Suchergebnisse

Law and Iranian women's activism / Louise A. Halper -- Gendered space and shared security: women's activism in peace and conflict resolution in Indonesia / Etin Anwar -- Failures of solidarity, failures of the nation-state: nongovernmental organizations and Moroccan women's activism / Rachel Newcomb -- Beyond personal belief? The role of religious identities among Muslim women respect activists / Narzanin Massoumi -- In search of faithful citizens in postcolonial Malaysia: Islamic ethics, Muslim activism, and feminist politics / Azza Basarudin -- Muslim women's scholarship and the new gender jihad / Roxanne D. Marcotte -- New expressions of religiosity: Al Huda international and the expansion of Islamic education for Pakistani Muslim women / Khanum Shaikh -- "Women's spirit" and spiritual matter(s)": gender, activism, and scholarship in an Ethiopian eco-spiritual system / Patricia H. Karimi-Taleghani -- Staging politics: new currents in North African women's dramatic literature / Laura Chakravarty Box -- Indonesian women: activist and Islamist spiritual callings / Nelly Van Doorn-Harder -- The dialogs of a new Orientalist discourse: telling tales of Iranian womanhood / Kahani Beguum -- Religious practice and worldview of Muslim women in western Europe / Kari Vogt -- From ritual to redemption : world view of Shi'a Muslim women in southern California / Bridget Blomfield -- Religion as a spring for activism: Muslim women youth in Canada / Katherine Bullock

The positive, unifying ideological resources of liberal and progressive Islamic interpretations deserve more than ever to be exploited in the contemporary socio-political context. Their conceptual tools, principles and theses could solve the conflictual cleavage, politically manipulated, between Islam and Western modernity, without repudiating the references to an Islamic paradigm. Therefore, liberal and progressive Islamic understandings could avoid the recent superficial oscillation between two ideological -artificially constructed- extremes, namely either confining the discussions to the secular, colonialist or postcolonialist perspectives, or promoting the defensive opportunist neotraditionalist Islamic approaches, specific to the nationalist movements of the last century so-called Islamic revival. Liberal Islam does not fully adopt all liberal theses and does not obediently imitate Western philosophy. Liberal Islamic understandings are defined by the opposition against teocracy and by supporting the democracy. Women, minorities and non-Muslims' rights in Muslim-majority countries, freedom of thought and trust in human progress, are other essential tenets that are fundamented on contemporary understandings of the major Islamic sources. Trying to correct some excesses that the liberal Muslims were accused of, but maintaining the reformist tendencies, progressive Muslims' approach is centered on a "multiple critiqueˮ ‒ a simultaneous critique of the diverse discourses and communities in which Muslims are situated. Not only the authoritarian constructions of literalist, puritanist Muslims, the violation of human rights, freedom of expression and of religion, the oppression of women in some Muslim countries are condemned and deconstructed, but also some political, economic, intellectual hegemonic Western aspects of modernity. In Romania these contemporary tendencies of interpreting Islam are not yet represented at a community level.

Islam plays a pivotal political role in Southeast Asian countries, where the governments that have ruled since independence have been concerned with influencing the trajectory, content, hermeneutic and style of the legal traditions of their Muslim citizens and reconciling them with the states' wider policy objectives. This contribution looks at one particular tool for this form of 'guiding' Islam – the codification of Islam – comparing the codes in two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Brunei) and two Muslim-minority countries (Singapore and the Philippines). Utilising comparative law methodologies, this article explores the structure, style and content of the codes in order to explicate their explicit and implied function. These codes are less concerned with being a statement of substantive Islamic law than with setting up a state-sanctioned bureaucracy for the administration of law for Muslims. These bureaucratic institutions were the key instruments for the states to develop their own brand of Islam. In doing so, the state's approach towards socially engineering Islam oscillates among appropriation, accommodation, control and subjugation of Islam in different political and legal frameworks.

Students of Classical Islam Now Have Several Substantial English-language reference works at their disposal. Foremost among these is the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (henceforth EI2) an imposing enterprise which attempts to cover all aspects of Islam in all lands from the time of the Prophet until the present. This noble ambition has carried the price of slow progress. Publication began in 1952 and after nearly half a century the work is still not complete. In the meantime The Encyclopedia of Religion and The Dictionary of the Middle Ages have appeared and been completed. Although the purview of these two works is much broader than the religion of Islam and the Islamic world, they contain many articles of considerable interest to Islamicists. Since the publication of its first fascicle in 1982, the Encyclopaedia Iranica has been supplementing these distinguished works, and eight volumes of a projected twenty have now been completed.

Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- Foreword -- 1. The Problem Stated -- What Is Capitalism? -- 2. What Islam Prescribes -- The Qur'an and the Sunnah -- An Ideal of Social Justice? -- 3. Economic Practice in the Muslim World of the Middle Ages -- The Capitalistic Sector -- Feudalism or Asiatic Mode of Production? -- A Just Society? -- 4. The Influence of Muslim Ideology Generally in the Economic Field -- The Ideology of the Qur'an -- Post-Qur'anic Muslim Ideology -- 5. Islam and Capitalism in the Muslim Countries Today -- Origination from Within or from Without? -- Influence of the Muslim Religion? -- A Muslim Path for Capitalism? -- 6. Conclusions and Prospects -- Correlations and Priorities -- Illusions and Mystifications -- Islam and Socialism -- Afterword -- Notes and References -- Index.

AbstractThe Muslim countries have a lower democracy level on average than the other countries. Yet, this cross‐country comparison is not sufficient to blame Islam for the democracy deficit. This issue is related to the numerous fixed characteristics that differ across the countries and that also have an effect on democracy. When the differences are not considered, the estimates mix the effect of the fixed characteristics with the effect that Islam has on democracy. We show this issue for a large set of countries covering the period 1950–2015. In cross‐country comparisons, we find a negative link between the share of Muslims in the total population and common measures for democracy. Yet, when the fixed characteristics are considered, the negative link vanishes. Thus, the lower democracy level has to be due to a fixed characteristic; it cannot be associated to (time‐varying) Muslim shares. Numerous empirical specifications support this finding. We also measure Islam by the average per‐day length of fasting during the month of Ramadan exploring whether the intensity of practicing the core teachings of Islam has a negative effect on democracy. Again, the evidence rejects a negative effect of Islam on democracy. If anything, the effect is positive. The findings are important for social coexistence.

Monshipouri reviews 'Islam and Democracy' by John L. Esposito and John O. Voll.