bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Islamic Reform Movements after the Arab Spring
Authors: Willoughby Jay
Published: October 2020

On June 24-July 3, 2013, the International Institute of Islamic Thought held

its annual Summer Institute for Scholars. Given the number of presentations,

only a few of them will be mentioned here.

In his welcoming remarks, Abdul Aziz Sachedina (George Mason University)

spoke eloquently about how change has to come from within, how

politics still dominates values, and how the Qur’an and Sunnah are being read

not for inspiration, but for putting down opposition and dissenters. The Arab

Spring represents a challenge to undertake such an internal reform. Unfortunately,

he said, cyberspace contains no serious conversation in this regard,

just hostility and animosity, which only damages Muslims. He called for leaders

to “moralize” the entire issue in order to achieve co-existence, mainly between

Shi‘is and Sunnis, and wondered if the reformers could deal with this

and other issues.

John Voll (Georgetown University), who delivered the keynote address,

“Pop-politics and Elections: Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring,”

raised the question as to whether the Arab Spring makes any difference, given

that reform movements have been going on in the Muslim world since 1880.

Are we, he asked, “looking at something moving forward/different, or just rehashing

the same old arguments?” He opined that a new vocabulary is needed

and that people have to move beyond “interfaith,” “tolerance,” and interreligious

dialogue and speak to each other about “shared interests.” He then discussed

earlier Muslim reform movements and how their goals have changed

over the years.

Yahya Michot (Hartford University) presented a special lecture entitled

“Taymiyyan Thoughts for a Temperate Arab Summer.” He pointed out how

different groups (e.g., those groups responsible for assassinating Sadat, the

Algerian civil war, and 9/11) took Ibn Taymiyyah’s anti-Mongol fatwas out

of context to justify their actions. Thus they ignored the underlying issues:

The supposedly “Muslim” Mongols were still massacring Muslims; ...
City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran
Authors: Ebrahimian Mojtaba
Published: October 2020

Setrag Manoukian’s City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz,History, and Poetry combines the application of Michel Foucault’s conceptualizationof the relationship between “knowledge” and “power” with a “historicaland ethnographic investigation” into the sociocultural and political lifeof twentieth-century Shiraz in order to portray a history of Iran and Iraniansthat differs from the usual accounts focusing on Tehran.The book is intended for both Iranian studies scholars and the generalpublic interested in the history of Iran. Avoiding an exclusivist approach thatBook Reviews 107offers either “a national perspective from the capital Tehran” or “a purely localview from a self-contained city,” the book provides, in the author’s words,“the viewpoint of Shiraz as a ‘province’ to highlight how local, national andglobal dimensions are mutually constituted.” It discusses the “question ofknowledge” from the viewpoint of Shiraz because most of the research oncontemporary Iran concentrates on the capital as representative of the wholecountry. In his view, “the after-effect of this concentration on Tehran is an analyticalposture that posits either the state and/or the nation as the startingpoints of the analysis, obliterating the multiplicity of convergences and divergencesfrom which both these constituencies emerge” (p. 3) ...
Islam and Literalism
Authors: Tabrizi Taymaz G.
Published: October 2020

This book surveys the development of literal meaning and literalism in Islamand Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) in particular. The term literal meaningrefers to the meaning that a text is believed to hold “in itself” by virtue of thesound-meaning relationships of words that were “coined” (waḍ‘) at some pointin time. Although Muslim debates on how words were coined (see secondchapter) are quite interesting and at times entertaining, the origin of languagewas secondary to the language’s actual existence. In other words, legal theoristscontended that the establishment of the “sound-meaning connection” wasmore important than who established it and when.Literalism, the other focus of the book, is the view that Islamic law privilegesliteral meaning. As Gleave explains in his first chapter, literalism seesliteral meaning as having an “advantage” over allusion, metaphor (majāz),and other kinds of meaning because it holds a “higher level of epistemologicalsecurity” (p. 1). Detecting the author’s intended meaning, although ideal, isfraught with uncertainties for it involves discerning another person’s intentions.In other words, for legal theorists, the literal can be established througha strict science of language and more importantly functions as a “startingpoint” for understanding texts which gives it a central role in hermeneutics.Even if the literal meaning is shown not to be the author’s intended meaning,it is nevertheless essential for controlling and understanding the linguistic andsemantic parameters of a word and the overall text in question.Gleave makes it clear that his purpose is not to establish whether or notthere is such a thing as literal meaning but instead to demonstrate the importanceof its various concepts and the role they played for Muslim legal theoristsof all sects as understanding how a language system works is key to grasping“God’s meaning when he addresses (khiṭāb) his servants” (p. 35). The firsttwo chapters are useful introductions to concepts of literal meaning in legaltheory. The third chapter, where the author traces one of the early conceptsand uses of literal meaning in Qur’anic exegesis, delineates its early historicalemergence in Islamic thought. This is significant for Islamic law and legaltheory as later Muslim legal hermeneutics had “imprints” of the debates thattook place in scriptural exegesis where literal meaning was often identified(e.g., through establishing what a word “literally” meant by tracing its ...
Jannat
Authors: Gaber Tammy
Published: October 2020

This rare publication on Islamic art and architecture revolves around a clearconceptual idea. A plethora of broad and specific survey texts continue to bepublished; however, very seldom does a thematic book come along with a thoroughlook at one idea. The collection is composed of an introduction, a port-128 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 31:2folio, and ten essays. As with many compilations, the essays are not all of thesame caliber and there are some structural issues. And yet the whole is a refreshinglook at the theme of jannat (paradise) in Islamic art and architecturein the Indian subcontinent. Not only are several historical eras encompassed,but the important connection to contemporary artistic expressions is also made.Mumtaz Currim’s introduction succinctly discusses the themes covered.His excellent summary of the philosophical and cosmological concepts of paradisein relation to the garden is followed by a clear account of the chaharbagh (quad-partite garden) and the Mughal legacy of gardens as microcosmsof paradise. The relationship of water to both gardens and paradise are reflectedupon with respect to engineering and the expressions in textile art. Thesection concludes with a look at paradise in literary works and popular art.The portfolio includes beautiful reproductions of two very differentgroups of calligraphic art. The first collection is from the twelfth- to sixteenthcenturymanuscript Qur’ans in Hyderabad’s Salar Jung Museum. The selectedverses refer to paradise, such as those found in the chapters of al-Fātiḥah (TheOpening), al-Raḥmān (The Merciful), and al-Wāqi‘ah (The Event). The manuscripts’calligraphy, as well as their geometric and arabesque elaborations,are vividly reproduced in the color images. The second collection consists ofcontemporary artworks by Salwa Rasool, who uses canvas, vellum, leather,and other materials to focus on the Names of Allah and Sūrat al-Fātiḥah’s,chapter and religious phrases. With very little accompanying text, aside fromthe notation of details, the reader is introduced to the concept of paradisethrough the sheer beauty of the Qur’an’s textual descriptions and the word’sevocative role. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works revealsthe continuity of the concepts in Islamic cultures ...
Islamic Art and the Museum
Authors: Gaber Tammy
Published: October 2020

This volume contains an impressive number of essays by authors from diversebackgrounds. What the title does not indicate is the reason for this publication– the conference “Layers of Islamic Art and the Museum Context” (held inBerlin during January 13-16, 2010) in cooperation with the Aga Khan Trustfor Culture, the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, and the “Europe in the MiddleEast – The Middle East in Europe” (EUME). The EUME is a Berlin-basedresearch program initiated by the Brandenburg Academy of Science, the FritzThyssen Foundation, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Forum TransregionaleStudien. This publication drew upon the expertise of the Aga KhanNetwork and experts in Germany because it was originally to be a workshopfocused on the reorganization of Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) aswell as a study for Toronto’s Museum of Islamic Art, which will open thisyear and house the Aga Khan’s personal collection.The forum offers a certain diversity of voices regarding issues in general(the display of Islamic art around the world) and specific to the MIA at thePergamon Museum. Its twenty-nine essays are divided into five sections: “In-132 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 31:2troduction,” ...
Tremors
Authors: Rezaeiyazdi Hamid
Published: October 2020

This collection of short stories and novel excerpts is the first of its kind to appearin English. Its twenty-seven stories are intended for the general publicinterested in exploring new horizons in fiction, although the fact that the bookis published by a university press might limit public access.Tremors is a collection of fiction revolving around the ideas of migration,exile, hybrid identities, and coming to terms with these. The book is dividedinto three sections, each of which, according to the editors, revolves around acentral theme. The stories in the first section, “American Homeland,” involvefictional accounts of the challenges of “immigration and assimilation in theUnited States” (p. xii). This, in fact, is not always the case. In Dena Afrasiabi’s“String,” for example, the female narrator, Forugh, is at home in the UnitedStates, for the only challenges facing her are the memory of her dead motherand the shadow of her sorrow-stricken Iranian father lurking in the background.Similarly, in Salar Abdoh’s “Fixer Karim,” it is the immigrant HeavyK who continues to ease past assimilation barriers in the United States, to theastonishment of the well-established Iranian-American narrator, so much sothat the story ends with Heavy K appearing as the lead singer in a countryband. In a number of stories, (e.g., Taha Ebrahimi’s “Family Trouble” or J.Kevin Shushtari’s “The Sweet Dry Fruit of the Lotus Tree”), in fact, the narrator’sfamily is well established and feels at home, sometimes with an Americanparent, until ghosts or guests from Iran upset the peace.The second section, “Iran, Land of Resilience,” has been so named becausethe setting of these stories is Iran, although not all of them entertainsuch a view about the land. One example is the excerpt from Zohreh Ghahremani’sSky of Red Poppies, in which the dark days of oppression under the ...
Islam and the Challenge of Civilization
Authors: Rufai Saheed Ahmad
Published: October 2020

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Islam and the Challenge of Civilization offers newperspectives on and fresh associations among historical events in a way thatdraws the curtain and adjusts the view among Muslim public intellectuals.Situated within the broad scholarship of Islamic thought, it engages criticallyand creatively with various doctrinal issues that are being manipulated bysome Muslim opinion leaders to support their own bellicose positions. Theauthor reveals the linkages between Islam and other revealed faiths, especiallyduring the former’s “golden age,” which witnessed productive encounters betweentheologians and philosophers of diverse religious orientations.The book comprises six chapters in addition to a prologue, an epilogue,notes, and two appendices. In his prologue, the author argues that “violenceproduced by belief is not unique to Islam but finds virulent expression evenamong beliefs issuing from the Indian subcontinent” (p. viii) and emphasizesthe need for a “check on violence via the return to context” (p. ix). He seeksto awaken Muslims “to the fact that times have changed” (p. x) and that “theworld is a different place” (p. x), which is why “when it comes to religiousidentity” (p. x), Islam cannot continue to “perceive Christianity as if it werestill its medieval antagonist, despite modern notions of nations and peoplesthat have circumscribed the religion” (p. x). The following statement sums upthe author’s thesis: “In short, if Islam is to be cured of its current affliction, itmust get to that post-Islamic, post-religious place where Christianity and Judaismhave managed to arrive” (p. x). This sounds interesting and prompts ameticulous reader to watch out for an elaboration thereof. Unfortunately, suchan elaboration never appears ...
Global Salafism
Authors: Poljarevic Emin
Published: October 2020

Roel Meijer’s edited Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, oneof the first collected works to broadly analyze contemporary Salafism as aglobal religious movement for English-speaking audiences, presents thismovement as a string of methods for approaching Islam’s canonical sources.Its many methodological ambiguities and tactical classifications enable it toincorporate a variety of local and international religious groups: those that rejectpolitical participation (e.g., “Scholastic Salafis”), embrace their society’sestablished political rules (e.g., “Sahwah Movement”), and seek radical transformationoften through violent means (e.g., “al-Qaeda”). In part, Salafismsymbolizes a varied scholarly attempt to disentangle long-simmering questionsabout conservative forms of Muslim activism, most of which concernthe ethics of how Muslims are to conduct their lives, perceive their individualand group identities, and understand the pious order of political and socialarrangements.The volume has two primary goals: (1) to reveal the diversity among themovement’s various groups and streams and (2) to reclaim the study ofSalafism from the field of security studies, which has, since 2001, influencedmuch of our overall understanding of this rather new religious phenomenon.The contributors challenge the widespread notion of Salafism as an exclusivelyviolent and intransigent Islamic movement by addressing the tensionsbetween basic Salafi doctrines (e.g., scriptural literalism, a sharp distinctionbetween in- and outsiders, and an active program for individual and communalreform), its supposed attraction to growing numbers of Muslims, and its intrinsiclinks to politics as well as to violence. The contributors argue that thesetensions have produced a whole range of consequences for primarily Muslim ...
Incredible Ottoman Projects
Authors: Gaber Tammy
Published: October 2020

When the term Ottoman architecture is used, the immediate image that comesto mind is that of the multitudes of mosque and religious buildings in Turkeyand the Ottoman Empire. One with a more in-depth knowledge of this fieldmay think of the prolific architect Sinan (d. 1588) and his hundreds of purpose-built works. However, this is not another book on Ottoman mosquesand pious foundations, but rather a focused collection of the empire’s oftenoverlookedcivic works, some of which demonstrate engineering innovationsin design. The empire’s geographical proximity to Europe gradually causedit to look westward for aspiration and engendered a palpable reflection ofEuropean influence in those of its architectural and infrastructure designsthat were the result of commissioning European experts to keep Istanbul andthe empire abreast of the latest innovations.This book is divided into thirty-five short sections, ranging from two tofourteen pages each, that consider particular urban, architecture, or infrastructuralinitiatives. Each section bears the name of the project in question, whichis amply illustrated with historical drawings (i.e., maps, urban plans, perspectivesrendered in watercolor, sections, and structural details), historical photographs,and relevant textual documents. However, almost no attempt hasbeen made to connect them to each other or to a larger thesis. And despite theintroduction’s portrayal of a wealthy, powerful, and vast empire with imperialinvestment in built innovations to improve the city, no indication is given asto the variety and breadth of the projects to be covered.An in-depth history of each one’s initiation is outlined, often revolvingaround an enlightened Ottoman sultan or an equally enlightened and forwardthinkingEuropean architect, urban planner, or engineer with occasional internationalbacking. The majority of these projects were never completed due tosuch international crises as war, natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes), the lack ...
Epistemological Integration
Authors: Delgado Jibreel
Published: October 2020

Nancy Roberts’ translation of Fathi Malkawi’s most recent study representsthe latest addition to the corpus of literature dealing with the Islamization ofKnowledge project. The author’s core argument is that a truly Islamic approachto the study of any phenomenon, whether biological, physical, or social,is definitively characterized by its inherent ability to incorporate both theadvances made in scientific theory as well as those made in applied scienceby any person. However, there is one caveat: these advances cannot befounded upon any underlying principles that contradict the only sources ofknowledge available to humanity: divine revelation and physical, psychological,and social reality. This book, which falls squarely within the branches ofepistemology that deal with education theory and knowledge assessment,strives to go beyond mere academic discussion into practical application forall major fields of scientific inquiry. It is primarily addressed to Muslim scientistsand educators, regardless of discipline, who seek a coherent set of principlesand a clearly delineated foundational worldview, inspired by the Qur’anand Sunnah, from which to ignite intellectual and material progress withincontemporary Muslim society.One of the work’s most salient features is its focus on training via exercises,activities, and problems to be dealt with in training seminars. The appendixprovides clear instructions on organizing such events in order to teach themethodology of epistemological integration as explained by Malkawi. Onealso finds charts and diagrams that present the relationships between the sourcesof knowledge and the means of interpreting this knowledge, as well as the connectionsamong epistemology, methodology, and worldview interspersedthroughout the text and then presented again at the end for convenience.The first chapter, “Concepts of Relevance to Epistemological Integration,”presents the concept of tawḥīd, God’s singular uniqueness as defined in the
The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the world
Authors: Sellam Amar
Published: October 2020

With painstaking effort and much dedication invested in this groundbreakingwork, John Andrew Morrow will surely manage to attract the attention of Islamicstudies students and specialists. Not only is the topic novel, but surelythe approach and method are new as well. Indeed, The Covenants of theProphet Muhammad with the Christians of the World is a genuine call for reconsideringthe relationship among the three revealed Abrahamic faiths, which is often viewed by some quarters with vested interests through the foggy lensesof suspicion and animosity, if not of utter aggressive hostility, especially thesedays. The author’s arguments stem from various perspectives ranging fromIslamic jurisprudence to political science, economics, sociology, ethics, andleadership studies. He defends the covenants written to various groups ofChristians, be they living inside the Arabian Peninsula (the Monks of Sinai,the Christians of Najran), Persia, or the world at large, as being genuine documentsemanating from Prophet Muhammad himself, who assumed the responsibilityof protecting these groups and pledged that his followers woulddo so until the last day: “This must not be violated or altered until the hour[of the Resurrection] and the end of the world” (p. 236) ...
Islamism in the Post-Arab Spring world
Authors: Kırkpınar Büşra
Published: October 2020

Istanbul Think-House (IDE), a self-supported independent research center thatpromotes the free circulation of ideas, analyzed “Islamism in the Post-ArabSpring World” during its October 24-26, 2014, international conference. IstanbulUniversity’s Political Science Faculty Alumni Association and the Associationfor Human Rights and Solidarity with the Oppressed (MAZLUMDER)hosted the event on their premises.In his opening remarks on Friday morning, conference co-chair and IDE’sgeneral coordinator Halil Ibrahim Yenigun (Istanbul Commerce University)introduced IDE and explained its vision of (1) producing and circulating ideaswithout depending on big capital and political power centers and (2) concentratingsolely on the good of humanity, especially that of the subaltern. IDE isthe outgrowth of national conferences on Islamism held during 2012-13, thefirst event of which had sparked an almost year-long debate in Turkey aboutthe revival of Islamism.The morning panel, “New Islamisms,” dealt with with important theoreticalarguments. Gökhan Sümer (University of Essex) began with a central debateon how to reconcile the constitutional system and the Shari‘ah bybroaching such questions as to whether democratic constitutions ensuring thebasic rights and freedoms could have been passed after the Arab Spring andwhat is Islam’s normative status in these new constitutions. He said that such ...
What’s in a Movement? Competing Narratives on Transnational Islam
Authors: Ugur Etga
Published: October 2020

Books Reviewed: M. Hakan Yavuz, Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: TheGülen Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Joshua D. Hendrick,Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World(New York: New York University Press, 2013); Sophia Pandya and NancyGallagher, eds., The Gülen Hizmet Movement and Its Transnational Activities:Case Studies of Altruistic Activism in Contemporary Islam (Boca Raton, FL:BrownWalker Press, 2012).What makes the ideas of an Islamic scholar from the heartland of eastern Anatoliarelevant to more than 150 countries across the world? To some, it is theauthenticity, dedication, activism, sincerity, and solidarity of the participantsin what Fethullah Gülen, the inspiring figure behind the movement, has calledthe “volunteers movement” or simply hizmet (service). This global movementprovides opportunities for education, promotes intercultural dialogue, supportsdemocratization and human rights, and connects businesses and activists forcommunity partnership. To others, there is something sinister, something morethan meets the eye, and hence it is a “project” with ulterior motives rangingfrom creating an Islamic state to serving the interests of Israel, the UnitedStates, and the Vatican. When there is such disagreement, a social theory perspectivebecomes critical to sorting out all of these competing and conflictingexplanations. The three books under review provide various kaleidoscopes tomake sense of such convoluted interpretations and raise interesting questionsfor future work in the burgeoning literature.1The movement began as one of the many Islamic communities inTurkey’s diverse informal religious sector, which has traditionally offered aprivate alternative to the official Islam represented by the Diyanet (TurkishDirectorate of Religious Affairs). By the mid-1990s, however, it had distinguisheditself from most of the rest through its words and deeds. This is thestory of an enigmatic “preacher” who led a core group of seminary disciples ...
Striving in the Path of God
Authors: Hamid Sadek
Published: October 2020

The term jihad is perhaps the most contentious Arabic word to enter the Englishlanguage in recent decades. In public discourse it has become shorthandfor “holy war” and synonymous with violent Muslim extremism. This scholarlyexamination of jihad and martyrdom by Asma Afsaruddin, a professorof Islamic studies at Indiana University, carefully disentangles their multivalentmeanings within Islamic scholarship from early Muslim history up tothe present day. It also challenges the assertions of those who focus only uponmartial connotations. Instead, she argues that “conceptualizations of jihad asprimarily armed combat and of shahada as primarily military martyrdomare relatively late and contested ones and deviate considerably from theQur’anic significations of these terms” (p. 5). In this substantial, dense text,comprising nine chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion, shedemonstrates an impressive command of materials by skillfully engaging arepresentative range of Qur’anic exegetical works, Prophetic sayings, andfaḍā’il literature.The first chapter is prefaced with a detailed discussion of the first term’setymological origin and semantic usage. Rooting her analysis in the Qur’an,she points out that its polyvalent nature cannot be reduced only to a combative ...
Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction
Authors: Alavi Samad
Published: October 2020

For at least the past several decades, Persian literary scholarship has drawnits conceptual framework largely from the social sciences. Despite severalnoteworthy exceptions, a tendency to read Persian literature for its sociopoliticalcontent still guides the way scholars write about and teach the fieldtoday. Indeed, a brief survey of course syllabi with “Persian literature” in theirtitles would no doubt reveal that instructors (the present writer included) byand large introduce writers and their works based on non-literary socio-historicaldevelopments, either arranging texts chronologically by their years ofproduction or presenting them (still usually chronologically) as reflections ofthe historical events, social movements, and ideological currents that shapedthe societies from which those texts arose.Mehdi Khorrami’s Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction:Who Writes Iran? challenges this trend, arguing that we do a great disserviceto both individual texts and literary studies as a discipline when weconsider non-literary factors as the primary criteria by which to analyze andschematize literary works. Instead, while acknowledging the importance ofsocial, historical, and ideological contexts, in other words the world outsidethe text, Khorrami’s study of contemporary Persian fiction contends that wemust scrutinize the world inside the texts – their aesthetic, linguistic, and formaldevices and concepts – to develop a comprehensive view of literature’shistorical evolution.The work under review argues that modernist Persian fiction evolves froma counter-discursive to a non-discursive position vis-à-vis official discoursesin Iran, primarily under the Islamic Republic. The author’s conception of discursivityrelates directly to his understanding of the term modernist. The single ...
Face Politics
Authors: Bullock Kathy
Published: October 2020

Over the last decade, public discourse in Europe and North America has beenoverwhelmingly in favor of banning the face veil (niqab). Politicians like JackStraw in the UK or John Charest in Québec have commented on its putativehindrance to community integration due to its covering of the face. So a bookentitled Face Politics would seem to offer some insights into this anti-niqabdynamic. A quick perusal of the index for “niqab,” “Islam,” and “Muslimwomen,” however, comes up unexpectedly empty. What, then, is “face politics” and how can an academic discussion about the “face” not mention niqab, arguablyone of the most burning issues of “face politics” this century?The book is a profound, intellectually challenging, sometimes dense, andyet empathetic and beautifully written exploration of how contemporary westernpolitics is predicated around individuality and the separatedness of being,signified by the idea of the face as a “window onto the [individual’s] soul” (p.165). Because she believes that “a politics that makes the face is a politics thatproduces the person as an object” (p.7), the author wishes to propose a differentconcept of the face, that of a mask hiding our inseparable connectedness, andconcludes that such an alternative would lead to a profoundly different, andbetter, political society, one symbolized by the concept of the tango. Indeed,the tagline on the dedication page is “If the face is a politics, dismantling theface is also a politics,” from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalystFélix Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia ...
The Lonely War
Authors: Elahi Babak
Published: October 2020

Nazila Fathi’s The Lonely War joins a number of similar journalist memoirsby Iranian or Iranian émigrés, including Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds(Harper Collins: 2010), Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (Public Affairs: 2014), andMaziar Bahari’s Then They Came for Me (Random House: 2011), which wasrecently reissued as Rosewater and adapted into a film by The Daily Show’sJon Stewart. Fathi and Bahari mostly grew up in Iran, whereas Azadeh Moaveni and Roya Hakakian mostly grew up in the United States. Thus theyoffer a different sort of history, one that is less inclined toward nostalgia or narrativesof leaving and return.As a proverbial first draft of history, Fathi’s memoir appeals to a wide audienceinterested in current affairs, but also to policy wonks in both the mediaand politics. Fellow journalists seem captivated by such stories, particularlywhen they involve the author’s attempts to analyze civil society in the IslamicRepublic. Fathi’s work will also appeal to Iranians in the diaspora, others interestedin the Shi‘ah polity’s internal problems, and those concerned with questionsof social class in addition to gender in the Islamic Republic ...
Architecture, Culture, Spirituality 7
Authors: Gaber Tammy
Published: October 2020

Architecture, Culture, Spirituality (ACS) members Julio Bermudez (CatholicUniversity of America, Washington DC), Norman Crowe (Professor Emeritus,Notre Dame School of Architecture), and Paul Tesar (North Carolina State University)co-chaired and organized the 2015 ACS symposium, which explorednature and the otherwise ordinary that form the spiritual foundations of architectureand culture. The symposium was held at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, NM,from June 18-21. Past ACS symposia have focused on various themes revolvingaround the ideas of creating and understanding sacred places.This year’s focus allowed researchers to discuss and critique nature’s importantrole and unraveling what has become “ordinary” as captured by Jalalal-Din Rumi’s quote: “Things are such, that someone lifting a cup, or watching the rain, petting a dog or singing, just singing – could be doing as much forthis universe as anyone.” Of the fifty abstracts submitted, twenty-three madeit through the blind peer-review process for presentation. Intentionally, ACSsymposia have remained small in order to allow the formation of an intimatecommunity of presenters, keynote speakers, and a small number of non-presentingattendees ...
In Celebration of the Life of Shaykh Taha Jabir al-‘Alwani
Authors: Family IIIT
Published: October 2020

Shaykh Taha Jabir al-‘Alwani – professor of jurisprudence (fiqh)and the principles of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh); president of theSchool of Islamic and Social Sciences (SISS), which later becamethe Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS); presidentof the Fiqh Council of North America, holder of the Imam Al-Shafi‘i Chair in Islamic Legal Theory at Corboda University;founding member and president of the International Institute of IslamicThought (IIIT); founder-member of the Council of the MuslimWorld League in Makkah; member of the Organization ofIslamic Cooperation’s Islamic Fiqh Academy in Jeddah; prolificwriter; and world renowned Islamic scholar and expert in Islamiclegal theory, jurisprudence, the principles of jurisprudence, Qur’anicsciences, and general Islamic thought – passed away on March 4,2016, at Ireland’s Shannon Airport while stopping over on his wayfrom Cairo to Washington, DC.An intellectual giant, friend, father, husband, and teacher, heleaves an immense void in the lives of many people. The Muslimworld mourns his loss and is the poorer for it.Shaykh Taha spent his life serving humanity and the truth,working tirelessly not only to elucidate the principles and methodologyof Islamic jurisprudence, but also to remove many of themyths and prejudices that had, over time, become entwined withMuslim cultural traditions and gained a strong foothold in the Muslimmind.Shaykh Taha always took account of Islam as it is being practisedin the modern world. For example, his seminal work Apostasyin Islam (2011), a masterful example of historical and scriptural ...
Reform of Education in Muslim Societies
Authors: Pervez Saulat
Published: October 2020

The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), in partnership with IstanbulUniversity’s Faculty of Theology, organized the Reform of Educationin Muslim Societies conference on March 18-19, 2016, in Istanbul, Turkey.The conference opened with memorial lectures by Hisham Altalib (vice president,IIIT) and Fathi Malkawi (regional director, Arab World) for Jamal Barzinji(d. 2015) and Shaykh Taha Jabir Al-Alwani (d. 2016), respectively. Thissession was moderated by Yaqub Mirza (president and CEO, Sterling ManagementGroup, Inc.).Session I: Contemporary Ethics of IslamZiauddin Sardar (chair, Muslim Institute, London) began his “Education Reform:From Islamisation of Knowledge to Integration of Knowledge” by relayingthree remarks from the imprisoned Anwar Ibrahim, a main force behindthe education reform project: (1) the crisis of education is universal, (2) Muslimsshould confidently engage with the West on equal terms, and (3) the discussionof reforming education needs to involve all of society. The crux of hispaper was the shift from the “Islamization of Knowledge” to the “Integrationof Knowledge.” Contending that western disciplines are inherently biased towardwestern values and cultures because they are socially constructed and reflecttheir originators’ worldview, he said that the best way to progress is tolaunch “a multigenerational project” to integrate the best of both cultures.Abdelwahab El-Affendi (head, Political Science Department, Doha Institutefor Graduate Studies, Qatar) spoke on the “Obstacles Facing EducationReform.” He pointed out that Muslims send their children to very expensiveinternational schools that conduct their classes in English and teach westernvalues. We cannot teach “our children texts in English and French and hope[that] someday they will produce material in Arabic,” he proclaimed.Jeremy Henzell-Thomas (Centre of Islamic Studies, Cambridge University)discussed his “Towards an Expanded Glossary of Key Terms.” Citingthe need for a common understanding of modern terms and concepts, he remarkedthat our recognition of various types of intelligences and ways of ...
The Holy City of Medina
Authors: Aslan Rose
Published: October 2020

In The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia, HarryMunt offers a much-needed look at the history of Madinah through scholars’writing about its significance and the construction of its sanctity. By examiningthe city’s history through a spatial lens, Munt presents a new perspective on134 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3the history of a city that has been written about for more than a millennium.While Madinah has served as a catalyst of religious formation, identity, andpractice, until now it has not been studied as a sanctified city (ḥaram) in andof itself.As the city that welcomed Makkah’s Muslim refugees, Madinah has arich and complicated history. In addition, it is a sacred city. While modernMuslims primarily view it as sacred because of the presence of the Prophet’sgrave, the author returns to early Islamic sources to understand how earlyMuslim scholars between the seventh to the ninth centuries viewed the cityand how it became sanctified. He argues against the modern normative Islamicviewpoint that the city was immediately viewed as sacred and posits that ittook several centuries for the normative viewpoint to consolidate into a popularnarrative ...
ISIS and Islam
Authors: Willoughby Jay
Published: October 2020

On May 3, 2016, at the International Institute of Islamic Thought’s headquartersin Herndon, VA, Asaad Al-Saleh (Indiana University; scholar-in-residence,IIIT) spoke on “ISIS and Islam: How a Terrorist's Ideology TwistsReligion.” He began by asking a question – Is ISIS Islamic or not? – and thenproceeded to give a “simple point of view.” He first drew a distinction between“Islam” and “Muslim,” which he said is a very problematic thing to do.“Islam” is the text (i.e., the Qur’an and the Hadith literature). He contendedthat the battle with ISIS is mainly textual, for the Qur’an is a “textual container.”Thus, anything beyond the Qur’an and Hadith texts cannot be consideredpurely Islamic, but only a human interpretation of the text. Forexample, if we take history, then “Islamic history” is a highly misrepresentedlabel, for it is only “Muslims” who are participating in “history.” This historicalerror dates from the third Islamic century, with the rise of the “Islamicsciences.”As ISIS is not textually Islamic, not a revealed entity from the heavenof Islam, it cannot be labeled “Islamic” without violating the boundaries ofthe Qur’an and Hadith. On the second level, if ISIS claims to be a Muslimbody interpreting Islam, then its members are not following the agreed-uponrules of interpretation. For example, their selective interoperations not onlywork against the majority of Muslims, including the scholars of Islam, butthey are also being labeled as “deviant” even by other terrorist groups, suchas al-Qaeda ...
The Transnational Mosque
Authors: Gaber Tammy
Published: October 2020

This catchy title, The Transnational Mosque, is timely and implies an analysisof global Islam and the multiplicities of mosque construction today. The premisepromises to contribute to the scholarship on Islamic architecture, and yetthere are some issues with the argument’s structure and even greater ones withthe analytical depth with respect to architecture.

The book’s structure highlights the attempt to separate itself and “buildsupon” (p. 7) established texts on the subject of contemporary Islamic architecture.However, its relatively small format, dense with text, is populatedsparely with uneven visual representation. The photographs vary in qualityand vantage, and not all of the mosques discussed have images and architecturaldrawings – serious omissions in a field that is so visual, systematic comparativeanalysis requires analogous efforts with visual representation for theargument to sustain itself. The book contains an introduction; one chaptereach on Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE);and an epilogue that serves as a conclusion. But this four-fold argument,which focuses on the patron countries, is flawed because it inherently setsup a hierarchy of influence that situates equally the relatively minimal worksof the UAE with the far-reaching impact of Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.It also ignores the “transnational” quality of those mosques not patronizedby any of them.The introduction, “Agency of History: The Symbolic Potential for theTransnational Mosque,” begins with an italicized brief first-person narrativethat describes Beirut’s Muhammad al-Amin Mosque followed by a long accountof patronage and political climate. Rizvi promises an interdisciplinaryapproach with field work, architecture and photo documentation, interviewswith architects and patrons in a “study [that] interrogates multiple agents anddiverse agendas behind the construction of transnational mosques” (p. 5). Shedefines “trans” as “beyond and across time of history and spaces of nations,”but nevertheless frames the book in terms of nations ...
Polygyny
Authors: Abdullah Keilani
Published: October 2020

Polygyny is titled precisely to reflect the form of plural marriage practiced byMuslims: one husband with up to four wives, as described in Q. 4:3. DebraMajeed employs the term living polygyny to describe the experiences of thoseinvolved in such marriages: men with multiple wives, the first or subsequentwives, those married both civilly and religiously, those only religiously marriedin a nikāḥ (Islamic marriage contract) ceremony, publically recognizedmarriages, closeted polygynous marriages not publically recognized, and“back door” marriages in which at least one wife is unknown to the other(s).The participants discussed in this book presently live in or have been part ofa polygynous marriage.Polygyny is a qualitative ethnography that utilizes womanist theoreticalapproaches through dialogical performance, an approach in which interviewdata are dialogues performed through “imaginary interplay” (p. 31) acrossparticipant responses. It also constructs a rich and comprehensive presentationof her findings in the form of the participants’ voices as well as triangulatesdata by using focus groups, surveys, and interviews. However, the methodsrequire greater detail to specify how the surveys were used. Majeed’s paradigmis rooted in gender justice, which acknowledges the intersectionality ofall social statuses held by women in these cases: religion, race, gender, maritalstatus, motherhood, age, class, and ability. She asserts that Muslim womanismis not only a lens for seeing the world, but also a “way of knowing ...
The (Un)Substantiated in Dan Diner’s Interpretations of the Islamic World’s “Backwardness”
Authors: Karić Enes
Published: October 2020

The author develops a dialogue with thoughts and views of DanDiner expressed in his book Lost in the Sacred (originally publishedin German as Versiegelte Zeit). This essay focuses on – and disputes– Diner’s contentions that the Arab and Muslim/Islamic worlds arebackward due to their resistance to such western concepts asdemocracy, human rights, and social and educational institutions,not to mention the Arabic alphabet and language and the Qur ’an(e.g., printing the text on a printing press, variant readings, and asan obstacle to progress) themselves.
Words of Power: Ḥurūfī Teachings between Shi‘ism and Sufism in Medieval Islam
Authors: Rizvi Sajjad
Published: October 2020

The study of Islamic intellectual history, while existing in pockets of scholarshipbefore, has increasingly become a dominant aspect of the study of Islam.We have moved from some piecemeal approaches to the classical period to amore carefully nuanced and thick understanding of the middle period, thatcritical time from the wane of the Abbasids to the rise of the Gunpowder Empires.In particular, the “Chicago school” has expended a great deal of effortin making sense of the critical messianic moment from around the time ofTimur (1336-1405), the “lord of the junction,” to the “messianic sovereigns”of the Timurid and later Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.The book under review concerns one of the key intellectual developmentsof that period, namely, esoteric political theology and lettrism (‘ilm al-ḥurūf),which later informed similar developments in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It gives us one, albeit marginal and rather antinomian, glimpse intothe importance of the esoteric and occult learning that was a critical elementof the scholarly underground even among elites throughout the middle andearly modern periods in the world of Islam. Mir-Kasimov’s magisterial andhighly textual study of Fazlallah Astarabadi (d. 1394) and his Hurufiyyahmovement, neither mainstream Shi‘i nor Alid-loyalist Sufis nor even completeesotericists beyond the pale of Islam, contributes to the processes by whichelite discourses on hermeneutics of reading the word and the world filteredinto more subaltern and vernacular understandings of the cosmos and thehuman within and the divine both within and without ...
Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism
Authors: Newlon Brendan
Published: October 2020

Tristan James Mabry’s research investigates whether Muslim populationsare exceptionally resistant to ethnonationalism, which he assumes to be moreconducive to a liberal democratic form of government than any concept ofcommunity defined in terms of a shared religion. He concludes that Muslimsare not immune to it, and that the determining factor in whether a Muslimcommunity will organize itself according to ethnonationalism instead of Islamism– Mabry apparently considers these the only modes worth mentioning– is whether they develop a print culture in their local vernacular.Ultimately, the author concludes that nationalism founded upon ethnic solidarityis inherently superior to alternative sociopolitical models, and thereforeadvocates promoting local ethnonationalisms as a strategy to preventMuslims from organizing themselves in terms of shared religious identity(p. 202) ...
For the good of the Nation
Authors: Warren David H.
Published: October 2020

This article analyzes Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi’s (d. 1873) idea of Egyptiannationhood (al-ummah al-miṣriyyah) and key attendant concepts,such as civilization (tamaddun), progress (taqaddum),homeland (waṭan), and citizen (waṭanī). I revisit the intellectualorigins of his thought to move our understanding of his intellectualproduction beyond simply the influence of the European Enlightenment.Instead, I locate al-Tahtawi’s work as part of a conversationinternal to the debates of the Islamic tradition, which stretchesacross centuries and was never meant to finish.Consequently, I contextualize his conceptualization of nationhoodas an attempt to re-imagine a role for the Muslim community inIslamic political life – from which it had long been excluded –and ground Muslim political theory and practice within a normativeIslamic framework. Furthermore, I contend that al-Tahtawi’scontributions to both the conversations of his immediate contextand those of his tradition were underpinned by a shift in his generation’shorizon of expectations, namely, the shared assumptionsthrough which they received the conversations of their tradition.Underpinning this shift was the redefinition of time as progress,specifically the progress of the nation. If we conceptualize the Islamic tradition as a framework for inquiry rather than as a set ofdoctrines, then we should recognize that al-Tahtawi and his peers’new concern for the futurity of the nation represented a key additionto this framework.
An Analysis of Islamophobia and the Anti-Islam Discourse
Authors: Gada Mohd Yaseen
Published: October 2020

In the recent past, fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims inthe West have attracted increasing scholarly interest, a development that iscertainly commendable. Some important works have delved deeply intothe Western imagination and stereotyping of Islam and Muslims, amongthem John Victor Tolan’s Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (1996)and Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002),Fredrick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in WesternThought (2008), Matthew Dimmock’s Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammadin Early Modern English Culture (2013),1 and Sophia Rose Arjana’sMuslims in the Western Imagination (2015) ...