Using semi-structured interviews with 122 young Muslims in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) from diverse ethnic backgrounds, this book investigates the lived reality of young Muslims from their own perspectives. It explores their ideas of key Islamic and secular issues, their struggles, world views, triumphs, how the stigmatized group negotiates their identity in these three English language speaking Western countries, 20 years after 9/11. The key aspect of this book is to transcend binaries and reductionisms by exploring what Muslims actually think and say rather than intellectual articulations on them. The book presents a very detailed account of these young Muslims in the Anglophone West on their political beliefs, their knowledge and understanding of sharia law, their interest and participation in local and transnational political activism, their positive and negative feelings about their own communities, and indeed how they define their community.
India has become known in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia as ‘the world’s largest democracy’, a ‘natural ally’, the ‘democratic counterweight’ to China and a trading partner of ‘massive economic potential’. This new foreign policy orthodoxy assumes that India will join with these four states and act just as any other democracy would. A set of political and think tank elites has emerged which seek to advance the cause of a culturally superior, if ill-defined, ‘Anglosphere’. Building on postcolonial and constructivist approaches to international relations, this book argues that the same Eurocentric assumptions about India pervade the foreign policies of the Anglosphere states, international relations theory and the idea of the Anglosphere. The assertion of a shared cultural superiority has long guided the foreign policies of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, and this has been central to these states’ relationships with postcolonial India. This book details these difficulties through historical and contemporary case studies, which reveal the impossibility of drawing India into Anglosphere-type relationships. At the centre of India-Anglosphere relations, then, is not a shared resonance over liberal ideals, but a postcolonial clash over race, identity and hierarchy. A valuable contribution to the much-needed scholarly quest to follow a critical lens of inquiry into international relations, this book will be of interest to academics and advanced students in international relations, Indian foreign policy, Asian studies, and those interested in the ‘Anglosphere’ as a concept in international affairs.
What does it mean to become a Muslim? What tends to happen when someone becomes Muslim in the English-speaking world, and why? Is there an agenda at play? Is Anglosphere Islam not everything it is cracked up to be? Does it have a future? How can a new Muslim thrive in such circumstances? In The Big Step, you will find the answers to these questions and so much more.
This book is a study of the UK-based Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the context of the twentieth-century South Asian diaspora. Originating in late nineteenth-century Punjab, the Ahmadis are today a vibrant international religious movement; they are also a group that has been declared heretic by other Muslims and one that continues to face persecution in Pakistan, the country the Ahmadis made their home after the partition of India in 1947. Structured as a series of case studies, the book focuses on the ways in which the Ahmadis balance the demands of faith, community and modern life in the diaspora. Following an overview of the history and beliefs of the Ahmadis, the chapters examine in turn the use of ceremonial occasions to consolidate a diverse international community; the paradoxical survival of the enchantments of dreams and charisma within the structures of an institutional bureaucracy; asylum claims and the ways in which the plight of asylum seekers has been strategically deployed to position the Ahmadis on the UK political stage; and how the planning and building of mosques serves to establish a home within the diaspora. Based on fieldwork conducted over several years in a range of formal and informal contexts, this timely book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience from social and cultural anthropology, South Asian studies, the study of Islam and of Muslims in Europe, refugee, asylum and diaspora studies, as well as more generally religious studies and history.
Terrains of Exchange offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the expansion of Islam in the modern world. Through the model of religious economy, it traces the competition between Muslim, Christian and Hindu religious entrepreneurs that transformed Islam into a proselytising global brand. Drawing Indian, Arab, Iranian and Tatar Muslims together with Scottish missionaries and African-American converts, Nile Green brings to life the local sites of globalisation where Islam was repeatedly reinvented in modern times. Evoking terrains of exchange from Russia's imperial borderlands to the factories of Detroit and the ports of Japan, he casts a microhistorian's eye on the innovative new Islams that emerged from these sites of contact. Drawing on a multilingual range of materials, the book challenges the idea that globalisation has given rise to a unified "global Islam." Instead, it reveals the forces behind the fracturing of Islam in the hands of feuding and fissiparous "'religious firms". Terrains of Exchange not only presents global history as Islamic history. It also reveals the forces of that history at work in the world today.
How do ordinary people from different regions around the world define peace and reconciliation? What factors do they think are necessary for promoting reconciliation between countries? Do they believe that individuals have a right to protest against war and in favor of peace? Do they believe that apologies can improve the chances of reconciliation? What do they think are the best ways for achieving peace? Does reasoning regarding the achievability of world peace vary by region? International Handbook of Peace and Reconciliation, a companion volume to the International Handbook on War, Torture, and Terrorism, examines and analyzes how people around the world think about justice, governmental apologies, the right to protest, the peace process, the justifiability of armed conflict, the possibility of world peace, and reconciliation. To address these questions, researchers from the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) administered the Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey (PAIRTAPS) to volunteers from over 40 countries representing the major regions of the world. The volume is organized such that the responses to the survey are summarized and analyzed by both by country and by theme. Integrative chapters provide an up-to-date overview of historical and current events relevant to peace and reconciliation and a grounded theory analysis of definitions of peace and reconciliation and of the role of apology in reconciliation. In addition to describing the major themes emerging from the responses in each region, the volume reports on some exploratory analyses addressing the extent to which we found differences in patterns of responding based on characteristics such as gender, military experience, and involvement in anti-war protest activity. International Handbook on Peace and Reconciliation allows ordinary citizens from around the world to voice their views on peace and related issues, and examines the context of these views. Thus, it offers researchers in political science, peace psychology, social psychology, social justice, and anthropology a comprehensive resource for a changing global landscape.
Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, the acclaimed writer Perry Anderson interviews the noted scholar of Islam Suleiman Mourad about the Qur'an and the history of the faith. Mourad elucidates the different stages in Islam's development: the Qur'an as scripture and the history of its codification; Muhammad and the significance of his Sunna and Hadith; the Sunni-Shi'a split and the formation of various sects; the development of jihad; the transition to modernity and the challenges of reform; and the complexities of Islam in the modern world. He also looks at Wahhabism from its inception in the eighteenth century to its present-day position as the movement that galvanized modern Salafism and gave rise to militant Islam or jihadism. The Mosaic of Islam reveals both the richness and the fissures of the faith. It speaks of the different voices claiming to represent the religion and spans peaceful groups and manifestations as well as the bloody confrontations that scar the Middle East, such as the Saudi Arabian and Iranian intervention in the Yemen and the collapse of Syria and Iraq.
This book is an exploration of the perceptions of the American and British governments about Islam and Muslims based upon their experiences over the past two centuries. It provides a response to the accusation that US and British governments are inherently anti-Islamic and are seeking the destruction of that faith through their policy decisions. The book uses primary documents from the US and British governments to examine the attitudes of politicians and officials in a variety contexts ranging from the ‘War on Terror’, the Iranian Revolution and the ‘Trojan Horse’ Scandal to the conversion of Alexander Russell Webb to Islam, Islamic Finance and Mosque-building. In so doing it provides a wide-angle lens on the diversity of issues and experiences which have shaped the views of officials and politicians about Islam.
Anglo-America is a clearly identifiable part of what is commonly referred to as the West. The West exists, this book argues, in the form of multiple traditions that have currency in America, Europe, the Americas, and a few outposts in the Southern hemisphere. Led by the British Empire until the beginning and by the United States since the middle of the twentieth century, Anglo-America has been at the very centre of world politics. Bridging the European and the American West, Anglo-America is distinctive, not unique. These multiple Wests coexist with each other and with other civilizations, as parts of one global civilization containing multiple modernities. And like all other civilizations, Anglo-America is marked by multiple traditions and internal pluralism. Once deeply held notions and practices of imperial rule and racial hierarchy now take the form of hegemony or multilateralism and politically contested versions of multiculturalism. At its core Anglo-America is fluid, not fixed. The analytical perspectives of this book are laid out in Katzenstein’s opening and concluding chapters. They are explored in seven outstanding case studies, written by widely known authors, which combine historical and contemporary perspectives. Featuring an exceptional line-up and representing a diversity of theoretical views within one integrative perspective, this work will be of interest to all scholars and students of international relations, sociology and political science.
