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Explores one of the most challenging issues facing the Muslim world: the Islamisation of political power. It presents a comparative analysis of Muslim societies in West, South, Central and South east Asia.

"On 12 August 1954, the first all-African Legislature of the Gold Coast called on the government to ban political parties that were organized on the basis of ethnic or religious principles. On 6 March 1957, this former British colony became Ghana, established a unitary government, and became the first country to the south of the Sahara to gain political independence. The national government adopted a secular constitution that prohibited the creation of political parties based on ethnic and religious principles. Even though civilian governments in post-independent Ghana had been overthrown by the military on several occasions, all the emerging republican constitutions had retained the supremacy of the state and the principle that party politics should not be conducted to excite any religious and ethnic population. Such a ban notwithstanding, the national governments have permitted certain freedoms. The clearest articulation of rights is demonstrated in the articles of the 1992 constitution of the Fourth Republic Constitution under which citizens are guaranteed human rights, freedom of speech, as well as the right to practice one's religion. It is not sufficient though to point to the existence of a secular constitution or to enumerate the rights for which citizens are entitled. Rather, the population must first accept the legitimacy of the state. Furthermore, it is important that the people recognize or at least perceive the state to be capable of addressing their concerns. Ghana has had a long history of contacts with Muslims. Indeed, 15 percent of the population was denumerated in the 2000 national census ascribe to the Islamic religion. Thus, for this essay in which we discuss the place of Islam in the national context, it is important that we articulate how the religious and social concerns of Muslims are addressed under the secular constitution. It is the thesis of this paper that though a religious minority, Muslims in Ghana are first and foremost citizens and should be therefore able to use all the necessary cultural and modern agencies to negotiate with the state." (author's abstract)

Introduction : ISIS as the expression of a legal order -- About ISIS -- About Shari'a -- Shari'a and ISIS -- No law but Islam : a theory of exclusivity -- No single rule left out : integrally Shari'a -- Voting on God's will : immediateness and mediation -- Striving on the straight path : Jihād -- A new land of Islam : reestablishing the caliphate -- Reinventing spatiality : a return to universalism -- Conclusion : ISIS between Shari'a and globalization.

The article analyses the evolution and the current state of radical Islam in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Chinese government considers Islamic radicalism as a serious threat, in particular in the Xinjiang region, which borders on some states in Central Asia as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate roots and historical development of significant groups, in particular the East Turkestan Islamic Movement - ETIM. In its next part, the article deals with the contemporary situation as well as the cooperation between Uyghur radicals and other radical Islamic movements, in particular al-Qaeda and Taliban, and their activities. The article concludes that contemporary Uyghur Islamic radicalism cannot be considered as a major security threat, since the activities of these groups have largely shifted to Pakistan and rather have the nature of a propaganda war.

Overview of relations between Central Asian regimes and Islam; view that Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are reacting with repression, while Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadzhikistan are participating in the struggle against the "Wahabbi threat," and other issues. Summary in English p. 142.

"The opening chapters of the volume document relations between the state and prominent Islamic political organizations. A second group of essays brings the level of documentation and analysis one step closer to the grass-roots operation of "reformist" or "resurgent" Islamic movements. The final group shifts the description and analysis to the most basic level - the grass-roots reception of institutional discourse and the target of reformist and resurgent activity. Collectively the essays provide crucial insights into the diversity and complexity of the reception and actualization of Islamic reform. They build a convincing argument for viewing resurgent Islam in Southeast Asia as neither monolithic nor antithetical to the nation-state. The portrait of these movements presented here is sympathetic but critical and does much to advance our understanding of the region and of the role of Islam in shaping its past and future." "Islam in an Era of Nation-States will be of interest to students of Islam, Southeast Asian history, and the anthropology of religion. In examining the politics and meanings of Islamic resurgence, it will also speak to political scientists, religious scholars, and others concerned with culture and politics in the late modern era."--Jacket

This article aims to discuss the issues of the relationship between Islam and state in the Islamic political perspective in Indonesia. This study was motivated by the desire to criticize the development and "up and down" relationship between Islam and state that is very dynamic coloring political situation in "Islamic majority country" Indonesia. This article concluded that understanding the relationship between religion and state with Islamic political approach is not meant to establish a religious state or an Islamic state of Indonesia, but more on filling spaces are functionally religion in order society, nation and state. The relationship between Islam and state can be integrated in a functional relationship equally aspire to nobility. Even integralistic, symbiotic, and secularistic relations, each should be viewed as a form of complementary. Facing the development of modernization, the relationship between Islam and state should be articulated as an effort to always adapt to the development of society in its various aspects, such as: the globalization of the world political economy, science and technology, the development issues of democracy, gender, human rights, pluralism, both nationally and internationally.