Islamic Studies

Why do Muslim-majority countries exhibit high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison to world averages? Ahmet T. Kuru criticizes explanations which point to Islam as the cause of this disparity, because Muslims were philosophically and socio-economically more developed than Western Europeans between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Nor was Western colonialism the cause: Muslims had already suffered political and socio-economic problems when colonization began. Kuru argues that Muslims had influential thinkers and merchants in their early history, when religious orthodoxy and military rule were prevalent in Europe. However, in the eleventh century, an alliance between orthodox Islamic scholars (the ulema) and military states began to emerge. This alliance gradually hindered intellectual and economic creativity by marginalizing intellectual and bourgeois classes in the Muslim world. This important study links its historical explanation to contemporary politics by showing that, to this day, ulema-state alliance still prevents creativity and competition in Muslim countries.

The ubiquity of use of the term “radicalization” suggests a consensus about its meaning, but this article shows through a review of a variety of definitions that no such consensus exists. The article then argues that use of the term is problematic not just for these reasons, but because it is used in three different contexts: the security context, the integration context, and the foreign-policy context. It is argued that each of these contexts has a different agenda, impacted in the case of the integration agenda by the rise of European “neo-nationalism,” and so each uses the term “radical” to mean something different. The use of one term to denote at least three different concepts risks serious confusion. The proposed solution is to abandon the attempt to use “radicalization” as an absolute concept.

An Important Article to Read:
The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities
Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century
Ramón Grosfoguel
U.C. Berkeley
   
Abstract: This article is inspired by Enrique Dussel’s historical and philosophical work on Cartesian philosophy and the conquest of the Americas. It discusses the epistemic racism/sexism that is foundational to the knowledge structures of the Westernized University. The article proposes that the epistemic privilege of Western Man in Westenized Universities’ structures of knowledge, is the result of four genocides/epistemicides in the long 16th century (against Jewish and Muslim origin population in the conquest of Al-Andalus, against indigenous people in the conquest of the Americas, against Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas and against women burned alive, accused of being witches in Europe). The article proposes that Dussel’s argument in the sense that the condition of possibility for the mid-17th century Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” (ego cogito) is the 150 years of “I conquer, therefor I am” (ego conquiro) is historically mediated by the genocide/epistemicide of the “I exterminate, therefore I am” (ego extermino). The ‘I exterminate’ is the socio-historical structural mediation between the idolatric ‘I think’ and the ‘I conquer.’

Religious constraints on sexuality may have consequences for the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Recognising that several Islamic tenets may have the effect, if followed, of reducing the sexual transmission of HIV, this paper tests the hypothesis that Muslims have lower HIV prevalence than non-Muslims. Among 38 sub-Saharan African countries, the percentage of Muslims within countries negatively predicted HIV prevalence. A survey of published journal articles containing data on HIV prevalence and religious affiliation showed that six of seven such studies indicated a negative relationship between HIV prevalence and being Muslim. Additional studies on the relationship of risk factors to HIV prevalence gave mixed evidence with respect to following Islamic sexual codes (e.g., vs. extramarital affairs) and other factors, but that benefits arising from circumcision may help account for lower HIV prevalence among Muslims.

The study investigates the effect of e-learning, blended learning and classroom learning on students’ achievement. Two experimental groups together with a control group from Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia were identified randomly. To assess students’ achievement in the different groups, pre- and post-achievement tests were used. The results of the study (N = 148) show that there was a statistically significant difference between the three methods in terms of students’ achievement favouring the blended learning method (n = 55) with a substantial effect size of 1.34 (Hedges’ g). No significant difference was found between the e-learning (n = 43) and traditional learning groups (n = 50) in terms of students’ achievement and with a negligible effect size of 0.02.

This paper attempts to present varying discourses pertaining to women's work and how it is impacted by interpretations of Islam.  This paper offers a window into the world of women's work and participation in Arab societies and how such participation is impacted by Islam, or its interpretations thereof. In addition to the English sources, this paper offers an opportunity for the reader to get a glimpse of the debate that has been going on in Arabic (especially when it comes to the little known religious discourse).

In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and theology. He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics.

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The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Love takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh–sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.

A multifaceted, multidimensional, changing, and inconsistent Islamism is a subject under study in this chapter. It is impossible to comprehend modern Muslim societies without an account of the impact of Islam on all sides of life. It would be a mistake to present Islamism as a node on the body of Muslim societies. In fact, Islamism in many respects reflects the essence of modern Muslim societies, of their mode of thought and life. It helps to maintain social, economic, political sphere at different societal levels as well as create a peculiar Islamic pattern of modernization. That is why Islamism cannot be eliminated at the present stage; it can be only overgrown. And this will take a long time. One should understand clearly that it is impossible to reduce the dangers of radical and terrorist Islamism only by force. It will decrease only after it is separated from moderate Islamism having made the latter a more respectable, open, and involved in normal political life movement. We analyze in this chapter a number of issues. Among them are general characteristics and functions of Islamism; confrontation of Islamism with secular regimes; evolution of Islamism; modern trends and the future of Islamism, etc.

This study explores how a group of young British Muslim gay men (BMGM) of Pakistani background in non-gay affirmative religious contexts understood and defined their sexual, religious and ethnic identities, focusing upon the negotiation and construction of these identities and particularly upon strategies employed for coping with identity threat. Twelve BMGM were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Transcripts were subjected to qualitative thematic analysis as described by Braun and Clarke (2006). The aim was to explore participants’ lived experiences through the interpretive lens of identity process theory (Breakwell, 1986, 1992). Four superordinate themes are reported, entitled “I’m gay because..”: Making sense of gay identity, “It’s all about temptation”: Invoking religious discourses to explain sexual identity, “Going against God”: Fear of divine retribution, “It’s easier to be gay here”: External attributions and British national identity. The data suggest the existence of an additional identity principle, which is referred to as the psychological coherence principle. This motive represents the need to ensure a sense of coherence between existing identities, and we discuss how individuals may adopt strategies to deal with threats to the principle.

This paper examines two sets of interrelated issues informing contemporary discussions on Islam and education that take place within both Muslim majority and minority contexts. The first set of issues concerns the academic conceptualisation of the study of education within diverse historical and contemporary Islamic cultural, intellectual, political, theological and spiritual traditions. After a critical examination of the current literature, the paper suggests that 'Islamic Education Studies' offers a distinctive academic framing that incorporates an interdisciplinary empirical and scholarly inquiry strategy capable of generating a body of knowledge and understanding guiding the professional practice and policy development in the field. Lack of conceptual clarity in various current depictions of the field, including 'Muslim Education', 'Islamic Pedagogy', 'Islamic Nurture' and 'Islamic Religious Pedagogy', is outlined and the frequent confusion of Islamic Education with Islamic Studies is critiqued. The field of Islamic Education Studies has theological and educational foundations and integrates interdisciplinary methodological designs in Social Sciences and Humanities. The second part of the inquiry draws attention to the lack of new theoretical insights and critical perspectives in Islamic Education. The pedagogic practice in diverse Muslim formal and informal educational settings does not show much variation and mostly is engaged with re-inscribing the existing power relations shaping the society. The juxtaposition of inherited Islamic and borrowed or enforced Western secular educational cultures appears to be largely forming mutually exclusive, antagonistic and often rigid 'foreclosed' minds within contemporary Muslim societies. The impact of the educational culture and educational institutions on the formation of resentful Islamic religiosities and the reproduction of authoritarian leadership within the wider mainstream Muslim communities have not been adequately explored. The study stresses the need to have a paradigm shift in addressing this widely acknowledged educational crisis. The formation of a transformative educational culture remains the key to being able to facilitate reflective and critical Muslim religiosities, and positive socioeconomic and political change in Muslim majority and minority societies. This inquiry explores a significant aspect of this crisis by reexamining the degree to which Islamic and Western, liberal, secular conceptions and values of education remain irreconcilably divergent or open to a convergent dialogue of exchange, reciprocity and complementarity. The originality of the paper lies in offering a critical rethinking of Islamic Education through mapping the main relevant literature and identifying and engaging with the central theoretical issues while suggesting a new academic framing of the field and its interdisciplinary research agenda.

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/11/335

Equality between women and men has been the objective of women’s movements in post-colonial Morocco and Tunisia, and it manifested as one of the emancipatory priorities in the Moroccan and Tunisian uprisings in 2010-2011. Today, the principle of gender equality is explicitly recognised in the Moroccan Constitution of 2011 (Article 19), and in the Tunisian Constitution of 2014 (Article 21). What compromises, confrontations and resistances between central power, transitional institutions and the different forces of civil society helped bring this about? In order to answer this question, two dimensions of analysis are applied in this chapter. In the first part, on a theoretical level, the centrality of the connection between Islam, patriarchy and citizenship is problematised in the systems of power and in the normativity of both countries. In addition, from a historical perspective, it traces the main steps of women’s movements’ struggles for gender equality, demanding the deconstruction of this strict relationship, through the years. In the second and most empirical part, the chapter analyses the ways in which the constitution-making process has been carried out in Morocco and Tunisia. In-depth interviews conducted during multiple fieldwork trips to Rabat and Tunis, in 2011, 2014 and 2016, shed light on the different approaches and stages of the writing process of the constitution, exploring if – and how – it was negotiated with the most representative actors of civil society. Furthermore, the different strategies and political praxis of women’s movements in achieving gender equality are explored. Concerning the Moroccan case, I problematise the debate about gender equality and complementarity that was developed within the ‘20 February Movement’ in relation to the ability of the central power to balance the demands of civil society by recognising gender equality in the new Constitution of 2011. Concerning the Tunisian case, attention is focused on the capability of the historical feminist organisations to influence the constitution-making process during the phase of the ‘transition to democracy’ 2011-2014. Despite the differences between the two cases, women’s movements have proved their importance as social actors in the post-uprising political scenario, and in the bottom-up definition of gender policies that affects the entire society from a political, juridical, economic and social perspective. In both countries, the central power used the narrative of gender equality for political objectives, mainly to advertise its democratic nature. Women’s rights and gender equality remain socially contested, indeed, at the heart of the process of building a collective egalitarian consciousness and a new citizenship based on an egalitarian paradigm.

This article presents a description and analysis of a Persian translation and commentary of the Qurʾān, entitled Tafsīr-i munīr, by Abū Naṣr al-Ḥaddādī (d. after 400/1009), the earliest exegetical work in Persian whose author can be identified. A manuscript of this multivolume work housed in the Topkapı Palace Museum of Istanbul offers an important historical testament to the calligraphic development of Persian exegetical writing and the manners in which scholars and authorities sought creative ways to visually balance the sacred Arabic text of the Qurʾān with vernacular exegetic material. The manuscript also reveals a good deal about Qurʾānic book art, as well as the development of Persian commentaries and translations, thus offering further insight into the history of the Qurʾān across the frontiers of Central Asia and Khurasan.

This book explores of how the events of September 11 and the subsequent 'war on terror' have impacted on the lived experiences of British South Asian Muslims in their religious and ethnic identity, citizenship, Islamophobia, gender and education, radicalism, media and political representation. Specialists in sociology, social geography, anthropology, theology and law examine the positions of South Asian Muslims from a variety of analytical perspectives and methodological approaches. The book draws on post-9/11 primary empirical material while other contributions are more discursive, providing valuable polemics on the current positions of British South Asian Muslims.

‘Halal’, an Arabic word from the Muslim holy book of the Qur’an, can be translated simply as meaning permissible, according to the teachings of Islam. However, the call to certify products and practices formally, and subsequently then label them has given rise to a new cultural phenomenon. Demands to carry overt labels and messages; and expectations as to what Halal is and should be are on the increase inside and outside of Muslim geographies across the globe. For economic and technological reasons, this is also transferring the domain of halal more and more to a vanguard of businesses; as opposed to being just a religious imperative driven by the clergy.  Furthermore, the current landscape of the halal industry has arrived at a crossroads: where debates consider whether halal offers opportunities for product and brand extensions, rendering it as a niche marketing approach; or if in fact it presents the opportunity to create a new business paradigm. This article offers practitioners and academics an overview and insight into an industry that has been assessed as having a worldwide value of USD $2.3 trillion.