Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics

Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics PDF Author: Rasul Bakhsh Rais
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199407590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics explores how the central state apparatus, social forces, ethnic groups, political elites, and religious factions have attempted to influence the construction of identity in Pakistan, and why it has become such a contested issue. The book analyzes the issue of identity in relation to power dynamics and competing ideologies, and argues that the choice and expression of a specific identity by contending political actors serves to claim, legitimize, and challenge power. The postcolonial inheritance of ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism that is embedded deep in regional histories as well as in the multiple layers of narrow tribal, caste, and parochial affiliations have not lent easily to the coveted idea of a single national culture or a particular sense of national identity. Against a conventional view of identity, the book makes the counter-argument of multiculturalism and a layered idea of identities that is contextualized. The defining idea of the book is that the cultural diversity of Pakistan-a rich mosaic-is not the problem that it is generally conceived to be. Conversely, it argues that diversity and pluralism in Pakistan or elsewhere can be managed and made to evolve into national solidarity and political cohesion through democratic, federal, and republican politics. However, such a diverse society requires a pluralistic political framework of equality, accommodation, inclusiveness, recognition, and rights.

Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics

Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics PDF Author: Rasul Bakhsh Rais
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199407590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Islam, Ethnicity, and Power Politics explores how the central state apparatus, social forces, ethnic groups, political elites, and religious factions have attempted to influence the construction of identity in Pakistan, and why it has become such a contested issue. The book analyzes the issue of identity in relation to power dynamics and competing ideologies, and argues that the choice and expression of a specific identity by contending political actors serves to claim, legitimize, and challenge power. The postcolonial inheritance of ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism that is embedded deep in regional histories as well as in the multiple layers of narrow tribal, caste, and parochial affiliations have not lent easily to the coveted idea of a single national culture or a particular sense of national identity. Against a conventional view of identity, the book makes the counter-argument of multiculturalism and a layered idea of identities that is contextualized. The defining idea of the book is that the cultural diversity of Pakistan-a rich mosaic-is not the problem that it is generally conceived to be. Conversely, it argues that diversity and pluralism in Pakistan or elsewhere can be managed and made to evolve into national solidarity and political cohesion through democratic, federal, and republican politics. However, such a diverse society requires a pluralistic political framework of equality, accommodation, inclusiveness, recognition, and rights.

Under the Banner of Islam

Under the Banner of Islam PDF Author: Gülay Türkmen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019751183X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Sunni Islam has played an ambivalent role in Turkey's Kurdish conflict--both as a conflict resolution tool and as a tool of resistance. Under the Banner of Islam uses Turkey as a case study to understand how religious, ethnic, and national identities converge in ethnic conflicts between co-religionists. Gülay Türkmen asks a question that informs the way we understand religiously homogeneous ethnic conflicts today: Is it possible for religion to act as a resolution tool in these often-violent conflicts? In search for answers to this question, in Under the Banner of Islam, Türkmen journeys into the inner circles of religious elites from different backgrounds: non-state-appointed local Kurdish meles, state-appointed Kurdish and Turkish imams, heads of religious NGOs, and members of religious orders. Blending interview data with a detailed historical analysis that goes back as far as the nineteenth century, she argues that the strength of Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms, the symbiotic relationship between Turkey's religious and political fields, the religious elites' varying conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities, and the recent political developments in the region (particularly in Syria) all contribute to the complex role religion plays in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Under the Banner of Islam is a specific story of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism in Turkey's Kurdish conflict, but it also tracks a broader narrative of how ethnic and religious identities are negotiated when resolving conflicts.

The Politics of Islamic Law

The Politics of Islamic Law PDF Author: Iza R. Hussin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022632348X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

Muslim Politics

Muslim Politics PDF Author: Dale F. Eickelman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691120539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere. As they examine the role of women in public life and Islamic perspectives on modernization and free speech, the authors probe the diversity of the contemporary Islamic experience, suggesting general trends and challenging popular Western notions of Islam as a monolithic movement. In so doing, they clarify concepts such as tradition, authority, ethnicity, pro-test, and symbolic space, notions that are crucial to an in-depth understanding of ongoing political events. This book poses questions about ideological politics in a variety of transnational and regional settings throughout the Muslim world. Europe and North America, for example, have become active Muslim centers, profoundly influencing trends in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. The authors examine the long-term cultural and political implications of this transnational shift as an emerging generation of Muslims, often the products of secular schooling, begin to reshape politics and society--sometimes in defiance of state authorities. Scholars, mothers, government leaders, and musicians are a few of the protagonists who, invoking shared Islamic symbols, try to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate and public life. These symbolic politics explain why political actions are recognizably Muslim, and why "Islam" makes a difference in determining the politics of a broad swath of the world.

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.

Muslim Women and Power

Muslim Women and Power PDF Author: Danièle Joly
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137480629
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Winner of the W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize 2017 This book provides an account of Muslim women’s political and civic engagement in Britain and France. It examines their interaction with civil society and state institutions to provide an understanding of their development as political actors. The authors argue that Muslim women’s participation is expressed at the intersections of the groups and society to which they belong. In Britain and France, their political attitudes and behaviour are influenced by their national/ethnic origins, religion and specific features of British and French societies. Thus three main spheres of action are identified: the ethnic group, religious group and majority society. Unequal, gendered power relations characterise the interconnection(s) between these spheres of action. Muslim women are positioned within these complex relations and find obstacles and/or facilitators governing their capacity to act politically. The authors suggest that Muslim women’s interest in politics, knowledge of it and participation in both institutional and informal politics is higher than expected. This book will appeal to students and scholars of politics, sociology, gender studies and social anthropology, and will also be of use to policy makers and practitioners in the field of gender and ethno-religious/ethno-cultural policy.

Redefining the Muslim Community

Redefining the Muslim Community PDF Author: Alexander Orwin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293908
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Writing in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Baghdad, Alfarabi (870-950) is unique in the history of premodern political philosophy for his extensive discussion of the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur'ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining Alfarabi's political writings as well as parts of his logical commentaries, his book on music, and other treatises, Alexander Orwin contends that the connections and tensions between ethnic and religious Ummas explored by Alfarabi in his time persist today in the ongoing political and cultural disputes among the various nationalities within Islam. According to Orwin, Alfarabi strove to recast the Islamic Umma as a community in both a religious and cultural sense, encompassing art and poetry as well as law and piety. By proposing to acknowledge and accommodate diverse Ummas rather than ignoring or suppressing them, Alfarabi anticipated the contemporary concept of "Islamic civilization," which emphasizes culture at least as much as religion. Enlisting language experts, jurists, theologians, artists, and rulers in his philosophic enterprise, Alfarabi argued for a new Umma that would be less rigid and more creative than the Muslim community as it has often been understood, and therefore less inclined to force disparate ethnic and religious communities into a single mold. Redefining the Muslim Community demonstrates how Alfarabi's judicious combination of cultural pluralism, religious flexibility, and political prudence could provide a blueprint for reducing communal strife in a region that continues to be plagued by it today.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan PDF Author: Thomas Barfield
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691154414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Traces the political history of Afghanistan from the sixteenth century to the present, looking at what has united the people as well as the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire PDF Author: Deepa Kumar
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608462129
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a "war on terror" ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 alone did not create Islamophobia. This book examines the current backlash within the context of Islamophobia's origins, in the historic relationship between East and West. Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Time and Social Theory

Time and Social Theory PDF Author: Barbara Adam
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.