The Politics of Writing Islam

The Politics of Writing Islam PDF Author: Mahmut Mutman
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441162496
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Politics of Writing Islam provides a much-needed critique of existing forms of studying, writing and representing Islam in the West. Through critiquing ethnographic, literary, critical, psychoanalytic and theological discourses, the author reveals the problematic underlying cultural and theoretical presuppositions. Mutman demonstrates how their approach reflects the socially, politically and economically unequal relationship between the West and Islam. While offering a critical insight into concepts such as writing, power, post-colonialism, difference and otherness on a theoretical level, Mutman reveals a different perspective on Islam by emphasizing its living, everyday and embodied aspects in dynamic relation with the outside world - in contrast to the stereotyped authoritarian and backward religion characterized by an omnipotent God. Throughout, Mutman develops an approach to culture as an embodied, everyday, living and ever changing practice. He argues that Islam should be perceived precisely in this way, that is, as an open, heterogeneous, interpretive, multiple and worldly belief system within the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism, and as one that is contested within as well as outside its 'own' culture.

The Politics of Writing Islam

The Politics of Writing Islam PDF Author: Mahmut Mutman
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441162496
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
The Politics of Writing Islam provides a much-needed critique of existing forms of studying, writing and representing Islam in the West. Through critiquing ethnographic, literary, critical, psychoanalytic and theological discourses, the author reveals the problematic underlying cultural and theoretical presuppositions. Mutman demonstrates how their approach reflects the socially, politically and economically unequal relationship between the West and Islam. While offering a critical insight into concepts such as writing, power, post-colonialism, difference and otherness on a theoretical level, Mutman reveals a different perspective on Islam by emphasizing its living, everyday and embodied aspects in dynamic relation with the outside world - in contrast to the stereotyped authoritarian and backward religion characterized by an omnipotent God. Throughout, Mutman develops an approach to culture as an embodied, everyday, living and ever changing practice. He argues that Islam should be perceived precisely in this way, that is, as an open, heterogeneous, interpretive, multiple and worldly belief system within the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism, and as one that is contested within as well as outside its 'own' culture.

Gender, Politics, and Islam

Gender, Politics, and Islam PDF Author: Therese Saliba
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788125027423
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In a time of increasing hostility towards Islam, this collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, these groundbreaking essays focus on the complex relations of power that shape women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book brings together Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora, from Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and Yemen to explore how women negotiate indigenous identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights. This collection shows that Islam is a heterogeneous set of historically and contexually variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to local and transnational cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, possibly revolutionary paradigm, to Eurocentric liberal humanism and the individualism of western feminism? Is Islam any more oppressive to women than the workings of the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women discursively constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a problematic tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency that produces contradictory effects for women participants.

Global Political Islam

Global Political Islam PDF Author: Peter Mandaville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134341350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
An accessible and comprehensive account of the global dimensions of political Islam in the twenty-first century, explaining political Islam, nationalism and globalization and providing a detailed account of Al Qaeda.

The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics PDF Author: John L. Esposito
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190631937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 701

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Book Description
Over the past three decades, scholars, government analysts and terrorism experts have examined the relationship between Islam and politics. But specialists have tended to limit their analysis to a specific country or focus. Few works have provided a geographically comprehensive, in-depth analysis. Since 9/11, another wave of literature on political Islam and global terrorism has appeared, much of it superficial and sensationalist. This situation underscores the need for a comprehensive, analytical, and in-depth examination of Islam and politics in the post-9/11 era and in an increasingly globalizing world. The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics, with contributions from prominent scholars and specialists, provides a comprehensive analysis of what we know and where we are in the study of political Islam. It enables scholars, students, and policymakers to understand the interaction of Islam and politics and the multiple and diverse roles of Islamic movements, as well as issues of authoritarianism and democratization, religious extremism and terrorism regionally and globally.

The Future of Political Islam

The Future of Political Islam PDF Author: Graham E. Fuller
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403965561
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Graham E. Fuller brings a lifetime of experience in the Muslim world to shed light on how common, even universal, political behavior takes on a distinctively Islamic guise in the Muslim world. By examining the social, economic and political context, he explains that the struggle between the fundamentalists and liberals will determine the future of political Islam. This sweeping survey of trends in the Muslim world, from Morocco to the Philippines, explores the diversity of Islamic political activity and makes clear that Islamic political movements represent a broad spectrum of outlook and behavior. Whether traditional or liberal, these movements have become an important vehicle for the concerns, aspirations and grievances of vast numbers of Muslims worldwide and are a natural outgrowth of Muslim history. Fuller contends that while political Islam is the dominant intellectual current, a focus on radicalism and extremism blinds us from another trend: liberal political Islam. The issues are not what is Islam, but what Muslims want, and not whether Islam will play a central role in politics, but which Islam. As Islam has become the vocabulary for political and social expression, it has come to serve various agendas.

Awakening Islam

Awakening Islam PDF Author: Stéphane Lacroix
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674265254
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.

Islam and the Foundations of Political Power

Islam and the Foundations of Political Power PDF Author: Ali Abdel Razek
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748689400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The translation of an essay first published in Egypt in 1925, which took the contemporaries of its author by storm. At a time when the Muslim world was in great turmoil over the question of the abolition of the caliphate by Mustapha Kamal Ataturk in Turke

Young Islam

Young Islam PDF Author: Avi Max Spiegel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086643X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
How the competition for young recruits is creating rivalries among Islamists today Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. Young Islam takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support—a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting visions of Islam itself. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among rank-and-file activists in Morocco, Avi Spiegel shows how Islamist movements are encountering opposition from an unexpected source—each other. In vivid and compelling detail, he describes the conflicts that arise as Islamist groups vie with one another for new recruits, and the unprecedented fragmentation that occurs as members wrangle over a shared urbanized base. Looking carefully at how political Islam is lived, expressed, and understood by young people, Spiegel moves beyond the top-down focus of current research. Instead, he makes the compelling case that Islamist actors are shaped more by their relationships to each other than by their relationships to the state or even to religious ideology. By focusing not only on the texts of aging elites but also on the voices of diverse and sophisticated Muslim youths, Spiegel exposes the shifting and contested nature of Islamist movements today—movements that are being reimagined from the bottom up by young Islam. The first book to shed light on this new and uncharted era of Islamist pluralism in the Middle East and North Africa, Young Islam uncovers the rivalries that are redefining the next generation of political Islam.

Understanding Political Islam

Understanding Political Islam PDF Author: François Burgat
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526143461
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Understanding Political Islam retraces the human and intellectual development that led François Burgat to a very firm conviction: that the roots of the tensions that afflict the Western world’s relationship with the Muslim world are political rather than ideological. In his compelling account of the interactions between personal life-history and professional research trajectories, Burgat examines how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with European and Western societies. An essential continuation of his work on Islamism, Burgat’s unique field research and ‘political trespassing’ marks an overdue challenge to the academic mainstream.

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.