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Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.
Offers fresh perspectives on the relationship between secularization, tolerance and democracy through a theoretically informed look at South Asian politics.
The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practices, this volume also breaks away from the dominant trend of mainstream ethnographic work, which celebrates Sufi-inspired forms of Islam as tolerant, plural, authentic and so on, pitted against a 'reformist' Islam. Urging a more nuanced examination of all forms of reformism and their reception in practice, the contributions here powerfully demonstrate the historical and geographical specificities of reform projects. In doing so, they challenge prevailing perspectives in which substantially different traditions of reform are lumped together into one reified category (often carelessly shorthanded as 'wah'habism') and branded as extremist – if not altogether demonised as terrorist.
In Masters Not Friends, Mubbashir Rizvi lends a historical and ethnographic perspective to the rise of one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia, the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP), who, against all odds, successfully resisted the Pakistani military and made a case for their moral right to farmland. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, and bridge literatures from subaltern studies, military power, colonial technology and governance, and the language of claim-making. More broadly, Rizvi offers a glimpse of Pakistan that contrasts with its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy and terrorism.
This thoughtful ethnography of Islam in Pakistan moves from the smallest scale—a single worshiper striving to be a better Muslim who is seeking guidance at a neighborhood mosque—to the largest, examining the thought of poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, considered to be the spiritual visionary of the country.
The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.
Chapters emphasize exploration of substantive questions about political life in a range of global contexts, with attention to whether and how those questions may be shared, contested, or reformulated across differences of time, space, and experienceAn interdisciplinary volume that bridges the gaps between various traditions, regions, and concerns regarding political theoryProvides tags and keywords to aid navigation of the handbook and help readers trace disruptions, thematic connections, and conceptual contrasts across entries.
Straddling a variety of boundaries--geographic, linguistic, and narrative--Dispatches from Pakistan is a vital attempt to speak for the multitude of Pakistanis who, in the face of seemingly unimaginable hardships, from drone strikes to crushing poverty, remain defiantly optimistic about their future.
Are secular aims, politics, and sensibilities impossible, undesirable and impracticable for Muslims and Islamic states? Should Muslim women be exempted from feminist attempts at liberation from patriarchy and its various expressions under Islamic laws and customs? Considerable literature on the entanglements of Islam and secularism has been produced in the post-9/11 decade and a large proportion of it deals with the Woman Question. Many commentators critique the secular and Western feminism, and the racialising backlash that accompanied the occupation of Muslim countries during the War on Terror military campaign launched by the U.S. government after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Implici...