Suchergebnisse

One of the main groups involved in organising the mobilisation of millions of people in opposition to the Iraq war of 2003 was the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). Much recent commentary has focused on the involvement of MAB (an offshoot of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood) in the coalition of organisations that led the anti-war movement. Less attention has been paid to how MAB activists themselves understood their working relationship with the other organised groups in the Stop the War coalition. Based mainly on interviews with MAB activists, this article examines their perspectives and experiences of working within a broad Left movement.

AbstractThis paper examines the itinerant women-only medical and social teams, created by the French army during the Algerian decolonisation war, which sought to instrumentalise and win over women through access to medical and social services. It is argued that the teams were instrumental in two significant events during the Algerian war: the public unveiling of Muslim women in May 1958 and the September 1958 referendum, in which Muslim women voted for the first time. This paper argues, however, that the teams' achievements were short lived and superficial and that the teams themselves faced severe limitations.

The Muslims in India comprise 14 per cent of the population and have been recognised empirically as a minority, facing social and economic concerns for over a decade. With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its slogans of Hindutva, discourse against the Muslims of India has been deteriorated significantly. Prime Minister Modi's government came to power in 2014, and the four years since have led to persecution and some of the most troubling crimes against the Muslims and other minorities, centred around communal issues. As a result, violence and discrimination have increased as has the rhetoric from the Hindu right-wing organisations that are supported, in one way or the other, by the mainstream BJP politicians. In this paper, the current state of the Muslim minority is examined and analysed using recent sources, including human rights reports from international organisations, as it is argued that Hindutva forces and ideological backing of the BJP have emboldened extremist mindsets and embedded them in society. This means that even ostensibly "secular" political agents of the Congress party have resorted to forms of Hindu domination in an environment where history is being rewritten and minorities are framed as outsiders in India.

"Colonial and Post-Colonial Identity Politics in South Asia analyses the colonial and post-colonial documentation and caste classification among Muslims in India, demonstrating that religion negotiated with regional social customs and local social practices whilst at the same time fostering a shared religious belief. The central question addressed in this is book is how different castes assert their identity for classification and how caste encountered colonial documentation. Identifying the colonial context of the documentation of caste among Muslims, and relying on colonial documentation in various census reports, Gazetteers, government or police records, ethnographic studies and travelogues, the author demonstrates the sheer diversity of attempts and caste among Muslims. The book deconstructs how under Colonialism Muslims were categorized into three broad but overlapping categories - Ashraf, Ajlafs and Arzals - and that Muslims were categorized into Asiatic, Non-Asiatic, Foreign, Mixed and Hindustani -Muslim categories. It argues that few colonial theories applied to Muslims. Finally, the author explores post-colonial documentation of castes among Muslims in various Commission reports, particularly in Backward class commission reports and its interplay in the reservation politics of the contemporary period and examines the growth of various Muslim caste organizations in different parts of India and their role in identity politics. Providing a new perspective on the issue of minorities in India, this book will be of interest to scholars of religion, Islam, history, politics and sociology of India"--

This article examines the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) movement's stand on the South Sudan question. The aim here is to contribute to the ongoing debate over the MB's moderation. Throughout the civil war in Sudan, the MB consistently objected to South Sudanese secession. Yet, while it had traditionally framed its objection in religious terms, describing the South Sudanese struggle as a Christian conspiracy against Islam, in the decade preceding South Sudan's declaration of independence it moved to base its opposition on more practical grounds, revolving around issues such the absence of democracy, stability and infrastructure in South Sudan. This correlated with wider shifts in the MB. Since the 1990s, the movement has claimed to have undergone a transformation, adopting a moderate, pro-democratic stance. These statements persuaded many scholars that the MB has come to represent political moderation in both its domestic and international agenda. More recent works on the movement, however, have come to question the MB's moderation hypothesis, suggesting that even though the movement has changed its discourse and some aspects of its activism, this could not be seen as a linear process of moderation. This article uses the South Sudan case to further support this critique from a foreign policy perspective. It demonstrates that even though the MB changed its tactics and discourse, its goals remained unchanged- even when the circumstances and the normative environment changed dramatically. Moreover, it shows that at times of crisis, the liberal discourse gave way to the old-fashioned radical discourse of previous decades. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

Ghazala Jamil, Muslim Women Speak: Of Dreams and Shackles. New Delhi: Sage Yoda Press, 2018, 190 pp., ₹595, ISBN 9789352805006.

Sudha Sharma, The Status of Muslim Women in Medieval India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016, 284 pp., ₹750, ISBN: 9789351505662 (Hardcover).

This study examines theories of Muslim minority integration as these apply to republican France and multicultural Canada, using data on psychological distress as a key measure. Based on the 2001–2002 Canadian Community Health Survey and the 2008 French Enquête sur la Santé et la Protection Sociale, we find Muslim minorities experience higher levels of psychological distress than non-Muslims, not only in France but also in Canada. The Muslim difference is unrelated to religious attachment and rather is partly explained by high rates of unemployment or labor market inactivity.

Although a voluminous literature has studied the substantive representation of women, these studies have largely been confined to advanced democracies. Similarly, studies that focus on the relationship between Islam and women's rights largely ignored the substantive representation of women in Muslim-majority countries. As one of the first studies of its kind, this article investigates the role of religion in the substantive representation of women by focusing on a Muslim-majority country: Turkey. Using a novel data set of 4,700 content coded private members' bills (PMBs) drafted in the Turkish parliament between 2002 and 2015, this article synthesizes competing explanations of women's representation in the Middle East and rigorously tests the implications of religion, ideology, critical mass, and labor force participation accounts. The results have significant implications for the study of gender and politics in Muslim-majority countries.