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The treatment and role of women is one of the most discussed and controversial aspects of Islam. In this volume, three scholars of Islam survey the situation of women in Islam, focusing on how Muslim views about and experiences of gender are changing in the Western diaspora. It offers an overview of the teachings of the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad on gender, analyzes the ways in which the West has historically viewed Muslim women, and examines how the Muslim world has changed in response to Western critiques. The volume then centers on the Muslim experience in America, examining Muslim American analyses of gender, Muslim attempts to form a new “American” Islam, and the legal issues surrounding equal rights for Muslim females. Such specific issues as dress, marriage, child custody, and asylum are addressed. It also looks at the ways in which American Muslim women have tried to create new paradigms of Islamic womanhood and are reinterpreting the traditions apart from the males who control the mosque institutions.

Working and living as an authentic Muslim-comporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate way-in the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions,Everyday Pietyexamines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a \"neoliberal Islamic piety.\" Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and economizing Islamic piety, and is done in ways that reflect a modern, cosmopolitan style and aesthetic, revealing a keen interest in displays of authenticity on the part of the actors. Tobin highlights sites at which economic life and Islamic virtue intersect: Ramadan, the hijab, Islamic economics, Islamic banking, and consumption. Each case reflects the shift from conditions and contexts of highly regulated and legalized moral behaviors to greater levels of uncertainty and indeterminacy. In its ethnographic richness, this book shows that actors make normative claims of an authentic, real Islam in economic practice and measure them against standards that derive from Islamic law, other sources of knowledge, and the pragmatics of everyday life. Working and living as an authentic Muslim-comporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate way-in the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions,Everyday Pietyexamines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan.Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a \"neoliberal Islamic piety.\" Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and economizing Islamic piety, and is done in ways that reflect a modern, cosmopolitan style and aesthetic, revealing a keen interest in displays of authenticity on the part of the actors. Tobin highlights sites at which economic life and Islamic virtue intersect: Ramadan, the hijab, Islamic economics, Islamic banking, and consumption. Each case reflects the shift from conditions and contexts of highly regulated and legalized moral behaviors to greater levels of uncertainty and indeterminacy. In its ethnographic richness, this book shows that actors make normative claims of an authentic, real Islam in economic practice and measure them against standards that derive from Islamic law, other sources of knowledge, and the pragmatics of everyday life.

This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse than death and as a sexual seduction.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations. The pesantren community, so-called because it is centered around an educational institution called the pesantren, uses education as a central arena for dealing with globalization and the construction and maintenance of an Indonesian Islamic identity. However, the community's efforts to wrestle with these issues extend beyond education into the public sphere in general and specifically in the area of leadership and politics. The case material is used to understand Muslim strategies and responses to civilizational contact and conflict. Scholars, educated readers, and advanced undergraduates interested in Islam, religious education, the construction of religious identity in the context of national politics and globalization will find this work useful.

Conservative Islam: A Cultural Anthropology by Erich Kolig analyzes the salient characteristics of Islam and contemporary Muslim society from the perspective of traditional cultural anthropology. Gender issues, the headscarf and veiling, alcohol and pork prohibition, the taboo on satirizing religious contents, violence and jihad, attitudes toward rationalism and modernity, and other important issues that emanate from Islamic doctrine are discursively highlighted as to their origins, symbolic meanings, and importance in the modern world. By highlighting socio-cultural configurations, the universals they represent, the circumstances of their creation, and their semiotic meaning, Kolig helps the reader gain understanding of Islam in the modern world.

A Muslim plays the slot machines -- The history of Amman: \"I don't recognize Amman anymore\" -- Making it meaningful: Ramadan -- Love, sex, and the market: the Hijab -- Making it real: adequation -- Uncertainty inside the Islamic bank: \"Is this the real islam?\" -- Consuming Islamic banking: \"they say they're Islamic, so they are\" -- Branding Islam: Jordan's Arab Spring, middle class, and Islam

Muslims in 21 st Century Europe explores the interaction between native majorities and Muslim minorities in various European countries with a view to highlighting different paths of integration of immigrant and native Muslims. Starting with a critical overview of the institutionalisation of Islam in Europe and a discussion on the nature of Muslimophobia as a social phenomenon, this book shows how socio-economic, institutional and political parameters set the frame for Muslim integration in Europe. Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are selected as case studies among the 'old' migration hosts. Italy, Spain and Greece are included to highlight the issues arising and the policies adopted in southern Europe to accommodate Muslim claims and needs. The book highlights the internal diversity of both minority and majority populations, and analyses critically the political and institutional responses to the presence of Muslims. Anna Triandafyllidou is Assistant Professor at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece, Senior Research Fellow at ELIAMEP in Athens, and Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. Her main areas of research and teaching are migration, nationalism, and European integration. Recent books include Irregular Migration in Europe (2010, Ashgate), European Immigration: A Sourcebook (2007, Ashgate), Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (2006, Routledge), Transcultural Europe (2006) and Contemporary Polish Migration in Europe (2006, The Edwin Allen Press). 1. Muslims and Multiculturalism in 21st century Europe, Anna Triandafyllidou and Daniel Faas 2. Islamophobia qua Racial Discrimination: Muslimophobia, Burak Erdenir 3. Public Policies towards Muslims and the Institutionalization of 'Moderate Islam' in Europe: some critical reflections, Sara Silvestri 4. Muslims in Germany: From Guest Workers to Citizens? Daniel Faas 5. Britain: Contemporary developments in cases of Muslim-state engagement, Tariq Modood and Nasar Meer 6. From Empire to Republic, the French Muslim Dilemma, Valerie Amiraux 7. Islam in the Netherlands, Dutch Islam, Thijl Sunier 8. Sweden: Cooperation and Conflict, Jonas Otterbeck 9. Muslims in Italy: models of integration and new citizenship, Maurizia Russo Spena 10. Muslims in Spain: Blurring past and present Moors, Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Nynke de Witte 11. Greece: The Challenge of Native and Immigrant Muslim Populations, Anna Triandafyllidou

The basic contention of this study is that the colonial rule had far more serious consequence than it has been realized. It radically transformed the nature of the Islamic societies of Egypt and Muslim India to that of an ‘Islamicate’societies. This affected the religious, cultural, social, and legal aspects including ethnic and minority relations, gender relations and even their educational system. The phrase ‘Islamicate’ is here borrowed from Marshall Hodgson, who used it in his The Ventures of Islam to indicate the changes that took place due to the modernization under the impact of the West and colonial rule. However, our investigation takes it into a different direction, demonstrating how and what ways this phenomenon of the ‘Islamicate’ has changed the Islamic identity of Egypt and Muslim India. This study analyzes varied aspects such as religious, social, cultural, legal, and other aspects of the Egyptian and Muslim Indian societies through the mechanisms of change that the colonial rule brought to them.

Islam in \"Liberal\" Europe provides the first comprehensive overview of the political and social status of Islam and of Muslim migrants in Europe. Kai Hafez shows that although legal and political systems have made progress toward recognizing Muslims on equal terms and eliminating discriminatory practices that are in contradiction to neutral secularism, “liberal societies” often lag behind. The author argues that Islamophobic murders in Norway and Germany are only the tip of the iceberg of a deep-seated inability of many Europeans to accept cultural globalization when it hits close to home. Although there have always been anti-racist elites and networks in Europe, Hafez contends that the dominant tradition even among seemingly liberal intellectual milieus and their media is Islamophobic. This fact finds expression not only in the growing anti-Islam sentiment among right-wing populists but sometimes also in so-called enlightened forms of contemporary media, public opinion, school curricula, and Christian interfaith dialogues. In addition to offering a critical assessment of positive and negative trends in Islamic-Western relations, Hafez also engages in a theoretical debate revolving around integration, tolerance, multicultural liberalism, and modern liberal democracy. He combines political philosophy and political and social theory with current analysis on communication and the role of both religious and secular institutions in community-building in modern societies. In essence, the author debates the question of whether liberal society in Europe, in order to avoid a growing gap between integrative politics and discriminatory societies, needs a complete renewal not only of political ideologies but also of cultures and institutions.