Islamic Studies

Islamic myths and collective memory are very much alive in today's localized struggles for identity, and are deployed in the ongoing construction of worldwide cultural networks. This book brings the theoretical perspectives of myth-making and collective...

Featuring contributions from anthropologists, historians and scholars of religion, this book explores the passionate, divided and evolving field of Islamic Studies in Europe and North America, past and present covering topics from secularism and gender...

Islamism is often portrayed as a reaction against, or at best a belated accommodation to, modernization. Refuting this dismissive opinion, Bjorn Utvik explores the movement through the lens of its engagement with social and economic change in Egypt...

Americans' awareness of Islam and Muslims rose to seemingly unprecedented heights in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, but this is not the first time they have dominated American public life. Once before, during the period of the Iranian...

PROSE Award- Media and Cultural Studies Finalist How diversity initiatives end up marginalizing Arab Americans and US Muslims One of Donald Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order to limit Muslim immigration to the United...

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions...

Hassan Mahamdallie gets spiritual in a commune; Marco Lauri visits Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century island utopia Hayy Ibn Yaqdan; Malise Ruthven interrogates modernity and Islamic utopias, Nazry Bahrawi is sceptical about secular utopias; and Sadek Hamid...

Jeremy Henzel-Thomas argues that educational reform is the biggest challenge facing Muslim societies, Richard Pringle highlights the purpose of education, Abdelwahab El-Affendi suggests how Muslim education should be reconfigured, Abdulkader Tayob argues...

Tahir Abbas explores the enigma of modern Islamist Turkey, Ahmet Kuru discovers Turkey's political history, Nagihan Halilolu gets tangled in Turkish heritage wars, Zeynep Okten has reservations about the country's Islamic finance industry, Gokhan Bacik...

How does one navigate the rich cultural and political geography of West Africa? Mapping the diverse manifestations of Islamic influence, this issue of Critical Muslim brings together the resplendent but manifold articulations of Muslim and African...

In Muslim countries, apostasy and blasphemy laws are defended on the grounds that they are based on Islamic Shari'a and intended to protect religion. But blasphemy and apostasy laws can be used both to suppress thought and debate and to harass religious...

Is our existence in the world a set of separate moving parts to which we must continuously adapt? Or is life a series of transitions as we evolve our understanding of what goes on around and within ourselves in order to realise an authentic self?...

The past few decades have seen a burgeoning interest in the manuscript cultures of the Muslim world. The study of manuscripts has brought to light new perspectives on the transmission of texts and larger questions of cultural practices passed down within...

Muslims are neither new nor foreign to the United States. They have been a vital presence in North America since the 16th century. Muslims in America unearths their history, documenting the lives of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, black,...

The three Lebanese writers discussed in this volume -- Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani and Mikhail Naimy -- all emigrated to the USA early in life. There, in the first decades of the twentieth century, together with other Syrian and Lebanese emigres, they...

Hassan Mahamdallie argues that racism is twenty-first century's main problem, Shannon Shah detects racial overtones within Islam, Robert Irwin examines race and racism in the Arabian Nights, Hugh Kennedy uncovers the ninth century Zanj slave uprisings,...

Aamer Hussein takes love to its logical conclusion, Robert Irwin traces the origins of the ghazal (love lyric ), Christopher Shackle recites epic Panjabi poems of sacred love and lyrical death, Imranali Panjwani mourns the massacre of Karbala, Martin...

This issue covers the politics, history, literature, and culture of The Maghreb. Robin Yassin-Kassab has an enlightening sojourn in Morocco; Hicham Yezza examines the role of the Berbers in the Arab Spring; Marcia Lynx Qualey is dazzled by the...

There is perhaps no place in the world today where the stakes of partying and having sex are higher than in present-day Iran. Drinking and dancing can lead to arrest by the morality police and a punishment of up to 70 lashes. Consequences for sex outside...

Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. Young Islam takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support--a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting...

"It is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful, balanced, or comprehensive treatment of this extremely elusive and difficult subject." -Digest of Middle East StudiesThis second edition of a widely acclaimed collection of essays reports on how new...

The growing tensions and occasional clashes between believers in the two main strands of Islam have been major concerns. Upheavals within the Shia sphere of influence had altered the relationship: the Iranian revolution of 1979 changed the politics of...

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine An exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Muslim womanhood that centers the lived experience of women of color For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through...

The Dark Side of the Crescent Moon constitutes a historical and political analysis of the growth of radical Islam throughout the world. It shows how the spread of radical Islam in Europe drove the United States and Russia to become allies of necessity,...

History is not just a subject taught in school. It is the lived reality of tradition that informs and, at times, colonises our present. So, any project that wishes to see us smoothly into the future must begin with a thorough analysis of the past...

A must-read for anyone interested in Muslim cultures, this volume not only explores Muslim identities through the lens of sexuality and gender - their historical and contemporary transformations and local and global articulations - but also interrogates...

Shi 'ism caught the attention of the world as Iran experienced her revolution in 1979 and was subsequently cast in the mold of a monolithic discourse of radical political Islam. The spokespersons of Shi'i Islam, in or out of power, have not been the sole...

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people's everyday lives. It complements existing studies by focusing not on mosque-going, activist Muslims, but on how people live out their...

As we teeter on the brink of climate collapse, this issue of Critical Muslim asks how we got here and whether environmental catastrophe can be averted. From the arid plains of Andalusia to landlocked Jordan, we see how communities are navigating extreme...

Political leaders of the 1930s may be accused of blindness to danger in their failed attempts to appease totalitarian aggression, but no one doubts they believed they were doing so to preserve their way of life. In contrast, Raphael Israeli suggests that...

Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni...

The first complete study of a little known Muslim presence in Europe. Since 9/11, the interest in Muslims in Europe has increased significantly. There has been much public debate and academic research focused on Muslims living in larger Western European...

A remarkable look at an understudied feature of the Iranian justice system, where forgiveness is as much a right of victims as retributionIran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences-according to Amnesty International, the country...

Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline...

Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the...

The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of...

It's not just intelligence that's going artificial! Numerous elements of our everyday life reek of inauthenticity. Even the grass we walk on and the plants we decorate our homes with demonstrate how the artificial has permeated our lives in ways we do...

In our turbulent times, all varieties of bodies face serious dangers. Bodies of water are disappearing before our eyes; bodies politic risk suppression, lying on the razor's edge of the democratic struggle; human bodies fear annihilation at the hands of...

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated for jinn possession and psychosis in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. Through rich filmic and textual case studies, he shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim...

We are often led to believe that liberty is synonymous with freedom--but is that really so? And what does it entail? In this issue of Critical Muslim, we explore who defines the liberty we are told we enjoy, and how our worldviews impact the ways we...