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Ewing examines the competing forces behind the formation of a modern western subjectivity in the context of Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan.
Prevent Strategy is a collection of work from practitioners – youth workers and the police – and academics researching Prevent. This book examines overcoming the stigma attached to Prevent being implicitly racist, problems related to the section 26 duty, training staff on Prevent, creating safe spaces to have open discussions, problems regarding extremists’ online activity, and the law surrounding freedom of expression. Since its introduction, the UK’s Prevent strategy has been surrounded with controversy ranging from making the Muslim community a dangerous ‘suspect community’ to being another layer of police surveillance on individuals who have not been arrested or convicted of a crime. Despite amendments to the strategy – which now covers all forms of extremism – and adopting a multi-agency approach, these suspicions remain, exacerbated by the section 26 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 duty on specified authorities to prevent vulnerable people being drawn towards terrorism. This book's findings on the Prevent strategy will be an invaluable tool for staff in education, the health service, and the criminal justice agencies who carry out the section 26 duty. It will also appeal to academics and students studying the area of terrorism and security.
The goal of this volume is to explore the social and political dynamics of rumor and the related concept of urban or contemporary legend. These forms of communication often appear in tandem with social problems, including riots, racial or political violence, and social and economic upheavals. The volume emphasizes the connection of rumor to a set of social concerns from government corruption and corporate scandal, to racial, religious, and other prejudices. Central to the dialogue are issues of truth, belief, history, public policy, and evidence. Rumor has been recognized as one of the most important contributing factors to violence and discrimination. Yet, despite its significance in exacerbating social discord and mistrust, little systematic scholarly attention has been paid to the political origins and consequences of rumor. Rumor is defined as a proposition for belief that is not backed by secure standards of evidence. Rumor can be traditional or not, and can be expressed as a simple claim of fact. In both instances groups of claim-makers, operating out of their own interests and with a set of resources, attempt to depict reality, and if possible, impact the future. The need for this book is underscored by changing patterns of technology. What in the past was grounded in face- to-face interaction is now often found on the Internet, which is a major source of rumor. An appreciation of how new electronic forms of communication affect communal belief is essential for explicating rumor dynamics. The volume is comprehensive. Essays cover race and ethnicity, migration and globalization, corporate malfeasance, and state and government corruption. While editors and contributors well appreciate the dynamic nature of rumors and legends, the high quality of the effort make it evident that the issues that are raised and reoccur will serve to channel and inspire research in this major field of communications research for years to come. Gary Alan Fine is professor of sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Veronique Campion-Vincent is a folklorist at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, in Paris, France. Chip Heath is associate professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School for Business at Stanford University in California. Each are accomplished authors and researchers--as are the participants in the volume itself.
Recentering the Sufi Shrine is a study of ritual, Sufi eschatology, and vernacular theopoetics of pilgrimage to Sufi shrines in the Indus region of Pakistan. The book examines the distinction between two different ritual contestations over pilgrimage to Sufi tombs: (1) an exposition of Ṭariqa-i Muhammadiyya’s millenarian Scripturalist reform of Sufism, and (2) Bulleh Shah’s (d. 1767) vernacular Sufism, a hard-hitting Sufi-poet of textual ("bookish") knowledge of religious scholars. This is the first work examining the legal theology of ritual intervention in using scripture to regulate the resurrected bodies of saints, on the one hand, and the ritual metaphysics of presence in understanding the significance and meaning of Sufi shrines, on the other.
The present book intends to invite readers on a multi-dimensional and multifaceted journey meeting dervishes in different places and environments of the Muslim world; its peculiarity is to bring together a classical orientalist approach, based on texts and written documents, with the approach typical of Anthropology, Ethnography and Ethnomusicology, based on research in the field and oral sources: the ethnographic study of the present sheds new light on practices, methods and theories exposed in treatises of the Past while, at the same time, practices of the present may be clarified and illuminated by the study of ancient Sufi texts and authors. These different approaches want to draw attention to the multiple dimensions embraced by “tasawwuf” (Sufism) both in its historical and social context and in its nontemporal aspect, concerning spirituality and the ways the latter is conveyed and transmitted, both in the past and present.
Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes explores the creation, expansion, and perpetuation of the material and imaginary spheres of spiritual domination and sanctity that surrounded Sufi saints and became central to religious authority, Islamic piety, and the belief in the miraculous.
One of more poorly understood aspects of the history of the Ottoman Empire has been the flourishing of Sufi mysticism under its auspices. This study tracks the evolution of the Halveti order from its modest origins in medieval Azerbaijan to the emergence of its influential Sa'baniyye branch, whose range extended throughout the Empire at the height of its expansion. By carefully reconstructing the lives of formerly obscure figures in the history of the order, a complex picture emerges of the connections of Halveti groups with the Ottoman state and society. Even more importantly, since the Sa'baniyye branch of the order grew out of the towns and villages of the northern Anatolian mountains rather than the major urban centres, this work has the added benefit of bringing a unique perspective to how Ottoman subjects lived, worked, and worshiped outside the major urban centres of the Empire. Along the way, it sheds light on less-visible actors in society, such as women and artisans, and challenges widely-held generalizations about the activities and strategies of Ottoman mystics.
The Deoband movement—a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that quickly spread from colonial India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and even the United Kingdom and South Africa—has been poorly understood and sometimes feared. Despite being one of the most influential Muslim revivalist movements of the last two centuries, Deoband’s connections to the Taliban have dominated the attention it has received from scholars and policy-makers alike. Revival from Below offers an important corrective, reorienting our understanding of Deoband around its global reach, which has profoundly shaped the movement’s history. In particular, the author tracks the origins of Deoband’s controversial critique of Sufism, how this critique travelled through Deobandi networks to South Africa, as well as the movement’s efforts to keep traditionally educated Islamic scholars (`ulama) at the center of Muslim public life. The result is a nuanced account of this global religious network that argues we cannot fully understand Deoband without understanding the complex modalities through which it spread beyond South Asia.
Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity. Eschewing the fashionable binaries of resistance and collaboration, the contributors seek to re-conceptualize modernity as a local and transitive practice of cultural conjunction. Whether through a close reading of Anglo-Indian poetry, Urdu rhyming dictionaries, Persian Bible translations, Jain court records, or Bengali polemical literature, the contributors interpret South Asian modernity as emerging from localized, partial and continuously negotiated efforts among a variety of South Asian and European elites. Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a trans-colonial and trans-national context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and re-interpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies.
In the West, media coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan is framed by military and political concerns, resulting in a simplistic picture of ageless barbarity, terrorist safe havens, and peoples in need of either punishment or salvation. Under the Drones looks beyond this limiting view to investigate real people on the ground, and to analyze the political, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. Understanding the complexity of life along the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can help America and its European allies realign their priorities in the region to address genuine problems, rather than fabricated ones. This volume explodes Western misunderstandings by revealing a land that abounds with human agency, perpetual innovation, and vibrant complexity. Through the work of historians and social scientists, the thirteen essays here explore the real and imagined presence of the Taliban; the animated sociopolitical identities expressed through traditions like Pakistani truck decoration; Sufism’s ambivalent position as an alternative to militancy; the long and contradictory history of Afghan media; and the simultaneous brutality and potential that heroin brings to women in the area. Moving past shifting conceptions of security, the authors expose the West’s prevailing perspective on the region as strategic, targeted, and alarmingly dehumanizing. Under the Drones is an essential antidote to contemporary media coverage and military concerns.