Far from Mecca

Far from Mecca PDF Author: Aliyah Khan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978806647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

Far from Mecca

Far from Mecca PDF Author: Aliyah Khan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978806647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

One Thousand Roads to Mecca

One Thousand Roads to Mecca PDF Author: Michael Wolfe
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192203
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 701

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Book Description
“Wolfe does an exemplary job of detailing the ceremonies performed at Mecca and the reasons behind them . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review This updated and expanded edition of One Thousand Roads to Mecca collects significant works by observant travel writers from the East and West over the last ten centuries—including two new contemporary narratives—creating a comprehensive, multifaceted literary portrait of the enduring tradition. Since its inception in the seventh century, the pilgrimage to Mecca has been the central theme in a large body of Islamic travel literature. Beginning with the European Renaissance, it has also been the subject for a handful of adventurous writers from the West who, through conversion or connivance, managed to slip inside the walls of a city forbidden to non-Muslims. These very different literary traditions form distinct impressions of a spirited conversation in which Mecca is the common destination and Islam the common subject of inquiry. Along with an introduction by Reza Aslan, featured writers include Ibn Battuta, J. L. Burckhardt, Sir Richard Burton, the Begum of Bhopal, John F. Keane, Winifred Stegar, Muhammad Asad, Lady Evelyn Cobbald, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Malcolm X. One Thousand Roads to Mecca is a historically, geographically, and ethnically diverse collection of travel writing that adds substantially to the literature of Islam and the West. “Serves as an excellent introduction to a religion, people, culture, and philosophy.” —Santa Cruz Sentinel

The Road To Mecca

The Road To Mecca PDF Author: Muhammad Asad
Publisher: The Book Foundation
ISBN: 0992798108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Part travelogue, part autobiography, "The Road to Mecca" is the compelling story of a Western journalist and adventurer who converted to Islam in the early twentieth century. A spiritual and literary counterpart of Wilfred Thesiger and a contemporary of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Muhammad Asad journeyed around the Middle East, Afghanistan and India. This is an account of Asad's adventures in Arabia, his inner awakening, and his relationships with nomads and royalty alike, set in the wake of the First World War. It can be read on many levels: as a eulogy to a lost world, and as the poignant account of a man's search for meaning. It is also a love story, defying convention and steeped in loss. With its evocative descriptions and profound insights on the Islamic world, "The Road to Mecca" is a work of immense value today.

Mecca and Main Street

Mecca and Main Street PDF Author: Geneive Abdo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195332377
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Islam is Americas fastest growing religion, with more than six million Muslims in the United States, all living in the shadow of 9/11. Who are our Muslim neighbors? What are their beliefs and desires? How are they coping with life under the War on Terror? In Mecca and Main Street, noted author and journalist Geneive Abdo offers illuminating answers to these questions. Gaining unprecedented access to Muslim communities in America, she traveled across the country, visiting schools, mosques, Islamic centers, radio stations, and homes. She reveals a community tired of being judged by American perceptions of Muslims overseas and eager to tell their own stories. Abdo brings these stories vividly to life, allowing us to hear their own voices and inviting us to understand their hopes and their fears. Inspiring, insightful, tough-minded, and even-handed, this book will appeal to those curious (or fearful) about the Muslim presence in America. It will also be warmly welcomed by the Muslim community.

Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca PDF Author: Michael Christopher Low
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The Unveiling Origin of Mecca

The Unveiling Origin of Mecca PDF Author: Mohammed Alal Khan
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1665528095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 807

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Book Description
The Unveiling Origin of Mecca provides insights into the history of Kaaba (Ka’ba) in Mecca. The Ka’ba is the first house built on earth. It is one of the few and perhaps the only Islamic History books that looks at modern archaeological evidence and the Holy Quran and the history of the Quran to explore the proper location of the Ka’ba. The author notes that in the Holy Quran, Mecca, sometimes also called Becca, which words are synonymous, and signify “a place of great intercourse,” is undoubtedly one of the most ancient cities in the world. Some authors imagine it to be the Mesa, or Mesha, of the Scripture and that it deduced its name from one of Ishmael’s sons. It stands in a stony and barren valley, surrounded by mountains under the exact parallel with the Macoraba of Ptolemy, and about 40 Arabian miles from the sea 'Al Kolzom. There is a magnificent temple in the city, like the Colosseum at Rome. However, it is not made of such large stones but burnt bricks and round in the same manner. It has ninety or one hundred doors around it and is arched...upon entering the temple you descend ten or twelve steps of marble, and here and there about the said entrance there stand men who sell jewels and nothing else. Researching ancient Islam and the origin of Mecca, the author asserts that the Ka’ba is currently misplaced, contradicting the Holy Quran and Arabian geography. Although there are many Islamic scholars and Quran research Institutes throughout the world, sadly, none of them have yet verified the exact places, mountains surrounding Ka’ba, and its sacred area according to the Holy Quran.

Love from Mecca to Medina

Love from Mecca to Medina PDF Author: S. K. Ali
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1665916095
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
On the trip of a lifetime, Adam and Zayneb must find their way back to each other in this surprising and romantic sequel to the “bighearted, wildly charming” (Becky Albertalli, New York Times bestselling author) Love from A to Z that’s a “contemplative exploration of faith, love, and the human condition” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Adam and Zayneb. Perfectly matched. Painfully apart. Adam is in Doha, Qatar, making a map of the Hijra, a historic migration from Mecca to Medina, and worried about where his next paycheck will come from. Zayneb is in Chicago, where school and extracurricular stresses are piling on top of a terrible frenemy situation, making her miserable. Then a marvel occurs: Adam and Zayneb get the chance to spend Thanksgiving week on the Umrah, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. Adam is thrilled; it’s the reboot he needs and an opportunity to pray for a hijra in real life: to migrate to Zayneb in Chicago. Zayneb balks at the trip at first, having envisioned another kind of vacation, but then decides a spiritual reset is calling her name too. And they can’t wait to see each other—surely, this is just what they both need. But the trip is nothing like what they expect, from the appearance of Adam’s former love interest in their traveling group to the anxiety gripping Zayneb when she’s supposed to be “spiritual.” As one wedge after another drives them apart while they make their way through rites in the holy city, Adam and Zayneb start to wonder: was their meeting just an oddity after all? Or can their love transcend everything else like the greatest marvels of the world?

Religion as Critique

Religion as Critique PDF Author: Irfan Ahmad
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635100
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.

From MTV to Mecca

From MTV to Mecca PDF Author: Kristiane Backer
Publisher: Arcadia Books
ISBN: 9781908129819
Category : Muslim converts from Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the early 1990s Kristiane Backer was one of the very first presenters on MTV (Europe). For some years she lived and breathed the international music scene quickly gaining a cult following amongst viewers and becoming a darling of the European press. As she reached the pinnacle of her success she realised that, despite having all she could have wished for, she was never truly satisfied. Something very important was missing. A fateful meeting with Pakistani cricket hero Imran Khan changed her life. He invited her to his country where she encountered a completely different world to the one she knew, the religion and culture of Islam. A few years later (in 1995), after travelling more widely in the Islamic world and knowing that she had discovered her spiritual path, she embraced Islam in a London mosque. In this private memoir Kristiane Backer tells the story of her conversion and explains how faith, despite the many challenges shefaced as she turned her life upside down, at last gave her inner peace and the meaning she had sought.

Mecca

Mecca PDF Author: Ziauddin Sardar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Mecca is, for many, the heart of Islam. It is the birthplace of Muhammad, the direction to which Muslims turn when they pray, and the site of pilgrimage that annually draws some three million Muslims from all corners of the world. Yet the significance of Mecca is more than purely religious. What happens in Mecca and how Muslims think about the political and cultural history of Mecca has had and continues to have a profound influence on world events to this day. In this insighful book, Ziauddin Sardar unravels the meaning and significance of Mecca. Tracing its history, from its origins as a “barren valley” in the desert to its evolution as a trading town and sudden emergence as the religious center of a world empire, Sardar examines the religious struggles and rebellions in Mecca that have significantly shaped Muslim culture. An illuminative, lyrical, and witty blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Mecca reflects all that is profound and enlightening, curious and amusing about Mecca and takes us behind the closed doors to one of the most important places in the world today.