bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Authors: Willoughby Jay
Published: October 2020

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is the story of why the so-calleddeveloping never seems to develop, as seen through the eyes of JohnPerkins, who was involved in “developing” several oil-rich nations. Theopening chapters deal with his childhood, which was permeated with elitismand ideas of how only the “right people” really mattered, his subsequentrebellion by defying his parents’ plan for his life, his initial contacts(through his wife) with government employment, and a 2-year Peace Corpsstint with an indigenous Indian tribe in Ecuador. While there, he wasrecruited by the National Security Agency. After his time was up, he washired by Chas. T. Main, Inc. to devise a 25-year forecast of seriously inflatedelectricity needs for Indonesia so that it would agree to take out an enormousloan. He did so, albeit with some misgivings, and his career as an economichit man (EMH) was launched.Claudine, his handler, made his task perfectly clear:We’re a small, exclusive club,” she said. “We’re paid – well paid – to cheatcountries around the globe out of billions of dollars. Alarge part of your jobis to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotesU.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnaredin a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them wheneverwe desire – to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn,these leaders bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks,power plants, and airports to their people. Meanwhile, the owners of U.S.engineering and construction companies become very wealthy. (p. 17)Praised for his success, he was given “the opportunity, something fewmen ever receive, even at twice your age” (p. 57): to bring on boardPanama’s popular president, Omar Torrijos, who wanted all Panamanians,instead of only the small elite, to benefit. Torrijos’ assertion that sovereign ...
Al-Qaeda
Authors: Brieger Pedro
Published: October 2020

The outrages carried out in recent years in diverse places of the world bearsomething that can only be called the “mark of al-Qaeda.” The planes thatcrashed into the Twin Towers, the bombs that exploded in Madrid, or theattack against American naval ships in Yemen were attributed to an internationalnetwork led by Osama bin Laden, located somewhere inAfghanistan. Although the existence of this “network” is not clear and itsstructure remains part of the unknown, it differs from the political partiesand movements known until now in two particular ways: It has demonstratedits willingness to attack anywhere in the world, and there do notseem to be too many requirements for joining it.In order to determine if this “network of networks” called al-Qaedaexists, we must first understand the rise and subsequent fall of the earlierIslamic movements that evolved out of the fervor of Iran’s Islamic revolutionof 1979. Second, we must realize the significance of adhering to amovement that has no partisan structure or links based on a strict ideologicalaffinity, given that many political parties exclude all who do not agreewith their own definite ideological set of rules.1The Radicalization of IslamFor the first time in the twentieth century, the revolution led by ImamKhomeini enabled a mass political movement rising aloft the political bannerof Islam to assume political and state power by means of revolution. In ...
Islam in Higher Education
Authors: Malik Abdul-Rehman
Published: October 2020

Since 9/11, there has been a remarkable growth in the study of Islam inhigher education. Whereas a decade earlier many universities were eager toclose down or at best amalgamate their Islamic studies programs into largerdepartments, there is now an urgency on the part of academic administratorsto begin teaching about and encouraging research on Islam. Not onlyis there a demand from students, but there is also an understanding thatIslam, as a religion and a social force, will continue to have an impact onglobal and domestic realities for the foreseeable future. However, there hasbeen little discussion about how to approach the study of Islam, given thecurrent political climate.The Islam in Higher Education conference, organized by theAssociation of Muslim Social Scientists UK (AMSS-UK) in conjunctionwith the Centre for the Study of Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations(CSIC) at the University of Birmingham and the Higher EducationAcademy Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, was heldon 29-30 January 2005. It encouraged participants to engage in a criticalanalysis and dialogue concerning the status of the study of Islam in highereducation, employability and recruitment, academic standards and pedagogy,the depiction of Islam and Muslims in higher education, and comparativeinternational approaches to Islam in higher education.In opening the conference, CSIC’s Bustami Khir, senior lecturer inIslamic studies, spoke of the critical role that such events could play inshaping the future of the study of Islam and Muslims in the UnitedKingdom. Michael Clarke (vice principal, University of Birmingham) discussedthe city as a historical space of interaction between religion andmodernity in an industrializing world. He added that with over 140,000Muslims residing in the city, Birmingham was set to become the firstmajority non-white city in the United Kingdom and that the city could notbe understood without reference to its faith communities ...
The Challenge of Post-Zionism
Authors: Glazer Aubrey L.
Published: October 2020

In uttering “Everywhere I wander is Jerusalem,” the late nineteenth-centuryHasidic revolutionary, Nahman of Bratzlav, was the first post-Zionist.The thought-provoking essays in this anthology, especially the conclusion,address the shifting signification of post-Zionism from (1) a methodologyin the Israeli social sciences, (2) to the political trends within contemporary Israeli society, and (3) to a particular period/project of the Israeli polity/society (p. 183).Rounding out the volume are the 1998 reflections of renownedPalestinian thinker, Edward Said, “New History, Old Ideas” (pp. 199-202).This is his critique of a Palestinian-Israeli conference featuring “new” Israelihistorians and their Palestinian counterparts, which included Elie Sambar,Nur Masalha, and himself, as well as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, ItamarRabinowitch, and Zeev Sternhell.The present anthology is born from Said’s critique of those who concludedthat it was morally wrong but necessary to expel the Palestinians intandem with Zionist efforts to reestablish the Jewish state. Of this group,only Pappé resists the profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia(p. 200), that informs all other research of these “new” historians. Callingfor Palestinian and Arab intellectuals to engage Israeli academic and intellectualaudiences by lecturing in Israeli centers openly, while admitting thatthe years of boycotting have achieved little (p. 202), Said calls for a newpolitics free of racial prejudices and ostrich-like attitudes. These seminalreflections are misplaced as an appendix, rather than as a forward.Following Hanna Herzog’s call for a post-Zionist discourse more informedby the clarity of feminism, it is a loss that the voice of Said’s daughter,Najla, is absent. Her significant involvement with the non-violent, democraticparty, the Palestinian National Initiative, would have been anotherwelcome voice in this discourse ...
Islamic Political Identity in Turkey
Authors: Sheikh Shiraz A.
Published: October 2020

During the events that led to the “soft coup” of the Erbakan-Çiller coalitiongovernment in 1997, the Turkish military declared that the number onethreat to national security was not Kurdish separatism, but Islamic radicalism.Despite this shift in security strategy, the Justice and Developmentparty, which was born from the ashes of Erbakan’s openly Islamist Refahparty, won a decisive victory at the polls in November 2002. These seriesof events from Turkey’s recent history have raised many questions in theminds of observers, both international and domestic, as to the nature andstrength of Islamic political and social movements in the Republic ofTurkey – a state that since its birth in 1923 had undergone a systematic programof westernization and secularization.In his Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, M. Hakan Yavuz attempts toanswer these very questions by providing a comprehensive analysis of themain Muslim social groups that have come to dominate Turkish-Muslimsociety, namely, the Nakshibendi Sufi orders and the Nurcu movement.These groups have made significant inroads into Turkish civil society, crossingclass, regional, and ethnic lines, by taking advantage of new opportunityspaces in the market, the print media, and education. This was a directresult of the political and economic liberalization policies of the Özal governmentduring the 1980s.As the author argues, “the secularizing, state-centric elite failed effectivelyto penetrate and transform traditional society, and was similarlyunsuccessful in developing an alternative value system and associational lifefor the rural population of society” (p. 4). Thus, the social and ethical vacuumcreated by the Kemalists was appropriated by a diverse group of Islamicsocial movements that were then urbanized by way of the gecekondus, theshanty-towns built overnight by rural migrants to the big cities during the1960s and 1970s. These movements, which were silently germinating in theAnatolian countryside, underwent what Yavuz aptly terms the “vernacularization ...
The Conference of the Birds
Authors: Lingwood Chad G.
Published: October 2020

In medieval Islamic civilization, poetry was widely acknowledged to be themost intimate vessel for conveying Sufism’s hidden truths. The spiritualstates and stations traversed by adepts along an ascending path to the realityof God’s unity largely defies simple descriptions into ordinary prose oreveryday language. The subtleties necessary to evocatively describe a spiritualjourney that is, by its very essence, ineffable, necessitates a linguisticmedium that could at once reveal secrets of inner contemplation and mysticalperception while simultaneously concealing such information from the“uninitiated” behind the exoteric understanding of the same work of literature.Persian poetry, with its unique capacity for metaphorical symbolism,puns, and paradoxes, thus emerged by the seventh/thirteenth century as anunparalleled vehicle for expressing the mystical experience.The most dramatic expression in all of Persian mystical literature of thisspiritual journey is the allegorical poem Mantiq al-Tair (best translated as“The Speech of the Birds”) by Farid al-Din `Attar (d. 627/1229), whichrecounts the initiatory voyage of a group of birds through seven valleys tothe palace of the mythical king-bird Simurgh, symbol of the Divine,enthroned atop the cosmic mountain Qaf.In addition to the book currently under review, `Attar’s masterpieceinspired other renditions into English, including an abbreviated and freelyreworked edition by Edward FitzGerald, The Bird-parliament (1903); R. P.Masani’s prose translation of half the original poem’s 4,600 lines, TheConference of the Birds (1924); the incomplete prose version by C. S. Nott,The Conference of the Birds (1954), which was prepared from Garcin deTassy’s nineteenth-century French translation, Le Langage des oiseaux, and,as such, is obscured by an intervening third language; Afkham Darbandi andDick Davis’ Penguin Classics edition The Conference of the Birds (1984),which represents the poem’s first complete English translation (minus theinvocation and epilogue), is based on the oldest extant manuscripts, and isskillfully rendered into heroic couplets pleasingly faithful to the letter andspirit of `Attar’s allegory; and Peter Avery’s determinedly literal translation,The Speech of the Birds (1998), whose 560-page opus includes 120 pages ofenriching endnotes on `Attar’s use of Qur’anic imagery and the hadith ...
Editorial
Authors: Siddiqui Dilnawaz A.
Published: October 2020

This issue coincides with several momentous events and trends in the world atlarge and Muslim nations. The heads or top representatives of the 57 Muslimmajoritynations have held an extraordinary meeting at Makkah under theOrganization of Islamic Conferences’ (OIC) aegis. A major goal is to reactivateand empower the OIC so that it can actively help the ummah deal with itshuge opportunities and challenges. Several salient issues were stressed: theneed for closer interaction, collaboration, and internal reform leading to apeaceful, pluralistic, and moderate disposition of Islam and Muslims.Muslim nations are trying to address their internal weaknesses and buildupon their strengths. In terms of human and material resources, the Muslimworld is composed of three kinds of countries: those with large populationsand poor economies, small populations and rich economies, and with bothfairly large populations backed by rich economic resources. They seem tobelieve that Iraq and Iran, the very backbone of the third category, are currentlytargeted for long-term occupation. They are exploring how to compensatefor one another’s drawbacks and reinforcing their assets.The OIC declaration, hailed as a historic turning point, stresses thatMuslims take responsibility for their present plight and stop blaming others.In addition, the organization will be renamed, get a new charter, and be runby mandatory contributions from member nations. It will also feature conflict-resolution and consensus-building mechanisms to resolve both minorand major conflicts, such as Palestine and Kashmir. The ummah and theworld now wait to see whether such statements are more than rhetoric.Concurrently, there is an increasing awareness of the futility of cardinaldirectionalconflicts and the “clash of civilizations” between the West andthe East, or between the North and the South. Ever more Muslim and otherintellectuals realize that the real confrontation is between powerful globalforces of greed and exploitative profiteering on the one hand, and people ofcandor, conscience, and moral orientation on the other. Among the individualsand organizations in the latter camp, there is growing realization of theneed for societal reform toward pluralism, learning from each other, collectiveand consultative decision making, basic freedoms for all, peace withjustice, and institution building that is compatible with the speed, complexity,and magnitude of the emerging globalized world ...
Losing My Religion
Authors: Afzaal Ahmed
Published: October 2020

Jeffrey Lang is a well-known Muslim convert and professor of mathematicsat the University of Kansas. Losing My Religion is his third book. In many ways, it surpasses the first two in the relevance and urgency of itssubject matter.While the book shares its title with a 1991 song by the popular rockband REM, its central theme is almost as old as religion itself: bridging thechasm that seems to separate religious beliefs and practices on the one hand,and contemporary rationality and secular culture on the other. Perhapsbecause of his background in mathematics, Lang is confident that humanreason, if properly used, can and will affirm the truths of divine revelation.The idea is by no means new, though its application has always called forthe most rigorous efforts by the most sophisticated human intellects.Writing as a lay theologian, Lang makes some interesting points inLosing My Religion, which is primarily aimed at the general North AmericanMuslim community. The main impetus behind this book is the alienationexperienced by young Muslims and converts who are confronted with thetraditional and conservative forms of Islam presented (and vigorouslydefended) by the immigrant-dominated mosque culture. This alienationaccounts for the facts that the majority of second- and third-generationMuslims tend to stay away from mosques and that it is generally the olderimmigrants or very recent arrivals who seem to be active in these institutions.Lang rightly argues that the young people’s absence from the mainstreamof the Muslim community’s religious and social life represents a seriousthreat to Islam’s survival and growth in North America ...
Rethinking Islamic Education in Facing the Challenges of the Twenty-first Century
Authors: Hashim Rosnani
Published: October 2020

The Muslim ummah, as a world community, faces many challenges at thethreshold of the new century. The fateful event of 9/11 has revealed yetanother facet of the problems plaguing Muslim society: the existence ofradical, or what some media have labeled “militant,” Muslim groups.Despite the Muslim world’s condemnation of the 9/11 terrorist attack, theUnited States considered itself the victim and thus launched its “war againstterrorism” against the alleged perpetrators: the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iraq,which was alleged to be building weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)and assisting al-Qaeda, became the second target. Iran would have becomethe immediate third target if the international community had supported theBush administration’s unilateral declaration of war against Iraq. But it didnot, for the allegations could not be proven.Unfortunately, this new American policy has not helped to curb aggressionor terrorism; rather, it has caused radical groups to run amok andindulge in even more acts of terrorism in Israel, Palestine, Indonesia, Turkey,Spain, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 tragedy has caused the West to holdmore negative images of Muslims and Islam and has made life more difficultfor Muslims living in the West. In response, anti-Americanism hasgrown throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim world.1September 11 seemed to provide certain Muslim governments with thelicense to combat terrorism on the local front more rigorously. This actionheightened the conflicts between local Muslims and the ruling governments,as in the case of General Musharraf of Pakistan, who decided to cooperatewith Washington in its “war against terrorism” by providing bases forAmerican forces. After 9/11, Egypt, Tunisia, and Malaysia all receivedrepeated praise from Washington for their experience and seriousness incombating terrorism and joining the alliance against it, despite their trackrecord on, for example, human rights violations vis-à-vis the ruling elites’ ...
Editorial
Authors: Bullock Katherine
Published: October 2020

When the tribes of Makkah decided to rebuild the Ka`bah, they workedtogether well until it was time to return the Black Stone to its corner. Eachclan wanted the honor of this task, and tensions ran high for four or fivedays due to the stalemate over who would have the honor of lifting theBlack Stone so that it could be returned to its proper place. With battlepreparations underway, one man decided to try and avert a fight by suggestinga rather unorthodox idea: The first man to walk into the area wouldbe appointed to arbitrate the dispute. Everyone agreed and began to wait.And so it was that Muhammad ibn Abdullah was the first to enter. Seeingthis, the men reached a spontaneous agreement that he was indeed the bestone to resolve this crisis, for he was known to all of them as a person oftruth. Muhammad analyzed the situation and then asked for a cloak.Telling them to spread it out on the ground, he asked each clan to take holdof a corner. After placing the Black Stone in the middle, he asked them toraise the cloak so that he could place the Black Stone back in its properplace.This was Muhammad ibn Abdullah, a man of truth, integrity, and peace;a man who, according to Muslim belief, later became the last Prophet ofGod. Muhammad ibn Abdullah: about whom Muslims say “salla Allahu`alayhi wasallam” (May the peace and blessings of God be upon him) eachtime his name is mentioned; about whom they ask God to bless, just as Hehad blessed Abraham his family, at each of the five daily prayers; aboutwhom it is said that God say ten prayers on anyone who says one prayer onhim. In contrast with the 1,400 year old Muslim tradition of reverencetoward Muhammad ibn Abdullah (pbuh), (indeed toward all of theprophets), a European tradition gradually sprung up dedicated to depictingMuhammad ibn Abdullah as an evil “magician” out to destroy Christendom.Pope Innocent III (1161-1216) even called him the Anti-Christ. During themedieval era, the bogey used to frighten naughty children into obediencewas “Mahomet.”This negative image of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) remains deeplyingrained in the European psyche (and, by extension, the colonized NewWorld, now known as “the West”). Indeed, it is so deeply ingrained that ...
In Pursuit of Legitimacy
Authors: Zalman Amy
Published: October 2020

In his book In Pursuit of Legitimacy, Hesham Al Awadi sets out to explainEgyptian president Mubarak’s dramatic shift in his treatment of the MuslimBrothers (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin), from toleration of the outlawed group tosevere repression, over the first two decades of his regime. Standard explanationsfor this shift, as Awadi points out, have a state-centric bias in which the state is the primary actor responding to the threat posed by the MuslimBrothers to the regime, either by providing social services when the state’scapacity to do so was hampered, or by challenging the legitimacy of anauthoritarian regime. The author acknowledges these factors, but then offersa substantially different narrative in which he skillfully traces the politicaldance of power between the outlawed group and the regime. The move torepression, in Awadi’s rendering, can be better explained by the responsiverelationship between the Muslim Brothers and Mubarak than by understandingeither power or legitimacy solely in terms of the state.Awadi argues that the driving force behind Mubarak’s crackdown inthe mid-1990s was a cyclical competition between the president and theMuslim Brothers for political legitimacy, which began with his regime’saccession following Sadat’s assassination in 1980. In his analysis, theauthor states that this conflict’s brutal 1995 climax, during which a numberof Muslim Brothers were convicted at a military trial, was by no meansa foregone conclusion. Rather, it was the result of a highly responsive relationshipbetween the regime and the increasingly powerful oppositionorganization. Moreover, it could have evolved differently had the MuslimBrothers made different choices about how to best pursue their program ...
Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Kersten Carool
Published: October 2020

In the introduction, the editors explain that the main motivation for producingthis volume is that, in the course of the last century or so, the Muslimworld has experienced unprecedented change to its societies and culturesthat, in turn, has had a tremendous impact upon its intellectual life. TheMuslim world’s encounter with modernity has been a source of tensionthat has turned “Islamic discourse in the twentieth century into a crisis” (p.3). In devising a framework for what they call the “dialectical relationship”between twentieth-century Islamic thought and modernity, SuhaTaji-Farouki and Basheer Nafi have resolved to construct their accountaround three themes: the emergence of new spokespersons, the diversityof twentieth-century Muslim discourse, and the connections and disruptionsbetween Islamic thought and the rest of “the global intellectualarena” (p. 5).With regards to the first theme, the key observation is that a new type ofintellectual, one who is not part of the ulama’ class, has taken center stage.The lack of consensus and almost “complete fragmentation” of present-dayIslamic thought is attributed to the external challenges that the Muslimworld has faced for the last 200 years. In fact, contemporary Islamic thoughtmirrors the very nature of modernity: the loss of certainty, challenged values,relativism, and an Islamdom – formerly assumed to be invincible – thathas been shaken to its inner core. An interesting observation made in thisrespect is “the blurring of the contours between expressions of Islamic intellectualismand the academic study of Islam” (p. 11). As a result of theirencounter with western scholarship, Muslim intellectuals felt increasinglycompelled to respond to what they saw as Orientalist distortions. However,as area study experts, social scientists, and specialists from the humanities –among them increasing numbers of Muslim scholars – began to study Islam,it became possible to discern a “meeting of the minds.” ...
Globalized Islam
Authors: Hartmann Noga
Published: October 2020

This book analyzes core issues of Islamic thought in the modern era byexamining Islam as both the dominant religion in the Middle East and aminority religion in the West. By considering a wide range of ideological, spiritual, and non-violent or violent events, Roy posits that contrary to popular(and erroneous) assumptions, Islamic fundamentalism derives fromglobalization, not from a clash of civilizations or religions.Roy claims that both liberalism and fundamentalism arise from globalizationand deterritorialization (i.e., the spread of Muslims and Islam beyondthe traditional Muslim world). He views neo-fundamentalists, Islamists,born-again Muslims, and radical violent groups as bit players in Islam’s continuingefforts to come to terms with western values. For example, Islamicmovements in Europe seem to be fundamentalist on the surface; but uponcloser examination, they display western values (e.g., individualization, selfrealization,spirituality, and the weakening of traditional ties and sources ofauthority). With one-third of all Muslims living outside Muslim-majoritylands, Roy believes that modern manifestations of Islam in the West (e.g.,radicalism, neo-fundamentalism, Sufism, nationalism, re-Islamization, neo-Islamic brotherhoods, and anti-westernism) evolve from globalizationinstead of a desire to return to orthodox religious practices or the allegedly“pure” Islam of an earlier time. He tells us that Islam is no longer only thetraditional faith of the Salaf (i.e., the three first and most pious generationsof Muslims), but also a mixture of modern sociological and cultural – evenwestern – elements, regardless of what modern-day Salafis claim ...
Me and the Mosque
Authors: Hussain Amir
Published: October 2020

Zarqa Nawaz is a Canadian Muslim filmmaker who lives with her family inRegina, Saskatchewan. There are any number of comments that could beinserted at this point. Having spent time on both the Saskatchewan andManitoba prairies, I note only that Zarqa is developing a television series forthe Canadian Broadcasting Corporation entitled “Little Mosque on thePrairie.” She has made two earlier short films, BBQ Muslims and DeathThreat. Information about those films, as well as about Zarqa, can be foundon her website, Fundamentalist Films, available at www.fundamentalistfilms.com.Me and the Mosque, her first documentary, is distributed by the NationalFilm Board of Canada. The film is directly related to her own concerns as aMuslim woman, namely, as to space available to her in the mosque. The filmbegins on a light-hearted note (as does her web site, with the tag line of “puttingthe fun back into fundamentalism”) with Muslim comic Azhar Usmanjoking about the lack of appropriate space available in mosques for Muslimwomen.The documentary traverses mosques in Canada and the United States,such including places as Aurora, Illinois; Mississauga, Ontario; Winnipeg,Manitoba; Regina, Saskatchewan; Surrey, British Columbia; and Morgantown,West Virginia. It includes the voices of established scholars, amongthem Asma Barlas, Umar Abd-Allah, and Aminah McCloud, alongside thenewer scholarly voices of Aisha Geissinger, Jasmine Zine, and Itrath Syed.In addition, there is a wide range of interviews with people from the Muslimcommunity, from such activists as Asra Nomani and Aminah Assilmi to suchscholars as Abdullah Adhami and Tareq Suwaidan.As mentioned above, the film begins on a humorous note with the comedyof Azhar Usman (of “Allah Made Me Funny” fame). However, what hejokes about, the nice “dungeons” that many people mention when they talkabout the basements where some mosques give space to women, is no laughingmatter. The film then moves to the mosque in Aurora to begin its discussionof these issues. I would like to think that this is Zarqa’s subtle homageto another Canadian filmmaker, Mike Myers, who bases his fictional character,Wayne Campbell, in Aurora. Zarqa then mentions her upbringing inToronto and contrasts the mosque that she attended (the Jami’ Mosque) while ...
The Dao of Muhammad
Authors: Ma Haiyun
Published: October 2020

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite has contributed an important piece to the history ofMuslims in imperial China, centered on a seventeenth-century Muslimgenealogy known as the Jing Xue Xi Chuan Pu (hereinafter Genealogy),which has been recently discovered, punctuated, and printed as the Jing XueXi Chuan Pu (Xining: Qinghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1989). His book followsSachiko Murata’s study of Confucian Muslim texts and teachers (namely,Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yu’s Great Learning of Pure andReal and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm [Albany,NY: State University of New York, 2000]) and illuminates many aspects ofthe Muslims’ cultural life in imperial China.The book consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusionwith tables and illustrations. The first chapter decodes the Genealogy andoutlines the trajectory of the Chinese Muslims’ educational network in centraland coastal China. The second chapter explores the “social logic”behind the practices of the Muslim literati (p. 74) – that is, how they envisionedand understood the educational system, their roles, and Islam in referenceto imperial China’s existing sociocultural categories. This chapterreveals how Muslim educational institutions enabled and empoweredMuslim intellectuals to convert “Islam” and “Muslim” into valid social categoriesof school (xuepai) and to envision themselves as “literati” (shi) thatwere as much Chinese as Muslim.The third chapter analyzes the transformation of Islamic knowledge from“orality” to “texuality” (p. 158) and the formation of the Chinese Islamicschool, which was patterned on contemporary Chinese schools of scholarship.The fourth chapter explains how Confucian Muslims interpreted Islam,Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic canons as equivalents and counterparts ofConfucianism (enumerated in the Han Kitab as “Dao,” “Sage,” and “Classic”),and how the Muslim literati embraced Confucianism. In the ...
Lost Voices
Authors: Marat Erica
Published: October 2020

Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes’ Lost Voices: Central Asian Women ConfrontingTransition examines how the Soviets empowered and disempowered CentralAsian women before, during, and after the communist regime. To date, thisbook is the most in-depth study of the revolutionary transformations experiencedby these women during the twentieth century. Combining her westernacademic background and sensitivity for the local context, she reachesbeyond the mainstream conceptualization of gender issues vis-à-vis theSoviet regime to examine Central Asian and western literature on gender thematicsacross disciplines, from anthropology to political science.The book opens with a sophisticated analysis of the relation betweenwestern feminist paradigms and the Soviet policy of gender equality. Bothexisted in parallel, yet were interactive. Although western feminist ideasimpacted women from the Soviet space, they represented rather marginalviews among Soviet feminists. Corcoran-Nantes explains that while theSoviet regime was empowering Central Asian women by liberating themfrom traditional religious values and setting quotas in public structures, theseradical shifts in daily life inevitably complicated their identities in varioussocial situations. The Soviet model provided some institutional frameworkfor the independence period, yet was largely inadequate in the new free marketsystem. As a result, Central Asian women faced greater problems inshaping their feminist agendas when compared to Russian women.Chapter 2 discusses why this forceful emancipation, which involvedkhujun (unveiling), replacing Islamic law with Soviet legislation, and establishingzhensovets (women councils) in the 1920-30s, was controversial. Sheargues that women were expected to follow the changes, yet still had to playimportant social roles in their families. In addition, this empowerment provokeddomestic and social violence against women. Such phenomena askhujun also engendered intra-personal conflict and hesitation among the firstgeneration of Soviet-ruled Central Asian women. Corcoran-Nantes statesthat the “emancipation of Central Asian women had far more to do with theimplementation of the Soviet political and economic project than constitutingan act of altruism” (p. 38) ...
Aversion and Desire
Authors: D’Agostino Melissa
Published: October 2020

In this interesting book, Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim FemaleIdentity in the Diaspora, Shanaz Khan challenges us to rethink static andfixed conceptions of Muslim women. She also points out that because minority identities are fixed, women who happen to be Muslim are oftenforced to enter social and political spaces as Muslim women. Such restraintsmake it almost impossible to create a place for progressive politics, change,and fluid identities. As an anthropologist and observer, Khan pinpoints andfocuses our attention on the situation currently facing Muslim women in theWest, particularly in Canada. As a Muslim and a woman, she has located aspace in which progressive politics and change may take place.Borrowing mainly from the work of Homi Bhabha, Khan calls for movingfrom fixed and static notions of Muslim women into what Bhabha refersto as the “third space,” from which hybrid identities can be constructed. Theauthor argues that both Islam and Orientalism, the two dominant discoursesfrom which ideas about Muslim women have been and are still articulated,have led to essentializing and idealizing our images of the Muslim woman.This is also true of feminism, which sees specific aspects of Islamic practiceas oppressive to women and, therefore, the target of change; of colonialismand postcolonialism, which reinforce those stereotypes influenced by unequalpower relationships between Euro-American and Muslim societiesand that have an imperial history currently embedded in the neocolonialforms of control of other societies; and multiculturalism, which views thecultures and religions of nonwhite people as homogenous, unchanging, andunconnected to any social, political, and historical reality. All of these lensesthrough which the “others” are viewed contribute to this essentialization.Moving beyond an extremely useful theoretical discussion structured bythe concept of hybridized identities in the third space, Khan then incorporatesa series of case studies that are categorized in a manner designed to showcasea variety of Muslim women’s attempts to construct an identity, live life, andchallenge the norms of both the wider society and of the Muslim communitiesin which they live. This is done from a third space, one that they themselvesmight not even realize that they are occupying ...
Contours of an Islamo-Christian Civilization
Authors: Johnston David
Published: October 2020

Books Reviewed: Jack Goody, Islam in Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press,2004; Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2004; James A. Bill and John Alden Williams,Roman Catholics and Shi’i Muslims: Prayer, Passion, and Politics.Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.There can be no doubt that the twenty-first century has begun – and continues– under the ominous cloud of enmity between Muslim groups or nationsand western ones, from the attacks on American soil on 11 September 2001to those in Madrid and London, to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, andnow in the growing tension with Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has spurred amushrooming of publications on the troubled relations between “Islam andthe West,” with almost every book pointing out the bold Christian rhetoricemanating from a militarily aggressive White House.Kenneth Cragg, the veteran Christian expositor of the Qur’an, more prolificthan ever in his nineties (seven titles since 2002), astutely named one ofhis latest books The Qur’an and the West (Georgetown University Press:2006). Not only is “Islam” misleading in terms of the wide diversity of cultures,sects, and spiritualities inspired by the Qur’an and the Hadith literature,but for Cragg, Muslims in today’s globalized world, whether living as“exiles” in the West or within Muslim-majority states, will have to choosebetween the vulnerable faith proclaimed in the early years in Makkah andthe religion cum political rule exemplified by the Prophet in Madinah. Asusual, Cragg also challenges the Christian side, which, in its American incarnation,largely rationalizes the use of power to extend its hegemony fromIsrael-Palestine to Central Asia in the name of democracy.Though all three books under review here share Cragg’s motivation toreduce tension and foster greater understanding between Muslims andChristians, only the third (on Shi`ites and Catholics) represents the kind oftheological dialogue that Cragg and others have nourished over the years ...
Formations of the Secular
Authors: Sabet Amr G. E.
Published: October 2020

This most interesting and ground-breaking study presents a Foucauldian andNietzschean genealogical tracing of the concept of the secular, workingback from the present to the contingencies that have coalesced to producecurrent certainties. It asks what an “anthropology of secularism” might looklike and examines the connection between the “secular” as an epistemic categoryand “secularism” as a political doctrine. Asad attempts to avoid thetrap of making pronouncements about secularism’s virtues and vices, irrespectiveof its origin, and to proffer instead an anthropological formulationof its doctrine and practice.According to the author, secularism is more than a mere separation ofreligious from secular institutions of government, for it presupposes newconcepts of religion, ethics, and politics; as well as the new imperativesassociated with them, and is closely linked to the emergence of the modernnation-state (pp. 1-2). In contrast to pre-modern mediations of nontranscendedlocal identities, secularism is a redefining, transcending, anddifferentiating political medium (representation of citizenship) of the self,articulated through class, gender, and religion (p. 5).Concomitantly, he questions the secular’s self-evident character evenwhen admitting the reality of its “presence” (p. 16). His main premise is that“the secular” is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism, thesecular being that formation caused by a variety of concepts, practices, andsensibilities that have come together over time (p. 16). He concludes that the“secular” cannot be viewed as the “rational” successor to “religion,” butrather as a multilayered historical category related to the major premises ofmodernity, democracy, and human rights.Within the above introductory framework, the book’s seven chapters aredivided into three parts. The first part, comprising three chapters, explores theepistemic category of the secular. The following three chapters of part 2 ...
Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen
Authors: Varisco Daniel Martin
Published: October 2020

The anthropological literature on Yemen has had little to say about the classof sadah (plural of sayyid) who dominated the Zaydi imamate in NorthYemen from the tenth century until 1962. Gabriele vom Bruck’s account ofthe sadah, based on interviews and an extended stay in Yemen starting in1983, includes a wide range of information on perceptions of this class,especially after the 1962 revolution, with an emphasis on how personal identityis established and attitudes about marriage with non-sadah. There is anextensive bibliography of western sources, but little indication of the widerange of relevant Arabic sources available. It should be noted that vomBruck almost totally ignores the sadah of southern Yemen as well as of theTihama, although her text sometimes reads as if it were describing a genericclass of sadah for Yemen as a whole. 

The author’s stated goal is “to examine the relationship of experience,social practice, and moral reasoning among the hereditary elite in the contextof revolutionary change” (p. 5). Her theoretical focus is on the social processof remembrance as the sadah were forced into new roles after the imamate’sdemise. Vom Bruck argues that we should avoid “a monolithic understandingof sayyid as a ‘vessel of charisma’ and ‘paragon of piety’” (p. 250) and suggeststhat the “descent metaphor” (p. 6) was the “principle self-defining criterion”of the sadah as well as the “core of the Imamate’s political culture.”(p. 6) However, the idiom of descent has also been the defining feature ofYemen’s tribes, so the role of descent per se is less relevant as a distinguishingmarker than how the sadah relate to other social categories.Although the relationship with tribesmen is mentioned at several points,it is not analyzed in depth apart from anecdotal evidence. For example, it ishighly problematic to label musicians al-akhdam (p. 44), who were actuallyquite rare in Zaydi towns and villages, a nuanced pariah category. There islittle sense of how the sadah fit into actual communities, and no effectiveintegration of the available literature previously published on Yemeni socialcategories (including Tomas Gerholm’s Market, Mosque, and Mafraj [StockholmUniversity Press: 1977] and Eduard Glaser’s important late-nineteenthcentury articles) ...
The Kemalists
Authors: Dressler Markus
Published: October 2020

The range of titles in Prometheus Books’ “Islamic Studies” section is quiteintriguing. According to its webpage, this “leading publisher in philosophy,popular science, and critical thinking” appears to be dedicated to coveringIslamic-related topics of interest in a comprehensive manner for a post-9/11western audience. Recnet publications include The Legacy of Jihad: IslamicHoly War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (the author is a professor of medicine),The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (authored by the “director of JihadWatch”), and Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out and Why I Am not aMuslim (both by the notorious Ibn Warraq).The book under review fits into this series due to its apologetic characterand narrow perspective on Islam – a perspective that sees political enunciationsmotivated by Islam as threatening and in direct contradiction to the(presumably universal) modern. The front book flap sets the tone and catersto a broad readership: “A clash of civilizations – between the secular traditionsof the West and the fundamentalist Islamic revival in the East – hasplunged the world into serious crisis.”First of all, it has to be stated that The Kemalists is neither an academicbook nor an “Islamic Studies” book. It is filled with methodological problemsand utterly incorrect statements about Islam. One particularly blatant exampleshould suffice to make this point: On page 198, Kaylan lumps together asbrotherhoods the “reactionary” Muslim Brotherhood, the “Shafis” (sic), the“Maliki Brotherhood,” and the “liberal … Melami and Bektashi brotherhoods”– apparently not understanding the differences between a modernIslamist movement, schools of law, and Sufi orders. To be fair, the author doesnot claim to be an Islamicist; however, it is disturbing to see how politicallymotivated treatises such as his gain publicity under an “Islamic Studies” label ...
Telling Lives in India
Authors: Abraham Jose
Published: October 2020

Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History is editedby David Arnold (professor of South Asian history) and Stuart Blackburn(research associate), both of the School of Oriental and African Studies(SOAS), London. The intellectual contributions of the editors and nine otherdistinguished scholars, all of whom belong to a range of academic disciplines,make this collection of eleven essays a remarkable and highly readablework on life histories – biographies, autobiographies, and oral accounts– from India. This volume grew out of the “Life Histories” project establishedat SOAS and out of various workshops held between 1998 and 2000at SOAS, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, CambridgeUniversity, and the British Library.In their well-thought-out and written “Introduction,” the editors explainwhy this volume was published. According to them, for a very long time thelife history approach has been gaining wide acceptance among scholarsbelonging to various disciplines, such as women’s studies and black studies,due to a “growing distrust of ‘meta-narratives’” and a firm desire to “movetowards a more nuanced, multi-stranded understanding of society and agreater recognition of the heterogeneity of human lives and lived ...
Rethinking Orientalism
Authors: Hamdan Amani
Published: October 2020

In her book, Reina Lewis discusses how to acquire an accurate understandingof the various strands of neo-Orientalism that perpetuate long-lastingand contemporary stereotypes of Muslim women from traditional Islamicsocieties. Within the context of the current global and geopolitical landscapeas well as the alleged American war on terror, the competing western imperialistand orientalist images, along with negative stereotypes, that characterizeMuslim women are rhetorical. According to Lewis, all of these elementsare at the center of knowledge that is produced and reproduced. This bookfocuses on Ottoman women’s writing from the beginning of the twentiethcentury and traces their “travel accounts, memories, and fractions that reveala gendered counter-discourse that challenges Occidental stereotypes” (p. 1).The author’s main theme is how these writings not only challenged westernOrientalist discourses, but also intervened in the Ottoman debate aboutwomen and national emancipation. The book, which follows an interdisciplinaryapproach, is divided into six chapters.In her introduction, Lewis argues that postcolonial studies have been tooparadigmatic and narrow to include Middle Eastern and particularly Turkishexperiences, since most postcolonial theories focus on the South Asian experience.Her novel endeavor helps bridge this void in postcolonial studies.Also, she introduces “to postcolonial studies the specificities of the lateOttoman situation and bringing to the reading of Ottoman sources the criticalperspectives of postcolonial and gender theory” (p. 5). Moreover, shebrings to light some western women’s writings, such as those of GraceEllison and Lady Mary Wortley, who traveled to the East exploring the statusof Middle Eastern women and, through their writings, tried to “challengeWestern misapprehensions” of their status (p. 45) ...
Burned Alive
Authors: Aslam Maleeha
Published: October 2020

Burned Alive is the true story of Souad, a young Palestinian woman whosurvived an attempted honor killing carried out by her brother-in-law. Thisautobiography, documented by Marie-Thérèse Cuny and translated fromthe French by Judith S. Armbruster, is narrated in such a way that the readerscan develop a familiarity with the complicated dimension of genderroles, the prevalence of asymmetrical standards of male and female morality in misogynistic societies, and their impact on women. The plot developsin a way designed to inform the reader that honor killing, although outwardlypracticed as a customary punishment for an illicit sexual relationship,is, in reality, a brutal form of female suppression.The book, divided into five parts, covers two different stages of Souad’slife. Now forty-five, the first phase of her life took place in a small WestBank village where, at the age of eighteen, she experienced the atrocity ofan attempted honor killing because she had had premarital sexual relationshipswith a man. Through an aid worker named Jacqueline, Souad miraculouslysurvived and was moved to Europe, where she began the secondphase of her life. She now lives with a loving husband and three children,following her tryst with death, twenty-four operations, and innumerableexcruciatingly painful recovery procedures ...