9/11 and various acts of global terrorism from Madrid to Bali have challenged the understanding of academic experts, students, and policymakers, Muslims and non-Muslims. Critical questions have been raised about Islam and Muslim politics in the modern world. This work includes materials with representative selections from diverse Muslim voices.
Islam in Transition focuses on the ways in which Islamic religion still engenders powerful loyalties within what is now a predominantly secular society and how, in their continual adherence to their religion, many young British Pakistanis find a welcome sense of stability and permanence. By presenting material collected in field-work study and by using extensive quotations from interviews, the author argues that in a world where concepts of identity are always being challenged traditional sources of authority and allegiance still survive.
This magnificent volume explores the epochal transformations and unexpected continuities in the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 9th century. At the beginning of the 7th century, the Empire's southern provinces, the vibrant, diverse areas of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, were at the crossroads of exchanges reaching from Spain to China. These regions experienced historic upheavals when their Christian and Jewish communities encountered the emerging Islamic world, and by the 9th century, an unprecedented cross- fertilization of cultures had taken place. This extraordinary age is brought vividly to life in insightful contributions by leading international scholars, accompanied by sumptuous illustrations of the period's most notable arts and artifacts. Resplendent images of authority, religion, and trade—embodied in precious metals, brilliant textiles, fine ivories, elaborate mosaics, manuscripts, and icons, many of them never before published— highlight the dynamic dialogue between the rich array of Byzantine styles and the newly forming Islamic aesthetic. With its masterful exploration of two centuries that would shape the emerging medieval world, this illuminating publication provides a unique interpretation of a period that still resonates today.
In 1998, Indonesia's military government collapsed, creating a crisis that many believed would derail its democratic transition. Yet the world's most populous Muslim country continues to receive high marks from democracy-ranking organizations. In this volume, political scientists, religious scholars, legal theorists, and anthropologists examine Indonesia's transition compared to Chile, Spain, India, and potentially Tunisia, and democratic failures in Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Iran. Chapters explore religion and politics and Muslims' support for democracy before change.
Contributors to this book are particularly interested in expanding our understanding of what helps, or hurts, successful democratic transition attempts in countries with large Muslim populations. Crafting pro-democratic coalitions among secularists and Islamists presents a special obstacle that must be addressed by theorists and practitioners. The argument throughout the book is that such coalitions will not happen if potentially democratic secularists are part of what Al Stepan terms the authoritarian regime's "constituency of coercion" because they (the secularists) are afraid that free elections will be won by Islamists who threaten them even more than the existing secular authoritarian regime. Tunisia allows us to do analysis on this topic by comparing two "least similar" recent case outcomes: democratic success in Tunisia and democratic failure in Egypt. Tunisia also allows us to do an analysis of four "most similar" case outcomes by comparing the successful democratic transitions in Tunisia, Indonesia, Senegal, and the country with the second or third largest Muslim population in the world, India. Did these countries face some common challenges concerning democratization? Did all four of these successful cases in fact use some common policies that while democratic, had not normally been used in transitions in countries without significant numbers of Muslims? If so, did these policies help the transitions in Tunisia, Indonesia, Senegal and India? If they did, we should incorporate them in some way into our comparative theories about successful democratic transitions.
The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.
Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, dominated by young people, is restive. Saudi Arabia has long remained closed to foreign scholars, with a select few academics allowed into the kingdom over the past decade. This book presents the fruits of their research as well as those of the most prominent Saudi academics in the field. This volume focuses on different sectors of Saudi society and examines how the changes of the past few decades have affected each. It reflects new insights and provides the most up-to-date research on the country's social, cultural, economic and political dynamics.
Using a comprehensive evaluation of recent archaeological findings, Avni addresses the transformation of local societies in Palestine and Jordan between the sixth and eleventh centuries AD. Arguing that these archaeological findings provide a reliable, though complex, picture, Avni illustrates how the Byzantine-Islamic transition was a much slower and gradual process than previously thought, and that it involved regional variability, different types of populations, and diverse settlement patterns. Based on the results of hundreds of excavations, including Avni's own surveys and excavations in the Negev, Beth Guvrin, Jerusalem, and Ramla, the volume reconstructs patterns of continuity and change in settlements during this turbulent period, evaluating the process of change in a dynamic multicultural society and showing that the coming of Islam had no direct effect on settlement patterns and material culture of the local population. The change in settlement, stemming from internal processes rather than from external political powers, culminated gradually during the Early Islamic period. However, the process of Islamization was slow, and by the eve of the Crusader period Christianity still had an overwhelming majority in Palestine and Jordan.
Based on a decade of research in Indonesia, this book provides an in-depth account of the military's struggle to adapt to the new democratic system after the downfall of Suharto's authoritarian regime in 1998. Unlike other studies of the Indonesian armed forces, which focus exclusively on internal military developments, Mietzner's study emphasizes the importance of conflicts among civilians in determining the extent of military involvement in political affairs. Analysing disputes between Indonesia's main Muslim groups, Mietzner argues that their intense rivalry between 1998 and 2004 allowed the military to extend its engagement in politics and protect its institutional interests. The stabilization of the civilian polity after 2004, in contrast, has led to an increasing marginalization of the armed forces from the power centre. Drawing broader conclusions from these events for Indonesia's ongoing process of democratic consolidation, the book shows that the future role of the armed forces in politics will largely depend on the ability of civilian leaders to maintain functioning democratic institutions and procedures.
