The Muslim World in Modern South Asia
The Muslim World in Modern South Asia

Author: Francis Robinson

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1438483031

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Over the past two hundred years, two great processes have shaped Muslim societies: Western domination and the industrial capitalism that came with it, and the Islamic revival that preceded the Western presence but came to interact significantly with it. In this book, Francis Robinson considers the challenges Western dominance has offered key aspects of Muslim civilization, particularly in the context of South Asia, which in the nineteenth century moved from being a receiver of influences from the rest of the Muslim world to being a transmitter of influences to it. Robinson also considers aspects of the Muslim revival and how they have come to shape, in various ways, Muslim responses to Western dominance. The role of the transmission of knowledge, both formal and spiritual, in forming Muslim societies is explored, and also the particular role of the transmitters in sustaining the Islamic dimensions of Muslim societies under Western dominance. Attention, too, is paid to the imposition of the modern state and the restriction of cosmopolitan spaces.

Ashraf Ali Thanawi
Ashraf Ali Thanawi

Author: Muhammad Qasim Zaman

Publisher: Oneworld Academic

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13:

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Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1863-1943) was one of the most prominent religious scholars in Islamic history. Author of over a thousand books on different aspects of Islam, he defended the Islamic scholarly tradition and articulated its authority in an age of momentous religious and political change. Muhammad Qasim Zaman offers a comprehensive and highly accessible account of Thanawi's multifaceted career and thought, whilst also providing a valuable introduction to Islam in modern South Asia.

Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia
Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia

Author: Elizabeth Lhost

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1469668130

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Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.

Defending Muḥammad in Modernity
Defending Muḥammad in Modernity

Author: SherAli Tareen

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2020-01-31

Total Pages: 638

ISBN-13: 026810672X

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In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.

Engaging the Muslim World
Engaging the Muslim World

Author: Juan Cole

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2009-03-17

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0230620574

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With clarity and concision, Juan Cole disentangles the key foreign policy issues that America is grappling with today--from our dependence on Middle East petroleum to the promotion of Islamophobia by the American right--and delivers his informed advice on the best way forward. Cole's unique ability to take the true Muslim perspective into account when looking at East-West relations make his insights well-rounded and prescient as he suggests a course of action on fundamental issues like religion, oil, war and peace. With substantive recommendations for the next administration on how to move forward in key countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, Engaging the Muslim World reveals how we can repair the damage of the disastrous foreign policy of the last eight years and forge ahead on a path of peace and prosperity. Cole argues: * Al-Qaeda is not a mass movement like fascism or communism but rather a small political cult like the American far right circles that produced Timothy McVeigh. * The Muslim world is not a new Soviet Bloc but rather is full of close allies or potential allies. * There can be no such thing as American energy independence, we will need Islamic oil to survive as a superpower into the next century. * Iran is not an implacable enemy of the U.S.--it can and should be fruitfully engaged, which is a necessary step for American energy security since Tehran can play the spoiler in the strategic Persian Gulf. * America's best hope in Iraq is careful, deliberate military disengagement, rather than either through immediate withdrawal or a century-long military presence--in other words, both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates are wrong.

Islam in South Asia in Practice
Islam in South Asia in Practice

Author: Barbara D. Metcalf

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-09-08

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1400831385

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This volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of more than thirty scholars of Islam and Muslim societies in South Asia to create a rich anthology of primary texts that contributes to a new appreciation of the lived religious and cultural experiences of the world's largest population of Muslims. The thirty-four selections--translated from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindavi, Dakhani, and other languages--highlight a wide variety of genres, many rarely found in standard accounts of Islamic practice, from oral narratives to elite guidance manuals, from devotional songs to secular judicial decisions arbitrating Islamic law, and from political posters to a discussion among college women affiliated with an "Islamist" organization. Drawn from premodern texts, modern pamphlets, government and organizational archives, new media, and contemporary fieldwork, the selections reflect the rich diversity of Islamic belief and practice in South Asia. Each reading is introduced with a brief contextual note from its scholar-translator, and Barbara Metcalf introduces the whole volume with a substantial historical overview.

The Idea of the Muslim World
The Idea of the Muslim World

Author: Cemil Aydin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-04-24

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0674050371

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“Superb... A tour de force.” —Ebrahim Moosa “Provocative... Aydin ranges over the centuries to show the relative novelty of the idea of a Muslim world and the relentless efforts to exploit that idea for political ends.” —Washington Post When President Obama visited Cairo to address Muslims worldwide, he followed in the footsteps of countless politicians who have taken the existence of a unified global Muslim community for granted. But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World considers its origins and reveals the consequences of its enduring allure. “Much of today’s media commentary traces current trouble in the Middle East back to the emergence of ‘artificial’ nation states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire... According to this narrative...today’s unrest is simply a belated product of that mistake. The Idea of the Muslim World is a bracing rebuke to such simplistic conclusions.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is here that Aydin’s book proves so valuable: by revealing how the racial, civilizational, and political biases that emerged in the nineteenth century shape contemporary visions of the Muslim world.” —Foreign Affairs

The Book in the Islamic World
The Book in the Islamic World

Author: George N. Atiyeh

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1995-07-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 079149540X

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The Book in the Islamic World brings together serious studies on the book as an intellectual entity and as a vehicle of cultural development. Written by a group of distinguished scholars, it examines and reflects upon this unique tool of communication not as a physical artifact but as a manifestation of the aspirations, values, and wisdom of Arabs and Muslims in general. The Islamic system of book production differed from that of the West. This volume shows the peculiarities of book making and the intellectual principles that governed a book's inner structure, mysteries, and impact on culture. Investigated and explained are the issues involved in printing; the compilation of the Koran, the most important book in Islam; attitudes toward books; the oral versus the written tradition; metaphors of the book in literature; biographical dictionaries, an important genre of Islamic books; the grammatical tradition; women's contribution to calligraphy; scientific manuscripts; the transition from scribal to print culture; publishing in the modern Arab World; and the new electronic media, a non-book vehicle of communication, and its impact on education.

Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia
Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia

Author: Greg Fealy

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13:

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In an era when Islam ostensibly lies at the heart of a volatile nexus of a global campaign of war on terrorism, simplistic notions and dangerous misunderstandings about the cultures and nature of Southeast Asian Islam, in all its variants, are used to inform and justify policies.

Islam in Southeast Asia
Islam in Southeast Asia

Author: Norshahril Saat

Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

Published: 2018-05-30

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9814786993

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"Islam in the Malay world of Southeast Asia or Islam Nusantara, as it has come to be known, had for a long time been seen as representing the more spiritual and Sufi dimension of Islam, thereby striking a balance between the exoteric and the esoteric. This image of 'the smiling face of Islam' has been disturbed during the last decades with increasing calls for the implementation of Shari’ah, conceived of in a narrow manner, intolerant discourse against non-Muslim communities, and hate speech against minority Muslims such as the Shi’ites. There has also been what some have referred to as the Salafization of Sunni Muslims in the region. The chapters of this volume are written by scholars and activists from the region who are very perceptive of such trends in Malay world Islam and promise to improve our understanding of developments that are sometimes difficult to grapple with." — Professor Syed Farid Alatas, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore