This book examines the concepts of knowledge and education in Islām, demystifying many of the (mis)perceptions associated with Muslim women, in particular. It explores how a renewed Muslim education informed by the principles of democratic citizenship education can begin to reshape multifarious forms of engagement by, with and among Muslim women.
Cosmopolitan ideals and pluralist tendencies have been employed creatively and adapted carefully by Muslim individuals, societies and institutions in modern Southeast Asia to produce the necessary contexts for mutual tolerance and shared respect between and within different groups in society. Organised around six key themes that interweave the connected histories of three countries in Southeast Asia - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - this book shows the ways in which historical actors have promoted better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the region. Case studies from across these countries of the Malay world take in the rise of the network society in the region in the 1970s up until the early 21st century, providing a panoramic view of Muslim cosmopolitan practices, outlook and visions in the region.
Since the early twentieth century, Muslim reformers have been campaigning for a total transformation of the ways in which Islam is imagined in the Malay world. One of the most influential is the author Haji Abdul Malik bin Abdul Karim Amrullah, commonly known as Hamka. In Hamka and Islam, Khairudin Aljunied employs the term "cosmopolitan reform" to describe Hamka's attempt to harmonize the many streams of Islamic and Western thought while posing solutions to the various challenges facing Muslims. Among the major themes Aljunied explores are reason and revelation, moderation and extremism, social justice, the state of women in society, and Sufism in the modern age, as well as the importance of history in reforming the minds of modern Muslims.Aljunied argues that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness toward a whole range of thoughts and philosophies to develop his own vocabulary of reform, attesting to Hamka's unique ability to function as a conduit for competing Islamic and secular groups. Hamka and Islam pushes the boundaries of the expanding literature on Muslim reformism and reformist thinkers by grounding its analysis within the Malay experience and by using the concept of cosmopolitan reform in a new context.
A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist era Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship. Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.
This richly illustrated volume highlights the history of Islamic cosmopolitanism as documented through works of art from the eighth century to the present, examining artistic exchange between Muslim and non-Muslim societies.
Seema Alavi challenges the idea that all pan-Islamic configurations are anti-Western or pro-Caliphate. A pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility—a political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood today as it did in the last century.
Mary Mills Patrick’s Constantinople Woman’s College was one of the most influential institutions of higher learning for women in the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Patrick arrived in the 1870s to evangelize, but she gradually distanced herself from Christian proselytism in order to create a “cosmopolitan” college for all Ottoman women. Patrick was president of the Constantinople Woman’s College for 34 years, protecting the institution through the Balkan Wars, World War One, the British occupation of Constantinople, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of the Turkish Republic. Just as the late Ottoman Empire underwent extraordinary changes, so did Patrick transform herself and the Constantinople College to meet the demands of a twentieth-century Muslim state, ultimately sacrificing her “cosmopolitan,” heterogeneous student body to an ethnically homogeneous one that reflected the newly racialized nationalism of the Turkish Republic. Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College explores Patrick’s career from the 1870s to the 1930s, tracking her personal religious struggle and her professional transformation from Protestant evangelist, to feminist educator, to advocate for Muslim women, to, finally, supporter of Turkish nationalism.
Islam in Europe is a book full of striking images: the assassination of and the death threats against artists and intellectuals; violent demonstrations demanding Sharia law for Europe; and acts of terrorism. ... But there is another reality, as Nil�fer G�le describes it from her own life experience: Muslims who are politicians in European parliaments; scholars teaching at European universities; and artists who use this creative intercultural exchange as a theme in their art. ... G�le sees the best hope for a modern and European Islam in the Muslim women who--in contrast to the men--demonstrate their commitment to their heritage by wearing head scarfs while participating in modern Western life. In manifesting their professional and public experience in their own communities, they become the agents of change and modernism. G�le thus sees European Islam as "feminine," in contrast to the male-dominated traditional Islam.
Family, Law and Politics, Volume II of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, brings together over 360 entries on women, family, law, politics, and Islamic cultures around the world.
