Explore the vast range of titles available.

Since the downfall of Suharto’s dictatorial regime in 1998, Indonesia has witnessed a surge of various Islamist groups that have potentially threatened the country’s religious tolerance, civil Islam, and civic pluralism. Moreover, it is suggested that the rise of Islamist groups could likely transform Indonesia into an intolerant Islamist country. However, this article asserts that the Islamist groups are unlikely to reform Indonesia into an Islamic State or Sharia–based government and society, and are unable to receive the support and approval of the Indonesian Muslim majority due to the following fundamental reasons: the groups’ internal and inherent weaknesses, ruptured alliance among the groups, lack of Islamist political parties, limited intellectual grounds of the movement, the accommodation of some influential Muslim clerics and figures into the central government body, and public opposition toward the Islamist groups.

Is there an Islamic version of the UN doctrine of the \"Responsibility to Protect\"? Are Muslims obligated to defend their own community, and to save the rest of the world from tyranny and oppression? The UN doctrine commits member states to protect people from certain types of harm, and specifically includes protecting populations from their own governments. If a comparable Islamic doctrine exists, it is especially ironic that the UN doctrine is so frequently applied to Muslim majority countries in the Middle East. This irony allows for a new perspective on the continuing conceptual and physical conflicts between western powers and states in the Middle East.

Many in the United States and Israel believe that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, and that its social sector serves merely to recruit new supporters for its violent agenda. Based on Sara Roy's extensive fieldwork in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during the critical period of the Oslo peace process, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza shows how the social service activities sponsored by the Islamist group emphasized not political violence but rather community development and civic restoration.

Since the downfall of Suharto dictatorial regime in 1998, Indonesia has witnessed the upsurge of various Islamist groups that have in turn potentially threatened the country’s religious tolerance, civil Islam, and civic pluralism. While some have argued that the rise of these Islamist groupings could turn Indonesia into an intolerant Islamist country, this article argues that the Islamists will likely not be able to transform Indonesia into an Islamic State or Sharia–based government and society, nor receive popular support and winning the heart of Indonesian Muslim majority because of the following fundamental reasons: the groups’ internal and inherent weaknesses, unsolid alliances among the groups, lack of Islamist political parties, limited intellectual grounds of the movement, the accommodation of some influential Muslim clerics and figures into the central government body, as well as public opposition to the Islamist groups.

This article introduces the Religion and Armed Conflict (RELAC) data, 1975 to 2015, which is a new data set suitable for analyzing the causes, dynamics, and resolution of religious conflicts. It contains information about key religious dimensions of conflicts: whether the issue at stake is religious, the actors’ religious identity, and fine-grained data about the type and salience of religious claims. The article presents the major features of the data set and describes patterns and trends that shed new light on religious conflicts, for example, by demonstrating that conflicts over Islamist claims have become more prevalent. We also illustrate the utility of the data. For instance, we show that there is great variation in lethality across conflicts with different types of Islamist claims, thereby offering a more nuanced understanding of the deadliness of religious conflicts. RELAC should be a valuable resource for scholars, examining religious dimensions of intrastate armed conflicts.

This article reviews the main trends in the anthropological scholarship of Islam in Europe by examining this body of work through the lens of what I call a double epistemological impasse. The first impasse refers to the historical marking of Islam as Europe's Other, and the second one concerns anthropology's discomfort with the epistemological claim making of monotheistic religious traditions. The literature is organized into three key figures (the Muslim as migrant, as Islamist, and as ethical subject), and through these figures, this article attempts to unearth how this double impasse has affected and informed anthropological scholarship on Islam in Europe.

Pakistan began the year with an energized opposition that directly challenged the military establishment, but as the year progressed, the opposition alliance fell apart under the strain of internal divisions. The military establishment pushed back against the ruling PTI and regained control of the political system. Religious extremists were emboldened and posed a challenge to both civilian and military centers of power. The economy rebounded from the collapse of 2020, but Pakistan continues to face macro- and micro-economic challenges. The Delta variant took its toll on Pakistanis, but the government was able to make significant progress in its vaccination program by the end of 2021. Pakistan gained considerable geostrategic leverage due to the Taliban take-over in Afghanistan.

The call by the Islamist scholars for an Islamic state governed by the sharia law has given rise to the criticism that Islamic state would involve the discrimination of religious minorities and their reversion to inferior or second-class status. In this paper, the Islamic discourse on non-Muslims living in an Islamic state is examined under two trends: Islamist and the New Islamist trend. This paper is an attempt to highlight and understand the Islamic discourse on the citizenship of non-Muslim minorities. It will also contribute to how this discourse has changed over time. More importantly, it will put forth the efforts made by New-Islamist scholars who associate themselves with wasatiyyah movement to reconcile the Islamist and modern concept of citizenship. Notwithstanding, the objectives of this paper is threefold: to discuss the relationship between Muslim majority and non-Muslim minority in a proposed Islamic state; to identify the basic rights such as freedom of religion and other rights, that are available to non-Muslims residents of an Islamic state; and to assess how far the new-Islamist scholars have been successful in reconciling the traditional Islamist discourse with the modern nation-state notion of citizenship.

Drawing on the extant literature on populism, we aim to flesh out how populists in power utilize religion and related state resources in setting up aggressive, multidimensional religious populist “us” versus “them” binaries. We focus on Turkey as our case and argue that by instrumentalizing the Diyanet (Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs), the authoritarian Islamists in power have been able to consolidate manufactured populist dichotomies via the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons. Populists’ control and use of a state institution to propagate populist civilizationist narratives and construct antagonistic binaries are underexamined in the literature. Therefore, by examining Turkish populists’ use of the Diyanet, this paper will make a general contribution to the extant literature on religion and populism. Furthermore, by analyzing the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons from the last ten years we demonstrate how different aspects of populism—its horizontal, vertical, and civilizational dimensions—have become embedded in the Diyanet’s Friday sermons. Equally, this paper shows how these sermons have been tailored to facilitate the populist appeal of Erdoğan’s Islamist regime. Through the Friday sermons, the majority—Sunni Muslim Turks are presented with statements that evoke negative emotions and play on their specific fears, their sense of victimhood and through which their anxieties—real and imagined—are revived and used to construct populist binaries to construct and mobilize the people in support of an authoritarian Islamist regime purported to be fighting a “civilizational enemy” on behalf of “the people”. Finally, drawing on insights from the Turkish case, we illustrate how the “hosting” function of the civilizational aspect plays a vital role in tailoring internal (vertical and horizontal) religious populist binaries.

This article examines the relationship between state-provided religious education and support for Islamists. It first provides a historical overview of this debate in the Egyptian context. It then examines a survey of young adults from post-Arab-Spring Egypt, the largest education market in the Middle East and North Africa region. The findings show that recipients of state-provided Islamic education, Azharites , are more likely to hold favorable views of Islamists. This is likely attributed to the ideological alignment between Azharites and Islamists, since both favor a bigger public role of religion and stricter adherence to conservative social norms. However, the analysis does not support the notion that Azharites view Islamists as competitors in the religious market for followers. These results inform policy debates on Islamic education in Muslim countries and illustrate the limitations of mass indoctrination in authoritarian settings.