Title: In the house of the law: gender and Islamic law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine
Author: Tucker, Judith E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Law | Islam | Women's Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: In an rewarding new study, Tucker explores the way in which Islamic legal thinkers understood Islam as it related to women and gender roles. In seventeenth and eighteenth century Syria and Palestine, Muslim legal thinkers gave considerable attention to women's roles in society, and Tucker shows how fatwa s, or legal opinions, greatly influenced these roles. She challenges prevailing views on Islam and gender, revealing Islamic law to have been more fluid and flexible than previously thought. Although the legal system had a consistent patriarchal orientation, it was modulated by sensitivities to the practical needs of women, men, and children. In her comprehensive overview of a field long neglected by scholars, Tucker deepens our understanding of how societies, including our own, construct gender roles.   [brief]
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Title: Windows on the house of Islam: Muslim sources on spirituality and religious life
Author: Renard, John 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | History | Islam
Publisher's Description: Over the centuries and across the globe, Muslim authors and artists have given moving testimony to their experience of being members of the Islamic community. Their many vantage points come together in this collection, one that represents major Islamic groups from the past through the present and covers a range of themes essential to understanding Islamic spirituality and religious life. More than thirty leading Islam scholars present translations originating from a dozen languages, including Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Indonesian. Texts include samples of virtually every major literary form of significance to the Muslim faith: the Qur'an, hadith, scriptural commentary, letters, treatises, lyric and didactic poetry, hagiography, historical chronicle, aphorism, endowment deeds, and personal diary entries. In addition, over five dozen illustrations thematically document a full range of artistic forms and historical periods, from ritual objects and architecture to manuscripts of religious texts. This volume and its companion, John Renard's 1996 book, Seven Doors to Islam , are the only books available that integrate such a wide range of Islamic literary and visual forms. Together they offer a superb introduction to the primary religious sources as well as a general understanding of Islamic spirituality and culture.   [brief]
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Title: The Prophet's pulpit: Islamic preaching in contemporary Egypt
Author: Gaffney, Patrick D 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Muslim preaching has been central in forming public opinion, building grassroots organizations, and developing leadership cadres for the wider Islamist agenda. Based on in-depth field research in Egypt, Patrick Gaffney focuses on the preacher and the sermon as the single most important medium for propounding the message of Islam. He draws on social history, political commentary, and theological sources to reveal the subtle connections between religious rhetoric and political dissent.Many of the sermons discussed were given during the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and Gaffney attempts to describe this militant movement and to compare it with official Islam. Finally, Gaffney presents examples of the sermons, so readers can better understand the full range of contemporary Islamic expression.   [brief]
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Title: Seven doors to Islam: spirituality and the religious life of Muslims
Author: Renard, John 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Islam | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Seven Doors to Islam reveals the religious worldview and spiritual tradition of the world's one billion Muslims. Spanning the breadth of Islamic civilization from Morocco to Indonesia, this book demonstrates how Muslims have used the literary and visual arts in all their richness and diversity to communicate religious values. Each of the seven chapters opens a "door" that leads progressively closer to the very heart of Islam, from the foundational revelation in the Qur'an to the transcendent experience of the Sufi mystics. However, unlike most studies of Islam, which see spirituality as the concern of a minority of mystical seekers, Seven Doors demonstrates its central role in every aspect of the Islamic tradition.   [brief]
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Title: Medicines of the soul: female bodies and sacred geographies in a transnational Islam
Author: Malti-Douglas, Fedwa
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: In Medicines of the Soul, the autobiographical writings of three leading women in today's Islamic revival movement reveal dramatic stories of religious transformation. As interpreted by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, the autobiographies provide a powerful, groundbreaking portrayal of gender, religion, and dis . . . [more]
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Title: Putting Islam to work: education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt 
Author: Starrett, Gregory 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Education | Religion | Islam | Politics
Publisher's Description: The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. In Putting Islam to Work , Gregory Starrett focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced.During the twentieth century new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, Gregory Starrett demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam that are based in the market, the media, and the school.   [brief]
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Title: Islam, politics, and social movements
Author: Burke, Edmund 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Taken together the essays in this work not only provide new research essential to the study of Islamic societies and Muslim peoples, but also set a new standard for the concrete study of local situations and illuminate the forces shaping the history of modern Muslim societies.This collection is unique in its sophisticated interpretation of the social protest and political resistance movements in Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors take two principal approaches to the study of their subject. Utilizing "new cultural history," they explore how particular movements have deployed the cultural and religious resources of Islam to mobilize and legitimize insurgent political action. Others rely on "new social history" to study the economic, political, and social contexts in which movements of anti-colonial resistance and revolution have developed. This work brings together contributions from specialists on Islamic North Africa, Egypt, the Arab fertile crescent, Iran and India.   [brief]
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Title: The vanguard of the Islamic revolution: the Jamaʿat-i Islami of Pakistan 
Author: Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Politics | Asian History | South Asia | Islam
Publisher's Description: In this groundbreaking study, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr examines the origins, historical development, and political strategies of one of the oldest and most influential Islamic revival movements, the Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan. He focuses on the inherent tension between the movement's idealized vision of the nation as a holy community based in Islamic law and its political agenda of socioeconomic change for Pakistani society.Nasr's work goes beyond the exploration of a single party to examine the diverse sociopolitical roots of contemporary Islamic revivalism, challenging many of the standard interpretations about political expressions of Islam.   [brief]
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Title: The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, 1204-1760 
Author: Eaton, Richard Maxwell
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | Middle Eastern History | South Asia | Islam
Publisher's Description: In all of the South Asian subcontinent, Bengal was the region most receptive to the Islamic faith. This area today is home to the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic population. How and why did such a large Muslim population emerge there? And how does such a religious conversion take place? Richard Eaton uses archaeological evidence, monuments, narrative histories, poetry, and Mughal administrative documents to trace the long historical encounter between Islamic and Indic civilizations.Moving from the year 1204, when Persianized Turks from North India annexed the former Hindu states of the lower Ganges delta, to 1760, when the British East India Company rose to political dominance there, Eaton explores these moving frontiers, focusing especially on agrarian growth and religious change.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the stream: Islam and society in a West African town 
Author: Launay, Robert 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Robert Launay has been observing the changing religious practices of the Dyula, a Muslim community in West Africa, for more than a decade. In Beyond the Stream , he examines the ways in which this religious and ethnic minority group living on the fringes of the Muslim world maintains its ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting everyday religious practices to the local context. Through the lens of this specific community, Launay elucidates the interaction between fundamental Islamic beliefs, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East, and the continually changing ways that Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.By focusing on the tension between "particular" and "universal" - on how a given religious morality must function simultaneously within a tightly knit community and a larger global arena - Beyond the Stream addresses issues of broad concern to the anthropology of Islam and to world religions generally.   [brief]
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Title: Political Islam: essays from Middle East report
Author: Beinin, Joel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Islam
Publisher's Description: The essays and case studies collected here - featuring some of the best material from Middle East Report over the past decade as well as much original material - challenge the facile generalizations about what Western media and political establishments usually call "Islamic fundamentalism." The authors demonstrate the complexity of these movements and offer complementary and contrasting interpretations of their origins and significance. The material included covers a broad range of themes - including democracy and civil society, gender relations and popular culture - as they have emerged in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa.   [brief]
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Title: Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | European History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place . Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places.Çelik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers.Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. Çelik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Engaged surrender: African American women and Islam
Author: Rouse, Carolyn Moxley 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Religion | African American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their adherence to the religion suggest unsuspected subtleties and complexities in the relation of women, especially black women, to Islam? Carolyn Rouse sought answers to these questions among the women of Sunni Muslim mosques in Los Angeles. Her richly textured study provides rare insight into the meaning of Islam for African American women; in particular, Rouse shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligations. In Engaged Surrender, Islam becomes a unique prism for clarifying the role of faith in contemporary black women's experience. Through these women's stories, Rouse reveals how commitment to Islam refracts complex processes - urbanization, political and social radicalization, and deindustrialization - that shape black lives generally, and black women's lives in particular. Rather than focusing on traditional (and deeply male) ideas of autonomy and supremacy, the book - and the community of women it depicts - emphasizes more holistic notions of collective obligation, personal humility, and commitment to overarching codes of conduct and belief. A much-needed corrective to media portraits of Islam and the misconceptions they engender, this engaged and engaging work offers an intimate, in-depth look into the vexed and interlocking issues of Islam, gender, and race.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of Muslim cultural reform: jadidism in Central Asia 
Author: Khalid, Adeeb 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Asian Studies | Asian History | European History
Publisher's Description: Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their own land but also within the larger modern Islamic world.Khalid uses previously untapped literary sources from Uzbek and Tajik as well as archival materials from Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and France to explore Russia's role as a colonial power and the politics of Islamic reform movements. He shows how Jadid efforts paralleled developments elsewhere in the world and at the same time provides a social history of the Jadid movement. By including a comparative study of Muslim societies, examining indigenous intellectual life under colonialism, and investigating how knowledge was disseminated in the early modern period, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform does much to remedy the dearth of scholarship on this important period. Interest in Central Asia is growing as a result of the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and Khalid's book will make an important contribution to current debates over political and cultural autonomy in the region.   [brief]
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Title: The call from Algeria: third worldism, revolution, and the turn to Islam
Author: Malley, Robert 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Intellectual History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers. Charting Algeria's political evolution from the turn of the century to the present, Robert Malley explores the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the current crisis. His analysis helps makes sense of the civil war that is tearing Algeria apart.Using contemporary Algerian politics as a case study of the intellectual movement labeled "Third Worldism," Malley's thoughtful analysis also elucidates the broader transformations affecting countries of the Third World that once embraced ideologies of state-centered radical change. Malley focuses on the interplay between politics, economics, and ideology to explain the rise, essential components, and precipitous decline of Third Worldism - a movement that attracted scholars and activists in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. He relates the disillusionment with Third Worldism to the growing appeal in the Third World of economic liberalism, versions of political pluralism, and ideological movements that threaten the very existence of the central state.At a time when the public increasingly is associating countries of the less developed world with Islamism, tribalism, and ethnic warfare, The Call from Algeria challenges our assumptions and offers a new perspective.   [brief]
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Title: Between memory and desire: the Middle East in a troubled age
Author: Humphreys, R. Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Islam | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Middle Easterners today are caught between memories of the past and frustrated hopes for the future. They struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. R. Stephen Humphreys's new book presents a much-needed and thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East. In clear, accessible language, he integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life. Humphreys discusses the conflicts over power and resources that engage Middle Eastern politicians and looks at the major ideologies that have shaped these conflicts. He focuses on the impact of Islam on public life and examines Muslim ways of thinking about the "secular" versus the "religious." What values does Islam put into play? What challenges does it pose to "ordinary" politics? What resources does it bring to the struggle for social justice? Humphreys recognizes the Western tendency to dismiss Middle Eastern politics as an incoherent tale of violence and fanaticism, and his book is especially valuable for its analysis of the deeper issues behind the headlines. These issues include the region's apparent inability to evolve democratic institutions, conflicts rooted in the peace settlements after World War I, and the unresolved debates over which cultural and moral values should drive Middle Eastern policy. Between Memory and Desire reminds us that Middle Easterners remember the past in specific ways: the shame of the colonial era; the disappointments since independence; and the glory of the Middle Ages, when Muslim achievements were respected throughout the world. Even if these memories are only partially true, in defining the past, they also define what the future ought to be.   [brief]
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Title: The calligraphic state: textual domination and history in a Muslim society 
Author: Messick, Brinkley Morris
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In this innovative combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory, Brinkley Messick examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present. The creation and interpretation of texts, from sacred scriptures to administrative and legal contracts, are among the fundamental ways that authority is established and maintained in a complex state. Yet few scholars have explored this process and the ways in which it changes, especially outside the Western world.Messick brings together intensive ethnography and textual analysis from a wealth of material: Islamic jurisprudence, Yemeni histories, local documents. In exploring the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen, he raises important issues that are of comparative significance for understanding political life in other Muslim and nonwestern states as well.   [brief]
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Title: Khomeinism: essays on the Islamic Republic 
Author: Abrahamian, Ervand 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: "Fanatic," "dogmatic," "fundamentalist" - these are the words most often used in the West to describe the Ayatollah Khomeini. The essays in this book challenge that view, arguing that Khomeini and his Islamic movement should be seen as a form of Third World political populism - a radical but pragmatic middle-class movement that strives to enter, rather than reject, the modern age.Ervand Abrahamian, while critical of Khomeini, asks us to look directly at the Ayatollah's own works and to understand what they meant to his principal audience - his followers in Iran. Abrahamian analyzes political tracts dating back to 1943, along with Khomeini's theological writings and his many public statements in the form of speeches, interviews, proclamations and fatwas (judicial decrees). What emerges, according to Abrahamian, is a militant, sometimes contradictory, political ideology that focuses not on issues of scripture and theology but on the immediate political, social, and economic grievances of workers and the middle class.These essays reveal how the Islamic Republic has systematically manipulated history through televised "recantations," newspapers, school textbooks, and even postage stamps. All are designed to bolster the clergy's reputation as champions of the downtrodden and as defenders against foreign powers. Abrahamian also discusses the paranoia that permeates the political spectrum in Iran, contending that such deep distrust is symptomatic of populist regimes everywhere.   [brief]
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Title: Perfecting women: Maulana Ashraf ʿAlī Thanawi's Bihishti zewar: a partial translation with commentary
Author: Thānvī, ʿAshraf ʿAlī
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | History | South Asia | Asian History | Islam
Publisher's Description: Challenging conventional notions about the place of women in Muslim societies, the Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) gives life to the themes of religious and social reform that have too often been treated in the abstract. This instructional guidebook, used by the world's largest population of Muslims, is a vital source for those interested in modern Indian social and intellectual history, in Islamic reform, and in conceptions of gender and women's roles.The Bihishti Zewar was written in northern India in the early 1900s by a revered Muslim scholar and spiritual guide, Maulana Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi (1864-1943), to instruct Muslim girls and women in religious teachings, proper behavior, and prudent conduct of their everyday lives. In so doing, it sets out the core of a reformist version of Islam that has become increasingly prominent across Muslim societies during the past hundred years. Throughout the work, nothing is more striking than the extent to which the book takes women and men as essentially the same, in contrast to European works directed toward women at this time.Its rich descriptions of the everyday life of the relatively privileged classes in turn-of-the-century north India provide information on issues of personality formation as well as on family life, social relations, household management, and encounters with new institutions and inventions. Barbara Metcalf has carefully selected those sections of the Bihishti Zewar that best illustrate the themes of reformist thought about God, the person, society, and gender. She provides a substantial introduction to the text and to each section, as well as detailed annotations.   [brief]
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Title: States and women's rights: the making of postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco
Author: Charrad, M. (Mounira)
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Women's Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Law
Publisher's Description: At a time when the situation of women in the Islamic world is of global interest, here is a study that unlocks the mystery of why women's fates vary so greatly from one country to another. Mounira M. Charrad analyzes the distinctive nature of Islamic legal codes by placing them in the larger context of state power in various societies. Charrad argues that many analysts miss what is going on in Islamic societies because they fail to recognize the logic of the kin-based model of social and political life, which she contrasts with the Western class-centered model. In a skillful synthesis, she shows how the logic of Islamic legal codes and kin-based political power affect the position of women. These provide the key to Charrad's empirical puzzle: why, after colonial rule, women in Tunisia gained broad legal rights (even in the absence of a feminist protest movement) while, despite similarities in culture and religion, women remained subordinated in post-independence Morocco and Algeria. Charrad's elegant theory, crisp writing, and solid scholarship make a unique contribution in developing a state-building paradigm to discuss women's rights.This book will interest readers in the fields of sociology, politics, law, women's studies, postcolonial studies, Middle Eastern studies, Middle Eastern history, French history, and Maghrib studies.   [brief]
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