Origin Narratives and the Making of Dynastic History in al‐Dīnawarī's Akhbār

This article takes the reader on a journey into the historical writing of the ninth century Muslim historian al‐Dīnawarī (d. 895) and examines the motives behind composing his al‐Akhbār al‐?iwāl. The themes and narrative arrangements of this work give insight into al‐Dīnawarī's historical agenda that demonstrates his interest in royal histories that exemplify the rise and fall of nations, dynasties, and powerful rulers. Al‐Dīnawarī's emphasis on specific episodes and events demonstrates that only certain ethnic groups whose political legitimacy derives from a respectable and prominent origin can bring about political and social stability. By dealing with these sociopolitical concerns, this article also sheds new light on the intellectual discourses and political crises that dominated Islamic society during the eighth and ninth centuries and the way al‐Dīnawarī reacted to these challenges.     

Imperial inventories, “illegal mosques” and institutionalized Islam: Coloniality and the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay explores the ways in which imperial inventories of colonial institutions come to influence and arbitrate contemporary debates over what constitutes legitimate practices of Islam in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Austria. Examining the larger political context in which these debates emerge, including the criminalization of Muslim communities that refuse to submit to the authority of state-sanctioned Islamic religious institutions, I detail the ways in which colonial histories are recruited to curate a homogenized, continuous representational mandate for Muslim communities and practices in Austria and BiH. Attending to nostalgic invocations of the late Habsburg governance of Islam and Muslims, I argue that these discourses serve to legitimate specific Muslim institutions and actors in Austria and BiH that privilege the Habsburg legacy through the exclusion of outlawed/illegal Muslim communities and practices in both countries.     

Intersections of Gender/Sex,Multiculturalism and Religion: Young Muslim Minority Women in Contemporary Bali

This article examines the experience of Muslim female students in high schools in Bali. Since the religion of the majority of the population of Bali is Balinese Hinduism, these young women are part of a Muslim minority – unusual in Indonesia. Data were obtained through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010. Interviewees were mainly Muslim students, but teachers and Muslim parents were also consulted. Some of the students are a minority within a state senior high school, and some attend a private Islamic school in Denpasar. Interviewees identified choice of school and the wearing of the jilbab (Islamic head-scarf) as issues for them in their everyday lives. The Islamic school is (mis-)perceived as a morally safe environment by parents. The state school does not allow the wearing of the jilbab, showing the limits of multiculturalism in Bali. While the jilbab should express piety and morality, there is some hypocrisy among some young jilbab-wearing women. Some young women have internalised the Balinese objection to poor Muslim immigrants, and feel inferior when they wear the jilbab. The data suggest that their female sex/gender flags their unequal Muslim-minority status in ways that Muslim-minority men do not experience.     

Flexible topographies: Muslim spaces in a German cityscape

This paper examines transient and semi-permanent Muslim spaces, their social construction, use, and relevance for diverse pious Muslims in Stuttgart, Germany. I describe the location, creation, negotiation, and maintenance of such spaces and analyze their position and contribution to a larger urban Muslim social geography. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, Germany, I illustrate how individuals mark or inhabit spaces momentarily or more permanently as Muslim spaces. I illustrate how at least for the length of a particular encounter, spaces are used in manners that reflect Islamic sensitivities and normativities. These spaces are ever more inseparably and irreversibly woven into the urban fabric. Over time they become and indeed some already have become integral parts of the cityscape. Some spaces in the process of recurrent islamically inspired uses become semi-permanent or even permanent Muslim spatialities, especially in contexts with considerable Muslim interaction or movement. The density of transient encounters and spaces over time contributes to the consolidation of an increasingly well-known and shared urban Muslim social geography. Within this spatiality, pious Muslims know that planned or unplanned encounters will be framed by Muslim beliefs and practices. Paying attention to the ‘elusive evidence of the ordinary’ [Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York. New York: Basic Books, p. 10], I demonstrate how increasingly visible Muslim spaces and practices slowly become part of the urban fabric and every day culture.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

Taqiyya as Polemic,Law and Knowledge: Following an Islamic Legal Term through the Worlds of Islamic Scholars,Ethnographers, Polemicists and Military Men

Taqiyya is an Islamic juridical term whose shifting meaning relates to when a Muslim is allowed, under Sharia law, to lie. A concept whose meaning has varied significantly among Islamic sects, scholars, countries, and political regimes, it nevertheless is one of the key terms used by recent anti‐Muslim polemicists such as Robert Spencer or Daniel Pipes, and has been used by US Prosecutors to explain terrorist behavior. This paper seeks to summarize the complex uses of the term and show how a specific concept in a legal system can be used and interpreted by both adherents of that system and enemies in a wide variety of ways, taking on different meanings while referring to effectively the same set of practices. The term is debated in a scholarly way in the scholarly literature, as an ethnographic term, and finally, as an operational concept used as a tactic in a war and demanding countertactics tailored to it. The paper will discuss the social purpose of having such ambiguous concepts available within one's society, and the idea that making the ambiguous specific can be a valuable weapon in polemical attack.     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

The rise of Islamic finance: post‐colonial market‐building in central Asia and Russia

Islamic finance signifies more than a projection of religious affiliation. The importance of Islamic finance is increasing in central Asia, both as a source of capital and as a form of post‐colonial market‐building. In central Asia, it is an important facet of the new phenomena of ‘nation‐branding’ and a means of reinvigorating the economy. In identity politics, Islamic finance projects an attitude of religious tolerance allowing states in the region to reposition their geopolitical identity relative to the Islamic community. This creates a ‘performance’ of Islamic finance that facilitates the creation of legitimacy for the state. Adopting Islamic finance projects images of the state's religious tolerance and diversity without changing the underlying structures; it suggests an ‘Islamicness’ that is useful to the development and post‐colonial goals of the state. As such, it creates opportunities for geopolitical alliances with Muslim countries. Economically, it appeals to rising financial‐industrial elites seeking new investment‐opportunities, which reduces pressure on the state to democratize. Meanwhile, in Russia, Islamic finance is an alternative source of capital for the sanctions‐hit state and a useful identity marker with which to connect to the increasingly wary Caucuses and Commonwealth of Independent States countries, lending it a wider significance across Eurasia.     

Rehabilitating the Spirituality of Pre‐Islamic Arabia: On the Importance of the Kahin,the Jinn,and the Tribal Ancestral Cult

This article brings into focus the misunderstood and oft‐ignored pre‐Islamic spirituality of, primarily, the Hejaz and their religious leaders, the kahins, often uncharitably translated as soothsayers. A combination of factors has limited discussion of pre‐Islamic religion, including the persistent rejection by Muslims of pre‐Islamic history as a time of ignorance (jahiliyyah) and a Judaeo‐Christian bias in Western scholarship. From the perspectives of anthropology and comparative religion, certain conclusions about pre‐Islamic spirituality can be derived. Most important among these is that the pre‐Islamic Arabs engaged in clearly religious practices revolving around the importance of the tribe and its members, living and dead. This article will hopefully spark a renewed interest in the study of the spirituality and religion of the pre‐Islamic Arabs.     

U.S. Latina/o Muslims Since 1920: From “Moors” to “Latino Muslims”

This article provides a historical overview of the development of the U.S. Latina/o Muslim community. U.S. Latina/os have been converting to Islam since the 1920s. Early converts were primarily found in African‐American‐majority Islamic communities, though there were some others who entered Islam through ties to Muslim immigrants. In both cases, the U.S.'s racist social system had brought the two communities together. In New York City during the 1970s, however, a group of around a dozen Latina/o Muslims felt that neither the African‐American‐majority nor the immigrant‐majority communities sufficiently addressed Latina/os' particular culture, languages, social situations, and contributions to Islamic history. To correct this, they created the first known U.S. Latina/o Muslim organisation, the Alianza Islamica, a group which fostered a “Latino Muslim” identity. Since that time, due to the growing numbers of U.S. Latina/o Muslims, as well as a tendency to foster ties with Latina/o Muslims in countries outside of the U.S., U.S. Latina/o Muslims are more and more adopting the “Latino Muslim” identity, which is now being promoted by several organisations and prominent leaders.     

The Islamic Jihad and al‐Qa'ida: a Review Essay

The Cannons of Jihad: Terrorists' Strategy for Defeating America: Jim Lacey, Ed. A Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al‐Suri's Islamic Jihad Manifesto: Jim Lacey, Ed. The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of al‐Qaida and Associated Movement: Mark E. Stout, et al.     

Muslim‐Christian Relations in Medieval Southern Italy

Abstract: This article examines the nature of relations between Muslims and Christians in southern Italy during the thirteenth century. In response to uprisings in Sicily, the emperor Frederick II transferred an estimated 20,000 Muslims to the city of Lucera in Apulia. Outside the Iberian Peninsula, Lucera came to have the largest Muslim population of any city in western Europe. Although the formation of the colony led to competition for resources between its inhabitants and the local Christian population, the members of the two religious communities often traded and collaborated. Social mobility was possible for the Lucerine Muslims, particularly through military service. Like Christians and Jews living in the dar al‐Islam, the Muslims of Lucera had a protected status, and they paid a tax called the jizya. They remained free to practice their religion. The heavy taxes paid by the Muslim colony at Lucera during its almost eighty‐year existence made it a valuable asset to the Hohenstaufen and Angevin crowns. Nevertheless, the settlement was dismantled in 1300 on the order of the Angevin king, Charles II, who gave a religious justification. The colony's history provides insight into the complex relations between Muslims and Christians in medieval Mediterranean Europe.     

Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

Democracy and Islamist Violence: Lessons from Post‐Mubarak Egypt

This article explores the contentious relation between the absence of democracy in the Middle East and the use of armed violence by Islamist groups in light of the Arab Spring. Its main objective is to decipher the evolving positions of former and current groups who used or promoted violence and to relate them to broader academic debates on violence and democracy on the one hand, and deradicalization on the other. This research demonstrates that the large majority of former Islamist militants in Egypt reject any sort of violence in post‐Mubarak Egypt, even if they have not all renounced their religious legitimization of violence in the past. Second, it reveals that even if they maintain a religious opposition to democracy in Egypt, the opening of political opportunities and their progressive joining of the political process has favorably led most of them to accept democratic practices in reality. Third, it adds that the voice of those currently promoting violence in Egypt has been marginalized and that their main alternative has been the promotion of armed violence in Syria; and last, it stresses two potential security threats unrelated to the opening of political opportunities in post‐Mubarak Egypt and to the general debate on democracy and violence. First, local grievances in Sinai have led to violence in the past and are still to be dealt with. Second, the current political deadlock can potentially lead to localized and specific armed activities that could start a cycle of violence. This research is based on field research in Egypt and uses repeated interviews of leaders and members of the two main former militant groups, al‐Jama?ah al‐Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and Jama? al‐Jihad (the Jihad Group) as well as interviews with militants of the salafi jihadi trend and their supporters in Cairo.     

The political geographies of religious sites in Moscow’s neighborhoods

Abstract

This paper addresses the spatial politics of Russia’s increased religiosity in Moscow. It analyzes the rights of minority Muslim communities within the context of increased political support for expressions of Russian Orthodoxy in Moscow’s public space. Moscow’s Russian Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders claim that their communities have a lack of religious infrastructure, with one church per 35,000 residents and one mosque per three million residents, respectively. The Russian Orthodox Church has been more successful than Muslim organizations at expanding their presence in Moscow’s neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, religious spaces are examined as sites of dissent as well as participatory, active citizenship at three different sites in Moscow. Protests over Russian Orthodox Church construction in one neighborhood are contrasted with the protests over mosque construction in two neighborhoods. This paper provides insights into how civil society and religious groups have increased their public presence in Moscow and shows the unequal access that different groups have to public space in that city.     

The ummah as nation: a reappraisal in the wake of the ‘Cartoons Affair’†

ABSTRACT. In the wake of the 2006 ‘Cartoons Affair’ which saw international protests by Muslims against the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, it is clear that identity based on membership in the Islamic ummah goes far beyond simple religious affiliation. This essay presents a novel argument for treating the ummah (the transnational community of Muslim believers) as a nation. I begin with a theoretical treatment of the ummah as nation which employs historic and current interpretations of what constitutes nationhood. I then turn to the current state of the ummah; my findings present a potent nexus of information and communications technology (ICT), emergent elites, and Muslim migration to the West that has facilitated a hitherto impossible reification of the ummah. I also discuss how globalisation, Western media practices, and the nature of European society allow ‘ummahist’ elites to marginalise other voices in the transnational Muslim community. Based on the global events surrounding the Danish cartoons controversy of 2005–06, I conclude that there is need to recognise ummah‐based identity as more than just a profession of faith – it represents a new form of postnational, political identity which is as profound as any extant nationalism.     

The Poetics of Devotion in ʿĀʾisha al‐Bāʿūniyya's Praise of God and Muḥammad

Recently, there has been an effort within Islamic Studies to reassess the common belief that the so‐called ‘post‐classical’ era of Islamic history was characterized by intellectual stagnation and decline. The Mamluk era is one such period that has suffered from a dearth of scholarly attention resulting from outdated stereotypes. This article contributes to scholarship on this era through examining some poems by a late Mamluk poet, ?ā?isha al‐Bā?ūniyya (d. 1517). While much scholarship on al‐Bā?ūniyya focuses on her lyrical mystical verse, the poems studied here incorporate selective allusions to key Islamic sources in order to narrate a history of divine favor as the speaker imagines it. This innovative history expresses a poetics of devotion that focalizes Mu?ammad and the poet's own peers. The poems intertextually anchor this narrative in key Islamic sources, reflecting al‐Bā?ūniyya's extensive scholarly training. They constitute an unusual example of a female poet writing beyond the genres with which women's premodern poetry is conventionally associated. This poetry also represents a post‐classical contribution to Islamic literary and religious history. However, the criterion of originality should ultimately be reconsidered in evaluations of scholarly merit, and scholarship should pay more attention to continuities and intertextuality in texts.     

Religion and ethno‐nationalism: Turkey's Kurdish issue

One approach within the Islamic camp treats Islam, which emphasizes overarching notions such as the ‘Islamic brotherhood’ and ‘ummah’, as incompatible with ethno‐nationalist ideas and movements. It is, however, striking that in the last decades, several Islamic and conservative groups in Turkey have paid increasing attention to the Kurdish issue, supporting their ethnic demands and sentiments. Even more striking, the leftist, secular Kurdish ethno‐nationalists have adopted a more welcoming attitude toward Islam. How can we explain such intriguing developments and shifts? Using original data derived from several elite interviews and a public opinion survey, this study shows that the struggle for Kurdish popular support and legitimacy has encouraged political elites from both camps to enrich their ideological toolbox by borrowing ideas and discourses from each other. Further, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists alike utilize Islamic discourses and ideas to legitimize their competing nationalist claims. Exploring such issues, the study also provides theoretical and policy implications.     

Corporal Punishment Verses in the Qur'an are to be Reinterpreted to Counter Violent Extremist Practices from Within the Islamic Juristic Tradition

Corporal punishments in the Qur'an, also grouped under the Arabic term Ḥudūd, have been understood as a set of preordained harsh punishments due whenever their conditions are met. They not only served mainly as a deterrent, but also as a penal code in traditional religious Islamic law books. This essay argues that those Ḥudūd‐Qur'anic corporal punishments can be reinterpreted to only represent an upper limit never to be exceeded, favoring more lenient noncorporal punishments, or even no punishment at all by the state. For the Qur'an recommends forgiveness for murder, theft, brigandage, slander, and adultery. If this powerful Qur'anic paradigm is to be well understood and popularized, it would contribute to eroding the ideological basis of the extremists’ propaganda machine. It would also help Muslims connect to their Islamic tradition in a modern pluralistic society without undue tension. An historic overview of the penal culture at the time of the Qur'anic revelation, and then through its modern evolution in various geographic locations, including Muslim majority societies is used to contextualize the discussion. Two possible counter arguments based on Muslim tradition are addressed, namely the concept of abrogation in the Qur'an, and the Hadith (Prophetic traditions) undermining this reading of the Qur'an.