Islam,Territory, and Contested Space in Post-Soviet Russia

A noted American specialist on nationalism and identity politics in the former USSR reviews the political, institutional, and territorial complexities identified with the Muslim minority in the Russian Federation. Coverage includes the size and distribution of Muslim communities, the government's approach to the diverse adherents of Islam (including Wahhabis), fragmentation of Islamic institutions, and federal policies before and after the October 2004 terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, North Ossetia. Considerable attention is devoted to differences between Islamo-internationalism and Islamo-nationalism in Chechnya, as well as similarities and differences among approaches to Muslim affairs in Russia and other parts of Europe. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O15, O18, Z13. 1 table, 53 references.     

Abdul Ghaffar Khan: An Islamic Gandhi

Abstract

Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a mid-twentieth-century Pashtun of the Northwest Frontier Region known as the "Frontier Gandhi" or the "Islamic Gandhi." His career was marked by rejection of the badal blood feud, and the belligerent Pashtun tribal code. Accepting instead a non-violent interpretation of Islam, Khan was heavily influenced by Mohandas K. Gandhi, and came to interpret the heart of Islam, including the concepts of jihad, as essentially about peace, service, and non-violence. Khan traveled widely in the frontier region that later became Pakistan, and his most significant achievement was to raise a non-violent army of Khudai Khidmatgars or "Servants of God" from his own Pashtun people. His legacy is important to further understand a non-violent alternative of Islamic political resistance.     

Islam,Human Rights and Interfaith Relations: Some Contemporary Egyptian Perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores current discussions and debates on Islam, human rights and interfaith relations in Egypt through an analysis of the public statements and writings of various religious scholars and spiritual teachers and the textbooks used to teach Islam in public secondary schools. It is well known that Islamist perspectives have become mainstream in Egypt, a largely devout and socially conservative country that is also the source of most of the major Islamic trends and political ideologies that have impacted the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency in government-issued textbooks on Islam and in the population at large to equate Islam with democracy and human rights, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the contradictions between traditional interpretations of Islam and international human rights norms. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights is linked to the threat of terrorism, which is labeled un-Islamic. Among ordinary Egyptian Muslims, even those who support Islamist politics, there seems to be a new concern to eradicate Islamic extremism and more openness to unconventional Muslim approaches. The most liberal example of this is an association that teaches the unity of all religions from a somewhat Sufi perspective, promotes interfaith dialogue, and advocates reinterpreting the Shari'a to promote gender equality and equal human rights for all Egyptians.     

Secular Islam

ABSTRACT

While he appears to have been a relentless critic of secularism as a liberal ideal, the celebrated Indian poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal might also be considered among its more important non-European theorists. Globally one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, Iqbal started publishing in its first decade, reaching the height of his power and popularity during the inter-war period until he died in Lahore in 1938. He studied philosophy as well as Arabic and Persian thought in Lahore, Cambridge, and Munich, and drew extensively upon European as much as Asian thinkers. I will argue here that Iqbal followed an important tradition of pre-modern philosophy by thinking about the relationship between politics and theology in esoteric terms.     

Russia's Involvement in the International Environmental Process: A Research Report

The paper surveys Russia's engagement, both in terms of policy formulation and implementation, with the main initiatives outlined at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Although coverage extends through the entire period from 1992 to present, a particular focus is on recent developments under the Putin administration, a period characterized by an ostensibly utilitarian approach to environmental management. Russia's response to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) is assessed in the broader context of the country's problems in effecting major environmental policy changes.     

State restrictions on the Ahmadiyya sect in Indonesia and Pakistan: Islam or political survival?

Indonesia and Pakistan have both adopted state policy that restricts the religious freedom of a minority heterodox sect, the Ahmadiyya, which is viewed by mainstream Muslims as a non-Muslim minority. This outcome is somewhat puzzling as there is a great discrepancy between the institutionalisation and formal privileging of the dominant religion – Islam – in the two Muslim majority states. I find that the similar outcome is attributable not to the institutionalisation of Islam in the state, but rather to the political survival needs of the regime, motivating it to adopt the policy demands of Islamist actors to repress the Ahmadiyya sect.

印度尼西亚和巴基斯坦都施行了限制少数异端艾哈马蒂亚教派宗教自由的国家政策。艾哈马蒂亚被主流穆斯林视为非穆斯林少数派。这个结果有些令人费解,因为在两个穆斯林占多数的国家,在主导性宗教即伊斯兰教的体制化与特权化之间存在差异。笔者发现,类似的的结果根源不在伊斯兰的体制化,倒是在于政权的政治生存需要,即响应伊斯兰主义主体压制艾哈马蒂亚教派的政策需要。     

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.     

Masquerade politics: race,Islam and the scale of Amazigh activism in southeastern Morocco*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the different scalar dimensions of Berber masquerades in southeastern Morocco. By ritually performing Jewish characters and demonstrating philo‐Semitic nostalgia for a former Jewish presence, Berber (Amazigh) activists simultaneously engage different audiences at a local, national and transnational scale. In the first place, they assert themselves as moderate (even secular) Muslims for a transnational audience for whom Muslims' supposed anti‐Semitism has been a mode of excluding them from modernity. At the same time, their performances underline the specificity of Berber culture as part of a national folkloric archive, welcome to a Moroccan national state interested in forging an authentic, national Islamic practice distinct from pan‐Islamic Wahhabism. Thirdly, in allying themselves with Jews, Berber activists distance themselves from a variety of rivals to local political and economic dominance, particularly black “Haratin” whose demographic and economic strength in the southeastern oases has increased since Moroccan independence. In exploring the confluences and contradictions between these different scales of activism, this article points to the internal fractures within social movements organised around religion or ethnicity.     

Lex alterius: Using Law to Construct Confessional Boundaries

Historians and anthropologists are confronted with a persistent problem for which there is no clear solution: the conceptual tools which we use to attempt to understand cultures are themselves products of (often) the very cultures we are attempting to understand. Take “religion”. Boyarin ([2004]. “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion.” Representations 85: 21–57) has argued that the very concept of “religion” as we know it was a product of the fourth and fifth centuries, as bishops and emperors constructed Christianity as a religion (the true one, of course), and in counterdistinction constructed “Judaism” and “Hellenism” (or paganism) as “false” religions. For Boyarin, Judaism only becomes a “religion” when Christian authorities define it as one. The same could be said for the jumble of texts, beliefs and rituals that the English, upon arriving in India, lump together under the name “Hinduism”, which they turn into a religion. Building, defining and policing borders between confessional groups has been an important part of constructing identities—or visions of community—in various societies, in particular those ruled by Christians or Muslims, from the time of the fourth-century Christian Roman emperors. In this article, I examine how Christian and Muslim jurists of the fourth to eleventh centuries use law to define and police confessional boundaries, in particular how they attempt to limit interactions that could transgress or blur those boundaries: shared meals, sexual contact, syncretic practices.