Bücher der Reihe Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

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.

Omar ibn Said (1770?1863) was a Muslim scholar from West Africa who spent more than fifty years enslaved in the North Carolina household of James Owen, brother of Governor John Owen. In 1831 Omar composed a brief autobiography, the only known narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in North America, and he became famous for his Arabic writings. His enslavers also provided him with an Arabic Bible and claimed Omar as a convert to Christianity, prompting wonder and speculation among amateur scholars of Islam, white slave owners, and missionaries. But these self-proclaimed experts were unable or unwilling to understand Omar's writings, and his voice was suppressed for two centuries.Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst here weave fresh and accurate translations of Omar's eighteen surviving writings, for the first time identifying his quotations from Islamic theological texts, correcting many distortions, and providing the fullest possible account of his life and significance. Placing Omar at the center of a broader network of the era's literary and religious thought, Lo and Ernst restore Omar's voice, his sophisticated engagement with Islamic and Christian theologies, his Arabic skills, and his extraordinary efforts to express himself and exert agency despite his enslavement.

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 The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life.

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.

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.

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.

Analysing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority.

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the centre of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population.

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.

Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks.

Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks.

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.

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

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.

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

Traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments. The author explores the art and writings of major artists, men and women, ranging from the late colonial period to the era of independence and beyond.

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.

Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi'is and their religious competitors in this "Land of the Pure".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scholars, saints, and the state.