A detailed study on the nature of Muslim apocalyptic material in Islam, both Sunnī and Shīʿī. Taking a transcultural perspective by also discussing Christian and Jewish apocalyptic traditions, it offers in eight studies and three appendices a typology of apocalypses and many new insights into the matter. For instance, historical apocalypses as well as apocalyptic figures, like the Dajjāl, the Sufyānī and the Mahdī are discussed. Moreover, apocalyptic ḥadīth literature, in particular Nuʿaym b. Ḥammād's (d. 844) Kitāb al-Fitan, and apocalyptic material in tafsīr works are presented. The author argues for a comprehensive understanding of this important feature of the Islamic religious tradition. "... a reference tool and a starting point for students in their study of early Islam" (Sajjad Rizvi)
Studying the Qur'an in the Muslim Academy examines what it is like to study and teach the Qur'an at academic institutions in the Muslim world, and how politics affect scholarly interpretations of the text. Guided by the author's own journey as a student, university lecturer, and researcher in Iran, Malaysia, and New Zealand, this book provides vivid accounts of the complex academic politics he encountered. Majid Daneshgar describes the selective translation and editing of Edward Said's classic work Orientalism into various Islamic languages, and the way Said's work is weaponized to question the credibility of contemporary Western-produced scholarship in Islamic studies. Daneshgar also examines networks of journals, research centers, and universities in both Sunni and Shia contexts, and looks at examples of Quranic interpretation there. Ultimately, he offers a constructive program for enriching Islamic studies by fusing the best of Western theories with the best philological practices developed in Muslim academic contexts, aimed at encouraging respectful but critical engagement with the Qur'an.
Featuring contributions from anthropologists, historians and scholars of religion, this book explores the passionate, divided and evolving field of Islamic Studies in Europe and North America, past and present - covering topics from secularism and gender to pop music and modern science.
This is the first volume of Goldziher's Muslim Studies, which ranks highly among the classics of the scholarly literature on Islam. Indeed, the two volumes, originally published in German in 1889-1890, can justly be counted among those which laid the foundations of the modern study of Islam as a religion and a civilization. The first study deals with the reaction of Islam to the ideals of Arab tribal society, to the attitudes of early Islam to the various nationalities and more especially the Persians, and culminates in the chapter on the Shu'ubiyya movement which represents the reaction of the newly converted peoples, and again more especially of the Persians, to the idea of Arab superiority. The second essay is the famous study on the development of the Hadith, the 'Traditions' ascribed to Muhammed, in which the Hadith is shown to reflect the various trends of early Islam, and in which its collection, and the subsequent literature devoted to it, is described. Goldziher's name is mainly associated with the critical study of the Hadith, of which this essay is the chief monument. The third essay is about the cult of saints, which, though contrary to the spirit and the letter of the earliest Islam, played such an important part in its subsequent development. These essays, with the author's marvelous richness of information, profound historical sense, and sympathetic insight into the motive forces of religion and civilization, are today as fresh as at the time of their original publication and are indispensable for all students of Islam. The editor, S. M. Stern, has brought the annotation up-to-date by completing, whenever necessary, the references, by making relevant additions and by indicating the most important later literature dealing with the subjects treated in the studies.
Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.
In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere. As they examine the role of women in public life and Islamic perspectives on modernization and free speech, the authors probe the diversity of the contemporary Islamic experience, suggesting general trends and challenging popular Western notions of Islam as a monolithic movement. In so doing, they clarify concepts such as tradition, authority, ethnicity, pro-test, and symbolic space, notions that are crucial to an in-depth understanding of ongoing political events. This book poses questions about ideological politics in a variety of transnational and regional settings throughout the Muslim world. Europe and North America, for example, have become active Muslim centers, profoundly influencing trends in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. The authors examine the long-term cultural and political implications of this transnational shift as an emerging generation of Muslims, often the products of secular schooling, begin to reshape politics and society--sometimes in defiance of state authorities. Scholars, mothers, government leaders, and musicians are a few of the protagonists who, invoking shared Islamic symbols, try to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate and public life. These symbolic politics explain why political actions are recognizably Muslim, and why "Islam" makes a difference in determining the politics of a broad swath of the world.
This book provides a look at Muslim life and institutions forming in North America. It considers the range of Islamic life in North America with its different racial-ethnic and cultural identities, customs, and religious orientations. Issues of acculturation, ethnicity, orthodoxy, and the changing roles of women are brought into focus. The authors provide insight into the lives of recent immigrants who are asking what is Islamically appropriate in a non-Muslim environment. Contrasts are drawn between Sunni and Shi'i groups, and attention is given to the activities of some Sufi organizations. The growing Islamic community among African-American Muslims is examined, including the followers of Warith Deen Muhammed and the sectarians identified with black power, such as the Nation of Islam, Darul Islam, and the Five Percenters. The authors document the challenges and issues that American Muslims face, such as prejudice and racism; pressure from overseas Muslims; dress and education; the influence of Islamic revivalism on the development of the community in this country; and the maintenance of Muslim identity amidst the pressure for assimilation.
The study of Islam has historically been approached in two different ways: apologetical and polemical. The former focuses on the preservation and propagation of religious teachings, and the latter on the attempt to undermine the tradition. The dialectic between these two approaches continued into the Enlightenment, and the tension between them still exists today. What is new in the modern period, however, is the introduction of a third approach, the academic one, which ostensibly examines the tradition in diverse historical, religious, legal, intellectual, and philosophical contexts. Classical Islamic subjects (e.g., Qur'ān, ḥadīth, fiqh, tafsīr) are now studied using a combination of the apologetical, the polemical, and the academic approaches. Depending upon the historical period and the institutional context, these classical topics have been accepted (apologetical), have had their truth claims undermined (polemical), or have simply been taken for granted (academic). This volume, comprising chapters by leading experts, deconstructs the ways in which classical Muslim scholarship has structured (and, indeed, continues to structure) the modern study of Islam. It explores how classical subjects have been approached traditionally, theologically, and secularly, in addition to examining some of the tensions inherent in these approaches.
Why contemporary Islam is able to support austerely traditional and conservative regimes as well as revolutionary ones is the subject of this collection of essays. Professor Gellner's position is supported by a series of case studies and critical evaluations of rival interpretations.
