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Dramatic political events involving Muslims across the world have put Islam under increased scrutiny. However, the focus of this attention is generally limited to the political realm and often even further confined by constrictive views of Islamism narrowed down to its most extremist exponents. Much less attention is paid to the parallel development of more liberal alternative Islamic discourses. The final decades of the twentieth-century has also seen the emergence of a Muslim intelligentsia exploring new and creative ways of engaging with the Islamic heritage. Drawing on advances made in the Western human sciences and understanding Islam in comprehensive terms as a civilisation rather than...
This book presents an intellectual history of today’s Muslim world, surveying contemporary Muslim thinking in its various manifestations, addressing a variety of themes that impact on the lives of present-day Muslims. Focusing on the period from roughly the late 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the book is global in its approach and offers an overview of different strands of thought and trends in the development of new ideas, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary, and progressive approaches. It presents a variety of themes and issues including: The continuing relevance of the legacy of traditional Islamic learning as well as the use of reason; the centrality...
Like anywhere else, the present-day Islamic world too is grappling with modernity and postmodernity, secularisation and globalisation. Muslims are raising questions about religious representations and authority. This has given rise to the emergence of alternative Islamic discourses which challenge binary oppositions and dichotomies of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, continuity and change, state and civil society. It also leads to a dispersal of authority, a collapse of existing hierarchical structures and gender roles. This book further argues that the centre of gravity of many of these alternative Islamic discourses is shifting from the Arabic-speaking 'heartland' towards the geographical peripheries of the Muslim world and expatriate Muslims in North America and Europe. At the same time, in view of recent seismic shifts in the political constellation of the Middle East, the trends discussed in this book hold important clues for the possible direction of future developments in that volatile part of the Muslim world.
This essay is centered around five questions: (i) What is the proper place of liturgical theology? (ii) Which evolutions have there been in the past and which current tendencies are there in the field of liturgical theology? (iii) Which contents must liturgical theologians focus on? (iv) How can liturgical theologians engage in research? And (v): How can liturgical theology appropriately respond to what happens in Church and society? Each question corresponds with one part. The rationale behind ordering the content of this essay in this way is the following: starting from a reflection about the non-evident place of liturgical theology, an attempt is made to give it a fitting profile again on the basis of its genealogy in the Liturgical Movement. Correspondingly, liturgical theology can be considered a full-fledged research program, which does not simply deal with Christian rituals, festivals and sacraments, but with the core of Christian faith.
A compelling account of the struggle for the soul of Indonesian Islam.
A Muslim Reformist in Communist Yugoslavia examines the Islamic modernist thought of Husein Đozo, a prominent Balkan scholar. Born at a time when the external challenges to the Muslim world were many, and its internal problems both complex and overwhelming, Đozo made it his goal to reinterpret the teachings of the Qur’an and hadīth (prophetic tradition) to a generation for whom the truths and realities of Islam had fallen into disuse. As a Muslim scholar who lived and worked in a European, communist, multi-cultural and multi-religious society, Husein Đozo and his work present us with a particularly exciting account through which to examine the innovative interpretations of Islam. For e...
How the Ottomans refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority The medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750–1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed’s political authority. In this book, Hüseyin Yılmaz traces how a new conception of the caliphate emerged under the Ottomans, who redefined the caliph as at once a ruler, a spiritual guide, and a lawmaker corresponding to the prophet’s three natures. Challenging conventional narratives that portray the Ottoman caliphate as a fading relic of medieval Islamic law, Yılmaz offers a no...
This book is a case study in the literary, psychoanalytic, and theological encounters between diasporic Muslim intellectuals and secular western modernity. It centres on the simultaneous search for the possibility of both a reformation of Islamic fundamentalism and a transformation of the exclusionary limitations of western public institutions. With roots in original research in the fields of comparative religion and cultural studies, and drawing on sources in English, French, and Arabic, the author introduces and elaborates the concept of "Western-Islamic public sphere". This concept defines what is at stake in the formative play of public representations where traditionalist foundations an...
Analyzes the place of beauty in the Sufi understanding of God, the world, and the human being through the writings of Sufi scholar and saint Rῡzbihān Baqlī. According to Muhammad, "God is beautiful and He loves beauty." Yet, Islam is rarely associated with beauty, and today, a politicized Islam dominates many perceptions. This work tells a forgotten story of beauty in Islam through the writings of celebrated but little-studied Sufi scholar and saint Rūzbihān Baqlī (1128–1209). Rūzbihān argued that the pursuit of beauty in the world and in oneself was the goal of Muslim life. One should become beautiful in imitation of God and reclaim the innate human nature created in God's beauti...
Introduction -- 1. Criticising religion -- 2. Ambivalent religiosity -- 3. Criticising religion on Twitter -- 4. Religious disengagements -- 5. Backlash: Takfir campaigns -- 6. Evolution of Saudi religion -- Index.