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This collection of essays examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask - often both simultaneously - discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. It builds on scholarship that re-imagines theories and practices of the public in modern and contemporary societies. While examining disparate time periods and locations, each contributor views modern and contemporary public spheres as crucial to the functioning, and understanding, of political and societal power in Muslim majority countries.

The study of the Islamic Resurgence has underestimated the intellectual trials that some key personalities underwent at a crucial stage of the crisis of post‐colonial societies. The intellectual leaders of the Resurgence faced the task to redefine the social value of faith and of its converse, doubt, as the insidious flip‐side of processes of modernization. Their response to the challenge contributed to a reconfiguration of the intellectual field: in order to reach larger audiences they reinterpreted their cultural credentials and even life narratives in terms of the communicative standards suitable to new media. This paper analyses how the motives of doubt and faith in the trajectories of two personalities aspiring to the status of 'Islamic intellectual' (the Sufi scholar and Shaykh al‐Azhar 'Abd al‐Halim Mahmud and the media‐savvy lay thinker Mustafa Mahmud) contributed to a reconfiguration of the intellectual field. We investigate how their legacy is presently discussed among educated audiences. Finally, we show how the ambivalence of the reception of their public teaching reflects the troubled search for a new ideological balance by the Egyptian middle classes.RésuméL'étude de la Résurgence islamique a sous‐estimé les épreuves intellectuelles par laquelle sont passés certains de ses grands noms à un stade crucial de la crise des sociétés postcoloniales. Les meneurs intellectuels de la Résurgence se sont trouvés confrontés à la tâche de redéfinir la valeur sociale de la foi et de son opposé, le doute, comme le revers insidieux des processus de modernisation. En relevant ce défi, ils ont contribuéà reconfigurer le champ intellectuel : pour atteindre un public plus large, ils ont réinterprété leurs références culturelles et même leurs récits de vies selon les standards de communication adaptés aux nouveaux médias. Les auteurs analysent ici la façon dont les motifs du doute et de la foi dans la trajectoire de deux personnalités aspirant au statut « d'intellectuel islamique », l'érudit soufi Shaykh al‐Azhar 'Abd al‐Halim Mahmud et le penseur laïque Mustafa Mahmud, fin connaisseur des média, ont contribuéà la reconfiguration du champ intellectuel. Les auteurs étudient le débat dont leur héritage fait aujourd'hui l'objet dans les cercles éduqués. Pour finir, ils montrent comment l'ambivalence de l'accueil fait à leur enseignement public reflète la difficile recherche d'un équilibre idéologique dans les classes moyennes égyptiennes.

Modem Shari'a in Search of Law : Transcendent Reason, Public Metanorm, and the Legal System.
This article examines the process of redefinition of shari'a as a metanorm of public life in Egypt. The investigation suggests that shari'a's increasing integration in the state's System of law does not exhaust the differentiating range of its (meta)normativity. Ranging from moral appeals to discipline the subject to constitutional daims about the primacy of divine norm, this normativity is neither in conflict with modern concepts of citizenship and legality, nor can be reduced to a tool for indigenising modem legal rationalities. Shari'a's normativity reflects rather a view of the transcendent thinking that grounds a religious model of Personal virtue. This normativity contributes to the reconstruction of catalogues of obligations and rights in a way that often bypasses the legal System, fosters the disciplinary authority of religious-legal personnel and resists a complete and systematic integration into the legal order of the state. In the process, shari'a keeps its impetus as a reservoir of normativity more than as an alternative legal order.

Annotation, This book explores the public role of Islam in contemporary world politics. "Public Islam" refers to the diverse invocations and struggles over Islamic ideas and practices that increasingly influence the politics and social life of large parts of the globe. The contributors to this volume show how public Islam articulates competing notions and practices of the common good and a way of envisioning alternative political and religious ideas and realities, reconfiguring established boundaries of civil and social life. Drawing on examples from the late Ottoman Empire, Africa, South Asia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East, this volume facilitates understanding the multiple ways in which the public sphere, a key concept in social thought, can be made transculturally feasible by encompassing the evolution of non-Western societies in which religion plays a vital role

The historical and contemporary development of certain informal and formal articulations of Muslim social and political identities and forms of association in Muslim-majority and Arab societies has facilitated the emergence of a public sphere and limited the coercive power of state authority. This article suggests how a greater focus on religious ideas and forms of association can enhance the concept of the public sphere so that it better accounts for developments in these societies and in European societies themselves. ; Peer Reviewed

"Book Abstract: The sociology of the Middle East has been an expanding field of inquiry since the aftermath of WWII when phenomena as diverse as urbanization, internal and international migration, and peasant societies attracted the attention of scholars working on the region. The Middle East became central in key sociological debates on modernization theory and the critical responses. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East connects this historical trajectory with the emergence of the sociology of Islam, inspired by Max Weber. It explores how within the global community, the Middle East has become a terrain of heightened concern within the post-Cold War context, where the promising rise of civic (and often religiously-inspired) sociopolitical movements in the 1980s and 1990s has been slowly overwhelmed by the affirmation of jihadist networks, authoritarian states, and complex supranational security apparatuses. This foundational volume starts by engaging in a critical examination of the field itself, starting with a historical sociology of the making of the idea itself of the Middle East and linking it with the legacy of colonialism and the evolving dynamics of global power. In repurposing the sociology of the Middle East within a growing interdisciplinary multifield, the Handbook develops the critical argument that the exploration of social dynamics in the Middle East cannot be disjoined from the analysis of culture and politics. By connecting the vexed state-society relations in the region with movements of transformation and the affirmation of rights and creativity in the public arenas, it provides a comprehensive perspective to investigate longstanding regional and new transregional and global dynamics and their impact on the life of people in the region. Keywords: sociology of the Middle East, sociology of Islam, Max Weber, historical sociology, Middle East and North Africa region, MENA"--

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Cover. Islam in Process -- Table of contents -- Editor's note -- Introduction -- Crystallizations -- Chapter 1. Marshall Hodgson's Civilizational Analysis of Islam: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives -- Chapter 2. The Middle Period: Islamic Axiality in the Age of Afro-Eurasian Transcultural Hybridity -- Chapter 3. Identity Formation in World Religions: A Comparative Analysis of Christianity and Islam -- Chapter 4. The Emergence of Islam as a Case of Cultural Crystallization: Historical and Comparative Reflections -- Crossroads and Turning Points -- Chapter 5. Revolution in Early Islam: The Rise of Islam as a Constitutive Revolution -- Chapter 6. Ábdallah b. Salam: Egypt, Late Antiquity and Islamic Sainthood -- Chapter 8. Islam and the Axial Age -- Cultural and Institutional Dynamics -- Chapter 9. Islam and the Path to Modernity: Institutions of Higher Learning and Secular and Political Culture -- Chapter 10. Global Ages, Ecumenic Empires and Prophetic Religions -- Chapter 11. Reflexivity, Praxis, and "Spirituality": Western Islam and Beyond -- Chapter 12. Public Spheres and Political Dynamics in Historical and Modern Muslim Societies -- Abstracts -- Contributors.

This book discusses the extent to which the theoreticalrelevance and analytical rigor of the concept of the public sphere is affected bycurrent processes of transnationalization. The contributions address fundamentalquestions concerning the viability of a socially and politically effective publicsphere in a post-Westphalian world

In the colonial era, new distinctions and differentiations between religious and non-religious spheres took shape within inner-Islamic discourses, partly as a product of encounters with Western knowledge. This introduction conceptualizes these distinctions and differentiations in relation to Islam, drawing on Marshall Hodgson's concept of the Islamicate, which we employ for our heuristic notion of Islamicate secularities. It charts the paradigmatic conflicts that shape the contested fields of Islamic and secularity/secularism studies. The introduction discusses the epistemological and political context of these debates, and argues that theoretical and normative conflicts should not hinder further empirical inquiries into forms of secularity in Islamicate contexts. It also explores promising theoretical and methodological approaches for further explorations. Particular emphasis is laid on the historical trajectories and conditions, close in time or distant, that have played a role in the formation of contemporary Islamicate secularities.