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Author: Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261445
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.
Author: Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261445
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Get Book Here
Book Description
What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.
Author: Azzam Tamimi
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814782613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Western civilization tends to view secularism as a positive achievement. From this perspective, benefits of secularizing trends include the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and freedom from organized religion. In the Arab Middle East, however, Islamist intellectuals increasingly cite Western-inspired secularism as the source of the region's social dislocation and political instability. While secularism in the West led to the spread of democratic values, in the Muslim world it has been associated with dictatorship, the violation of human rights, and the abrogation of civil liberties. Islam and Secularism in the Middle East examines the origins and growth of the movement to abolish the secularizing reforms of the past century by creating a political order guided by Shariah law. Contributors explain the Islamic rejection of secularism as a failed Western Christian ideal and also discuss how secularization was pioneered by those who thought Muslims could only advance politically by emulating Western practices, including the renunciation of religion.
Author: Talal Asad
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
“A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Author: Mayanthi L. Fernando
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
Author: Jeff Redding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295747071
Category : Domestic relations
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
"Islamic law's relationship to secular governance is a fraught one in contemporary discussions. Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates, secularism's partisans, or publics caught in the crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islam and secularism as antagonistic. Moreover, the relationship between Islamic law and secularism seems increasingly discordant, with recent developments in the United States (e.g., calls for "shari'a bans" in U.S. courts), Western Europe (such as legal limitations on headscarves and mosques), and the Arab Middle East (such as conflicts between secularist old-guards and Islamist revolutionaries) indicating that unsteady coexistences are transforming into outright hostilities. This book's exploration of an Indian non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution-formally known as the dar ul qaza system, but commonly referred to as a system of "Muslim courts" or "shariat courts"-challenges conventional narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and secular forms of governance, and the impossibility of their coexistence. Moreover, it demonstrates how secular law and governance in India does not and cannot work without the significant assistance of non-state Islamic legal actors. For example, the conciliation-oriented Indian family court system is insufficient for handling divorce petitions brought by Muslim women seeking to unilaterally disassociate from their Muslim husbands. This volume shows how in these situations and others, Indian state secularism needs the Islamic non-state-so much so that this intense need often erupts into a complicated set of love-hate politics towards India's Muslims"--
Author: Hussein Ali Agrama
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226010686
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.
Author: Sarah Wolff
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472132539
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Reconsidering the European Union's secular identity
Author: Humeira Iqtidar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226384705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.
Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Author: Ahmet Kuru
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231159323
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
While Turkey has grown as a world power, promoting the image of a progressive and stable nation, several policy choices have strained its relationship with the East and the West. Providing social, historical, and religious context for Turkey's singular behavior, the essays in Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey examine issues relevant to Turkish debates and global concerns, from the state's position on religion and diversity to its involvement in the European Union. Written by experts in a range of disciplines, the chapters explore the Ottoman toleration of diversity during its classical period; the erosion of ethno-religious diversity in modern, pre-democratic times; Kemalism and its role in modernization and nation building; the changing political strategies of the military; and the effect of possible EU membership on domestic reforms. They also conduct a cross-Continental comparison of "multiple secularisms" as well as political parties, considering the Justice and Development Party in Turkey in relation to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. The contributors tackle central research questions, such as what is the legacy of the Ottoman Empire's ethno-religious plurality and how can Turkey's assertive secularism be softened to allow greater space for religious actors. They address the military's "guardian" role in Turkey's secularism, the implications of recent constitutional amendments for democratization, and the consequences and benefits of Islamic activism's presence within a democratic system. No other collection confronts Turkey's contemporary evolution so vividly and thoroughly or offers such expert analysis of its crucial social and political systems.
