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The Christians of Pakistan
In May 1998, John Joseph, the first native Pakistani Catholic bishop, shot himself in front of the courthouse where a Christian had been sentenced to death for blasphemy. This book tells the story of the Christians in Pakistan, with Bishop Joseph as its centrepiece. It is an account of outcastes who sought hope through Christianity, but who now find themselves victims of a struggle to define Islam in Pakistan. The majority of Pakistani Christians are descendants of untouchables converted to Christianity in the late 19th century. In Pakistan a minority religion is linked with low status, perpetuating the Indian Hindu caste system even though the Muslim majority has disassociated itself from all things Hindu and Indian. The book also deals with enculturation in the Pakistani church, the rise of native clergy, conflicts between the local church and Rome, the rise of 'fundamentalist' Islam and the position of women in society and church.
The Thread of Muawiya: The Making of a Marja Taqlid
The marja's or grand ayatollahs are the scholars who sit at the pinnacle of the Shi'a religious hierarchy. Normally learned and reclusive men, they nonetheless wield enormous authority through their religious prestige and the funds generated by religious taxes. From their modest homes in the Shi'ite shrines cities of Iraq and Iran, their influence reaches across the Shi'a world carried by networks of sons, sons-in-law, students, and local clerics. This book reveals the process by which a handful of religious scholars become recognized as grand ayatollahs, the way their influence is exercised, and how they relate to other Shi'a clerics and to ordinary believers. Based on scores of interviews with Shi'a clerics, this book gives a detailed and human portrait of the inner world of the Shi'ite clerical hierarchy. The late Linda Walbridge was an anthropologist of religion specializing in minorities in the Islamic world. Her other works include Without Forgetting the Imam: Shi'ism in an American Community, The Most Learned of the Shi'a: The Institution of the Marja' Taqlid, and The Christians of Pakistan: The Passion of Bishop John Joseph.
Without Forgetting the Imam
Without Forgetting the Imam is an ethnographic study of the religious life of the Lebanese Shi'ites of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community outside of the Middle East. Based on four years of fieldwork, this book explores how the Lebanese who have emigrated, most in the past three decades, to the United States, have adapted to their new surroundings. Anthropologist Linda Walbridge delves into the ways in which politics and religion have converged as the Lebanese Shi'i community has remade its identity and accommodated itself to a new environment. She captures a broad picture of religious life within the realm of community living and within the mosques which have proliferated in Dearborn. Walbridge explains how Shi'ites, affected in one way or another by Islamic revivalism, have brought different notions of how their religion should be expressed and carried out in America. These differences are reflected in mosque rituals, social functions, sermons, and educational activities. She also explores how contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the religious leadership in Iran and Iraq influence the functioning of the mosques.
The Most Learned of the Shiʻa
The problem of who should succeed the Prophet has plagued the Islamic community since the time of his death. The Shiites have decided on a successor, but that does not solve who is the lawful marja (or grand ayatollah) of all the Shi'a.
The Arabic Language in America
As in any other situation of languages in contact, Arabic spoken in the United States is changing under the influence of English. It has incorporated different linguistic innovations, and interference from English occurs on the various linguistic levels. However, in many cases this interference does not lead to language attrition, but rather to the creation of an ethnic language with special uses understood only by members of the Arab-American community. Developed out of Aleya Rouchdy's own involvement and teaching of Arabic in the United States, this book--the first of its kind--is devoted to the full range of Arabic in America. In Part I contributors discuss borrowing and the changes occur...
Iraq
Well-considered answers to the many questions raised by the situation in Iraq, past and present, are rare. This first comprehensive, thematically organised, bibliography devoted to Iraq is based on the full Index Islamicus database and is drawn from a wide variety of European-language journals and books. Featuring an extensive introduction to the subject and its literature by Peter Sluglett, this bibliography will help readers to find their way through the massive secondary literature now available. Following the pattern established by the Index Islamicus, both journal articles and book publications are included, as well as important internet resources. The editors have taken care to add much new material to bring its coverage up to date, and supplement the previously published volumes, while the most important and/or influential publications are conveniently highlighted in the introduction. An indispensable gateway for all those with a more than superficial interest in what is, and what has been, happening in this nation so much the focus of attention today.
Religion, Gender, and the Public Sphere
The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Tensions between claims for women’s equality and the rights of sexual minorities on one side and the claims of religions on the other side are well-documented across all major religions and regions. It is also well recognized in feminist scholarship that gender identities and ethno-religious identities work together in complex ways that are often exploited by dominant groups. Hence, a more comprehensive understanding of the changing role and influence of religion in the public sphere more widely requires complex, multidisciplinary and comparative gender analyses. Most recent discussio...
Speaking for Islam
Focuses on Middle Eastern Muslim majority societies in the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. This work contains papers which highlight the scope and variety of religious authorities in Muslim societies.
Transnational Shia Politics
This book illuminates the historical origins and present situation of militant Shia transnational networks by focusing on three key countries in the Gulf, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, whose Shia Islamic groups are the offspring of Iraqi movements. The reshaping of the area's geopolitics after the Gulf War and the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 have had a profound impact on transnational Shiite networks, pushing them to focus on national issues in the context of new political opportunities. For example, from being fierce opponents of the Saudi monarchy, Saudi Shiite militants have tended to become upholders of the Al-Sa'ud dynasty.The question remains, however, how deeply in society have these new beliefs taken root? Can Shiites be Saudi or Bahraini patriots? Louer concludes her book by analysing the transformation of the Shia' movements' relation to central religious authority, the marja', who reside either in Iraq and Iran. This is all the more problematic when the marja' is also the head of a state, as with Ali Khamenei of Iran, who has many followers in Bahrain and Kuwait.
Schooling Islam
Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countri...
