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A rapidly expanding Islamic revival movement shows that Islamic rationalism and not jihadism is to define twenty-first century Islam.
The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam provides a comprehensive overview of a timely topic that encompasses the fields of Islamic feminist scholarship, anthropology, history, and sociology. Divided into three parts, it makes several key contributions. The volume offers a detailed analysis of textual debates on gender and Islam, highlighting the logic of classical reasoning and its enduring appeal, while emphasizing alternative readings proposed by Islamic feminists. It considers the agency that Muslim women exhibit in relation to their faith as reflected in women's piety movements. Moreover, the volume documents how Muslim women shape socio-political life, presenting real-world examples from across the Muslim world and diaspora communities. Written by an international team of scholars, the Companion also explores theoretical and methodological advances in the field, providing guidance for future research. Surveying Muslim women's experiences across time and place, it also presents debates on gender norms across various genres of Islamic scholarship.
Thirty percent of foreign development aid is channeled through NGOs or community-based organizations to improve service delivery to the poor, build social capital, and establish democracy in developing nations. However, growing evidence suggests that aid often erodes, rather than promotes, cooperation within developing nations. This book presents a rare, micro level account of the complex decision-making processes that bring individuals together to form collective-action platforms. It then examines why aid often breaks down the very institutions for collective action that it aims to promote. Breakdown in Pakistan identifies concrete measures to check the erosion of cooperation in foreign aid scenarios. Pakistan is one of the largest recipients of international development aid, and therefore the empirical details presented are particularly relevant for policy. The book's argument is equally applicable to a number of other developing countries, and has important implications for recent discussions within the field of economics.
This volume is the first to bring together analysis of contemporary female religious leadership in ideologically-diverse Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with chapters discussing the emergence, consolidation, and impact of female Islamic authority.
Since the 1970s, movements aimed at giving Muslim women access to the serious study of Islamic texts have emerged across the world. In this book, Masooda Bano argues that the creative spirit that marked the rise and consolidation of Islam, whereby Islam inspired serious intellectual engagement to create optimal societal institutions, can be found within these education movements. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Pakistan, northern Nigeria and Syria, Bano questions the restricted notion of agency associated with these movements, exploring the educational networks which have attracted educated, professional and culturally progressive Muslim women to textual study, thus helping to reverse the most damaging legacy of colonial rule in Muslim societies: the isolation of modern and Islamic knowledge. With its comparative approach, this will appeal to those studying and researching the role of women across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the wider Muslim world.
Explores the influence of centres of Islamic learning using 3 case studies: Al-Azhar University in Egypt, International Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, and Al-Mustafa University in Iran
The first systematic reading of Gilles Deleuze's mature philosophy through the lens of creative practice.
Maps the new Islamic authority platforms emerging in the West and their relationship with older centres of learning in a three-fold typology: Neo-Traditionalists; Neo-Legalists, and Neo-Conservatives.
Development practice is full of examples of the importance of religion in the lives of people in developing countries. However, religion has largely remained unexplored in development studies. This timely new book aims to fill that gap. The authors expertly review how religion has been treated in the evolution of development thought, how it has been conceptualised in the social sciences, and highlights the major deficiencies of the assumption of secularism. The book argues that development theory and practice needs to rewrite its dominant script regarding its treatment of religion, a script which has so far been heavily inscribed in the secular tradition. It puts forward an understanding of ...