Download Free Islamic Politics And The Modern World Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Islamic Politics And The Modern World and write the review.

This comprehensive introduction explores the landscape of contemporary Islam. Written by a distinguished team of scholars, it: provides broad overviews of the developments, events, people and movements that have defined Islam in the three majority-Muslim regions traces the connections between traditional Islamic institutions and concerns, and their modern manifestations and transformations. How are medieval ideas, policies and practices refashioned to address modern circumstances investigates new themes and trends that are shaping the modern Muslim experience such as gender, fundamentalism, the media and secularisation offers case studies of Muslims and Islam in dynamic interaction with different societies. Islam in the Modern World includes illustrations, summaries, discussion points and suggestions for further reading that will aid understanding and revision. Additional resources are provided via a companion website.
Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims, entailing the visitation and veneration of sites associated with the Prophet Muhammad or saintly figures. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks. Traveling to and far beyond the Hajj, the most well-known Muslim pilgrimage, the volume's contributors reveal and analyze emerging contemporary Islamic pilgrimage practices around the world, in minority- and majority-Muslim countries as well as in urban and rural settings. What was once a tiny religious attraction in a remote village, for example, may begin to draw increasing numbers of pilgrims to shrines and tombs as the result of new means of travel, thus triggering significant changes in the traditional rituals, and livelihoods, of the local people. Organized around three key themes—history and politics; embodiment, memory, and material religion; and communications—the book reveals how rituals, practices, and institutions are experienced in the context of an inexorable global capitalism. The volume contributors are Sophia Rose Arjana, Rose Aslan, Robert R. Bianchi, Omar Kasmani, Azim Malikov, Lewis Mayo, Julian Millie, Reza Masoudi Nejad, Paulo G. Pinto, Babak Rahimi, Emilio Spadola, Edith Szanto, and Brannon Wheeler.
Why Islam is more political and fundamentalist than other religions Why does Islam play a larger role in contemporary politics than other religions? Is there something about the Islamic heritage that makes Muslims more likely than adherents of other faiths to invoke it in their political life? If so, what is it? Ancient Religions, Modern Politics seeks to answer these questions by examining the roles of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity in modern political life, placing special emphasis on the relevance—or irrelevance—of their heritages to today's social and political concerns. Michael Cook takes an in-depth, comparative look at political identity, social values, attitudes to warfare, views about the role of religion in various cultural domains, and conceptions of the polity. In all these fields he finds that the Islamic heritage offers richer resources for those engaged in current politics than either the Hindu or the Christian heritages. He uses this finding to explain the fact that, despite the existence of Hindu and Christian counterparts to some aspects of Islamism, the phenomenon as a whole is unique in the world today. The book also shows that fundamentalism—in the sense of a determination to return to the original sources of the religion—is politically more adaptive for Muslims than it is for Hindus or Christians. A sweeping comparative analysis by one of the world's leading scholars of premodern Islam, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics sheds important light on the relationship between the foundational texts of these three great religious traditions and the politics of their followers today.
Is Islam compatible with democracy? Must fundamentalism win out in the Middle East, or will democracy ever be possible? In this now-classic book, Islamic sociologist Fatima Mernissi explores the ways in which progressive Muslims--defenders of democracy, feminists, and others trying to resist fundamentalism--must use the same sacred texts as Muslims who use them for violent ends, to prove different views. Updated with a new introduction by the author written in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Islam and Democracy serves as a guide to the players moving the pieces on the rather grim Muslim chessboard. It shines new light on the people behind today's terrorist acts and raises provocative questions about the possibilities for democracy and human rights in the Islamic world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of the Middle East today, Islam and Democracy is as timely now as it was upon its initial, celebrated publication.
This book presents general readers and specialists alike with a broad survey of Islamic political thought in the six centuries from the rise of Islam to the Mongol invasions.
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.
One of the most important developments in Muslim politics in recent years has been the spread of movements calling for the implementation of Shari'a or Islamic law. Shari'a Politics maps the ideals and organization of these movements and examines their implications for the future of democracy, citizen rights, and gender relations in the Muslim world. These studies of eight Muslim-majority societies, and state-of-the-field reflections by leading experts, provide the first comparative investigation of movements for and against implementation of Shari'a. These essays reveal that the Muslim public's interest in Shari'a does not spring from an unchanging devotion to received religious tradition, but from an effort to respond to the central political and ethical questions of the day. -- Publisher description.
"In 2012, the year 1433 of the Muslim calendar, the Islamic population throughout the world was estimated at approximately a billion and a half, representing about one-fifth of humanity. In geographical terms, Islam occupies the center of the world, stretching like a big belt across the globe from east to west."--P. vii.
Graham E. Fuller brings a lifetime of experience in the Muslim world to shed light on how common, even universal, political behavior takes on a distinctively Islamic guise in the Muslim world. By examining the social, economic and political context, he explains that the struggle between the fundamentalists and liberals will determine the future of political Islam. This sweeping survey of trends in the Muslim world, from Morocco to the Philippines, explores the diversity of Islamic political activity and makes clear that Islamic political movements represent a broad spectrum of outlook and behavior. Whether traditional or liberal, these movements have become an important vehicle for the concerns, aspirations and grievances of vast numbers of Muslims worldwide and are a natural outgrowth of Muslim history. Fuller contends that while political Islam is the dominant intellectual current, a focus on radicalism and extremism blinds us from another trend: liberal political Islam. The issues are not what is Islam, but what Muslims want, and not whether Islam will play a central role in politics, but which Islam. As Islam has become the vocabulary for political and social expression, it has come to serve various agendas.
Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations. The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.