Bücher der Reihe Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

Exploring the increasing impact of the Internet on Muslims around the world, this book sheds new light on the nature of contemporary Islamic discourse, identity, and community.The Internet has profoundly shaped how both Muslims and non-Muslims perceive Islam and how Islamic societies and networks are evolving and shifting in the twenty-first century, says Gary Bunt. While Islamic society has deep historical patterns of global exchange, the Internet has transformed how many Muslims practice the duties and rituals of Islam. A place of religious instruction may exist solely in the virtual world, for example, or a community may gather only online. Drawing on more than a decade of online research, Bunt shows how social-networking sites, blogs, and other "e;cyber-Islamic environments"e; have exposed Muslims to new influences outside the traditional spheres of Islamic knowledge and authority. Furthermore, the Internet has dramatically influenced forms of Islamic activism and radicalization, including jihad-oriented campaigns by networks such as al-Qaeda. By surveying the broad spectrum of approaches used to present dimensions of Islamic social, spiritual, and political life on the Internet, iMuslims encourages diverse understandings of online Islam and of Islam generally.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazl, a Muslim jurist-theologian and polymath who lived from the mid-eleventh to the early twelfth century in present-day Iran, is a figure equivalent in stature to Maimonides in Judaism and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity. He is best known for his work in philosophy, ethics, law, and mysticism. In an engaged re-reading of the ideas of this preeminent Muslim thinker, Ebrahim Moosa argues that Ghazl's work has lasting relevance today as a model for a critical encounter with the Muslim intellectual tradition in a modern and postmodern context. Moosa employs the theme of the threshold, or dihliz, the space from which Ghazl himself engaged the different currents of thought in his day, and proposes that contemporary Muslims who wish to place their own traditions in conversation with modern traditions consider the same vantage point. Moosa argues that by incorporating elements of Islamic theology, neoplatonic mysticism, and Aristotelian philosophy, Ghazl's work epitomizes the idea that the answers to life's complex realities do not reside in a single culture or intellectual tradition. Ghazl's emphasis on poiesis--creativity, imagination, and freedom of thought--provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectual renewal among Muslims, Moosa argues. Such a creative and critical inheritance, he concludes, ought to be heeded by those who seek to cultivate Muslim intellectual traditions in today's tumultuous world.

Shows how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life.

Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the centre is the influential Sufi scholar Shaykh Ali Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples.

The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period.

Gary R. Bunt is a twenty-year pioneer in the study of cyber-Islamic environments (CIEs). In this new book, he explores the diverse and surprising ways digital technology is shaping how Muslims across vast territories relate to religious authorities in fulfilling spiritual, mystical, and legalistic agendas.

Makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam - indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions.

The two Muslim poets featured in Scott Kugle's comparative study lived separate lives during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the Deccan region of southern India. Here, they meet in the realm of literary imagination, illuminating the complexity of gender, sexuality, and religious practice in South Asian Islamic culture.

Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place.

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi ism"

Positioned at the crossroads of the maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Yemeni port of Aden grew to be one of the medieval world's greatest commercial hubs. Roxani Eleni Margariti examines the ways in which physical space and urban institutions developed to serve and harness the commercial potential presented by the city's strategic location.

Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan regions of Tajikistan and Pakistan, as well as in Europe, this investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the development of their expansive twenty-first-century global structures.

Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, this title demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power.

Presents an exploration of Iranian literature and society. This book warns against the rise of what the author calls the 'New Orientalist narrative', which thrives on stereotype and prejudice and is often tied to geopolitical conflict rather than an understanding of Iran.

Scholars, saints, and the state.

Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal's ground breaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought.

This volume selects major moments and key players from the seventh century to the twenty-first that have defined Muslim networks as the building blocks for Islamic identity and social cohesion. The essays provide a long view of Muslim networks, correcting both scholarly omission and political sloganeering.