Islam

Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.

Both as a religion and as a civilisation, Islam is currently beset by a cacophony and a worrying erosion of plurality by its apologists as well as its detractors. The “clash of ignorances” is much more real than the so-called “clash of civilisations”.

At the beginning of the eleventh century, the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate coincided with political fragmentation. It was in this unusual context, soon to be exacerbated by Christian incursions from the north and Berber incursions from the south, that this part of the Muslim world experienced a flourishing culture.

The Association of Algerian Ulema played an important role in the process of decolonisation. Its goal: making Algeria into a Muslim society.

Indonesia is known to be the most-populated Muslim-majority country in the world. With an interdisciplinary perspective, Delphine Allès’ book highlights the roots and continuities of the influence of Islam in political and foreign policy developments of contemporary Indonesia.

What can economics teach us about belief systems? As an institution, religion has implications for education, social cohesion, and politics, all of which are linked to economic growth and inequality. Sriya Iyer uses the tools of economics in an expansive study of one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world— India.

Was nation-building in Africa destined to fail? The question is particularly important for one of the most fragile states in the world—Sudan. Set in a period that straddles the late colonial and early independence era, Alden Young’s book addresses the auspices of postcolonial nation-building.

How to live one’s Muslim faith in a context of growing Islamophobia? John O’Brien explores the multiple ways in which young American Muslims manage to reconcile their beliefs with their national belonging.

When Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was published in 1988, the book both garnered praise and stirred a political controversy. Yet it did not invent anything as it relied on the very well documented ‘Satanic Verses incident’. Addressing this infamous historical episode, Shahab Ahmed’s work investigates how different interpretive methodologies can quarrel over what constitutes truth and how to make a truth-claim.

Intellectual historian Maurice Samuels offers a timely corrective to simplistic renderings of French universalism showing that, over the years, it has been far more nuanced and far less anti-particularistic than usually argued. However, studying Jews as the paradigmatic minority, he tends to forget the growing focus on Muslims in contemporary conversations.

The texts are clear: far from proscribing joking and joviality, Muslim culture gives significant place to laughter, whether by madmen, social parasites, and Bedouins or by the two main figures of authority, the caliph and the Prophet themselves.

Through a rich ethnography of three shariʽa councils, American anthropologist John Bowen shows convincingly that in the UK, the real debate about Islam is not between non-Muslims and Muslims, but among Muslims themselves.

In a recent book, Harvard Professor of Law Intisar Rabb focuses on what she terms the ‘doubt canon’ in Islamic law, which instructs jurists to avoid criminal punishments in cases of doubt. In rediscovering the centrality of this concept, Rabb shines a light on an aspect of Islamic law that is too often ignored today.

Describing how the Qur’anic school creates taalibes through the embodiment of knowledge, Ware offers a sharply revisionist history not only of West African Islamic education, but of the place of West Africans in the history of the Muslim world in general.

In this monumental work, three historians study the political, military, cultural and economic interactions between Europe and the Muslim world over the past millennium and a half. One of the original sides to their approach is that they don’t confine themselves to the religious divide, which enables them to refute the theory of an inevitable clash between the European and Arab Muslim worlds.

In Florence and Baghdad, Hans Belting writes a new history of the human gaze based on its symbolic value in relation to the image. His starting point is the cultural transfer between the East and the West, leading to the invention of perspective in the 16^th century. The author examines two different forms of cultures of the gaze and lays the groundwork for a global art history.

The increasing marginalisation and ghettoisation of Indian Muslims is a hotly debated but poorly understood subject. Gayer and Jaffrelot’s edited collection presents rich empirical evidence from Muslim localities in eleven Indian cities, providing key insights into the complex nature of this supposed decline.

Rewriting the history of Muslims in modern Europe while addressing current Islamophobia: historian Lucette Valensi has taken up a challenge that would have sent most of her colleagues running. But rather than eschewing the risk of anachronism, she chooses to face “the sin of sins” – and succeeds remarkably.

The recent biography of Malcolm X provides us with a compelling intellectual history of the charismatic leader. Marable’s critical reevalution of Malcolm’s biography traces his ideas back to a long history of social and religious movements within African American society.