Muslims in Kenyan Politics

Muslims in Kenyan Politics PDF Author: Hassan J. Ndzovu
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810130025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Muslims in Kenyan Politics explores the changing relationship between Muslims and the state in Kenya from precolonial times to the present, culminating in the radicalization of a section of the Muslim population in recent decades. The politicization of Islam in Kenya is deeply connected with the sense of marginalization that shapes Muslims’ understanding of Kenyan politics and government policies. Kenya’s Muslim population comprises ethnic Arabs, Indians, and black Africans, and its status has varied historically. Under British rule, an imposed racial hierarchy affected Muslims particularly, thwarting the development of a united political voice. Drawing on a broad range of interviews and historical research, Ndzovu presents a nuanced picture of political associations during the postcolonial period and explores the role of Kenyan Muslims as political actors.

Muslims in Kenyan Politics

Muslims in Kenyan Politics PDF Author: Hassan J. Ndzovu
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810130025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Muslims in Kenyan Politics explores the changing relationship between Muslims and the state in Kenya from precolonial times to the present, culminating in the radicalization of a section of the Muslim population in recent decades. The politicization of Islam in Kenya is deeply connected with the sense of marginalization that shapes Muslims’ understanding of Kenyan politics and government policies. Kenya’s Muslim population comprises ethnic Arabs, Indians, and black Africans, and its status has varied historically. Under British rule, an imposed racial hierarchy affected Muslims particularly, thwarting the development of a united political voice. Drawing on a broad range of interviews and historical research, Ndzovu presents a nuanced picture of political associations during the postcolonial period and explores the role of Kenyan Muslims as political actors.

Islam and Politics in Kenya

Islam and Politics in Kenya PDF Author: Arye Oded
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555879297
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
8 Muslims and the Law

Morality at the Margins

Morality at the Margins PDF Author: Sarah Hillewaert
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286525
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya’s island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu’s inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices—how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs—and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.

Islam & Ethnicity in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia

Islam & Ethnicity in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia PDF Author: Günther Schlee
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1847010466
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
A study of the longue durée of a marginalized part of northern Kenya, examining the process of territorialization and the role of Islam in politicizing ethnicity. The recent ethnic violence in Kenya has been preceded by a process of territorialization and politicization of ethnicity. This study examines a marginalized part of Kenya, the semi-arid north inhabited by pastoralists of three language groups - speakers of Oromo, Somali, and Rendille. It spans different periods of time, from early processes of ethnic differentiation between groups, through the colonial period when differences were reflected in administrative policies, to recent times, when global minority discourses, particularly those related to Islam, are tapped by local political agents and ethnic entrepreneurs. A companion volume to Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, this book is based on over thirty-four years of field research and synthesizes findings from history and political anthropology. Günther Schlee is director of the Department of 'Integration and Conflict', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; Abdullahi Shongolo is an independent scholar based in Kenya.

The Failure of Political Islam

The Failure of Political Islam PDF Author: Olivier Roy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674291416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This powerful argument reassess radical Islam and the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. Olivier Roy offers a challenging and highly original view that no-one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.

The Impossible State

The Impossible State PDF Author: Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530862
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations. The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History

Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History PDF Author: Tayeb El-Hibri
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231150822
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Tayeb El-Hibri draws on medieval Islamic chronicles to remap the origins of Islamic political and religious orthodoxy, offering an insightful critique of both early and contemporary Islam and the concerns of legitimacy shadowing various rulers. He also highlights the Islamic reinterpretation of biblical traditions.

Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa

Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa PDF Author: Alex De Waal
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253344038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Militant Islam is a powerful force in the Horn of Africa, and the U.S. war on terrorism has thrown the region and its politics into the international spotlight. Since the 1990s, when a failed U.S. military mission was called in to maintain order, Islamist organizations, with heavy sponsorship from Saudi Arabia, have multiplied and established much-needed health and education services in the region. However, despite the good that they are clearly providing, these organizations are labeled "terrorist" by the U.S. Islamist extremists have been found to be responsible for the deadly embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on an Israeli jet in Mombasa. Since September 11, 2001, global effort has been concentrated on bringing these groups to their knees. Focusing on how Islamist movements have been viewed post-9/11 and how the U.S. agenda is being translated into local struggles in the region, this book is an important step toward understanding the complex dynamics that enfold the region. Contributors are Roland Marchal, A. H. Abdel Salam, M. A. Mohamed Salih, and Alex de Waal.

The Edge of Islam

The Edge of Islam PDF Author: Janet McIntosh
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822344964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam sometimes rejected by Swahili. The Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. The Edge of Islam advances understanding of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession, local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of “Islam” across cultures.

Mobilizing Islam

Mobilizing Islam PDF Author: Carrie Rosefsky Wickham
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500831
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Mobilizing Islam explores how and why Islamic groups succeeded in galvanizing educated youth into politics under the shadow of Egypt's authoritarian state, offering important and surprising answers to a series of pressing questions. Under what conditions does mobilization by opposition groups become possible in authoritarian settings? Why did Islamist groups have more success attracting recruits and overcoming governmental restraints than their secular rivals? And finally, how can Islamist mobilization contribute to broader and more enduring forms of political change throughout the Muslim world? Moving beyond the simplistic accounts of "Islamic fundamentalism" offered by much of the Western media, Mobilizing Islam offers a balanced and persuasive explanation of the Islamic movement's dramatic growth in the world's largest Arab state.