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 026810672X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 663

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.

Repentance and the Return to God

Repentance and the Return to God PDF Author: Atif Khalil
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846911X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The first major study of the idea of repentance, or tawba, in Islam. This book offers the first extensive treatment in a European language of tawba in Islam. Conventionally translated as “repentance,” tawba includes the broader sense of returning to God. Khalil examines this wider notionin the early period of Sufism with a particular focus on the formative years of the tradition between Mu??sib? and Ab? ??lib al-Makk?. Beginning with an extensive survey of the semantic field of the term as outlined in Arabic lexicography, Khalil offers a detailed analysis of the concept in Muslim scripture. He then examines tawba as a complex psychological process involving interior conversion and a complete, unwavering commitment to the spiritual life. The ideas of a number of prominent figures from the first few centuries of Islam are used to illuminate the historical development of tawba and its role in early praxis-oriented Sufism. “In this exemplary study, Khalil lays bare the contours of the key concept of repentance in the spiritual psychology of early Islam with admirable sensitivity and ease—a remarkable achievement.” — Ahmet T. Karamustafa, author of Sufism: The Formative Period “Atif Khalil’s Repentance and the Return to God is an illuminating account of the idea of tawba as attested to in the early Sufi literature from the ninth through the tenth centuries. Starting with a painstaking semantic examination of the Qur’?nic passages related to repentance from sin and turning to God in remorse and search of pardon, the author traces the development of these motifs from early Sufi didactic adages to their subsequent rearticulation in the sophisticated psychological discourses of such major lights of classical Sufism such as al-Mu??sib?, Sahl al-Tustar?, al-Kharr?z, al-Junayd, and Ab? ??lib al-Makk?. A must read for both lay readers interested in comparative mysticism/religions and specialists on Islam, Sufism, and Islamic spiritual and intellectual history.” — Alexander Knysh, author of Islamic Mysticism: A Short History and Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism

American Journal of Islam and Society (AJIS) - Volume 37 Issues 3-4

American Journal of Islam and Society (AJIS) - Volume 37 Issues 3-4 PDF Author: Timothy Gutmann
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
In an editorial essay, Ovamir Anjum reflects on the current moment of (and literature on) de-globalization, considering in turn conservative and liberal arguments. He concludes by raising several questions which de-globalization opens, key among them the challenges posed by ongoing ecological degradation. In the first research article, Timothy Gutmann offers the term “propaedeutic” to refer to the critical pedagogy necessary for teaching unfamiliar material to audiences whose sensibilities and expectations are already structured by distinctive anxieties and concerns. Gutmann addresses common caricatures of Islamic law and suggests that Islamic traditions may themselves contain a propaedeutic potential for teaching Islamic studies in the North American context. In the second research article, Brannon Wheeler traces a possible Islamic “Responsibility To Protect.” By focusing on Islamist exegesis of Q 3:110 and on classical and contemporary understandings of migration, Wheeler ultimately notes the political and intellectual compromises involved in accepting certain instances of violence and rejecting others. In the third research article, Abbas Ahsan makes an analytic-philosophical case for radical epistemic relativism. Our inability to conceive of the logically impossible, he concludes, is itself a testimony that God transcends the laws of logic. Next, a review essay is followed by ten book reviews; in this issue’s Forum article, Scott Lucas introduces readers to the sophisticated work of four Muslim thinkers of the 5th/11th century: Miskawayh, al-Hakim al-Jishumi, Ibn Hazm, and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi. Lucas encourages Muslims to emulate these figures’ practices of reading widely, with intellectual generosity and commitment, and to insist on the relationship between knowledge and practice.