Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.     

Revelation in Islam

Among the world's religions, Islam has one of the most fully developed understandings of the notion of revelation. It views the whole of the created order as a revelation and, accordingly, considers religious revelation in the form of Scripture as an integral feature of the human condition. It is within this context that Muhammad's own revelatory experiences must be considered. These are well‐attested in the Hadith literature. Islam recognises three distinct grades of revelation. Muhammad's was the highest of these which, as the ahadith make clear, is a “passing into the deep sleep state in full consciousness ...”. The explicit nature of these traditional accounts of prophecy in action, as well as Islam's universalism, sheds light upon revelation in all religious traditions.     

Islam and suicide

Suicide and homicide rates of a sample of 72 nations were associated with a cluster of social variables related to economic development but not with a cluster related to the proportion of Islamic adherents.     

伊斯兰教与世俗化问题再思考

宗教作为一种社会存在、社会文化形态,它与人类社会是双向互动的。社会生活世俗化与社会宗教道德规范化、制度化,在任何人类社会都是互有联系和区别的现象。本文以伊斯兰教历史上三个有代表性的时间节点为线索,就其与世俗化的关系问题进行了一些学理上的梳理。     

Same-sex unions in Islam

The objective of this paper was to streamline the case for Muslim same-sex unions that was comprehensively made in Jahangir and Abdullatif (2016). Additionally, we try to address same-sex unions on the basis of non-binary gender, gender expression and sexual orientation. Based on our work, we argue that the case for Muslim same-sex unions can be made on the basis of broad principles of human dignity and affection and therefore through marriage or through the specific arguments of repelling harm and legal authority. In this regard, going beyond the overarching Islamic value of human dignity, we specifically argue that the case for same-sex unions can be anchored on verse 4:28 on facilitating a legal outlet for sexual expression.     

The Fascination of Islam

An Orientalist painting reproduced on the cover of the English translation of Rodinson's La fascination de l'Islam prompts some initial reflections about elements of distortion and projection in European perceptions of the Muslim world. The rest of the article charts the growth of the academic study of Islam and makes some suggestions as to how it might develop in the future. The second section surveys the history of Islamic Studies in Western Europe, dealing in turn with Christian scholarship, text-based Orientalism, and the contribution of the political sciences. It highlights the merits of these approaches but also explains why Muslim students find them problematic. The third section considers a traditional Muslim approach to the subject, as described by Ibn Khaldun. Because of its emphasis on the transmission of information on religious authority, this approach would be inappropriate in a modern Western university. Moreover, as a historian, Ibn Khaldun was already aware of its deficiencies. The fourth section opens by stressing that there is an urgent need to bring Western scholarship and traditional Muslim scholarship into constructive dialogue with each other. Despite the enormity of the task, it would be facilitated if Islamicists of all persuasions were prepared to learn from colleagues in Religious Studies and Theology. With this in mind, a number of suggestions are made as to how Islamic Studies stands to be enriched through contact with these two disciplines. Finally, the author states that Religious Studies and Theology also stand to benefit from the relationship. For example, he suggests that the rise of Islam raises important issues for those who are interested in the formative period of Christian doctrine.     

Understanding Islam in Ireland

The article describes the growth of the Muslim presence in Ireland, covering its origins and the rapid development of Islamic institutions and communities, both Sunni and Shi^ci, over the past fifteen years. It traces the stages in the development of schools and mosques, the involvement of the Muslim community in Irish public life and recent initiatives in interfaith dialogue, and proceeds to an assessment of the present situation in what has become the world's most globalized country. The history of Muslim communities in Northern Ireland is also briefly described.     

The Anthropology of Islam

Argyle, M. and Beit-Hallahmi, B. The social psychology of religion, London: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 256, £5.95 (£2.95 paper)

Rosenthal, Franz, The classical heritage in Islam, transl. Emile and Jenny Marmorstein. London: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. xx + 298, £5.50

Mirza, Hormazdyar Dastur Kayoji, Outlines of Parsi history, Bombay: Industrial Press, 1974, xxvii + 516 pp, approx £4.50     

Towards a neo-modernist Islam

Fazlur Rahman was one of the most significant Muslim intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. This is partly due to his original contribution to a re-thinking of Islamic tradition and classical theological concerns. He initiated a new hermeneutic interpretation of the Qur’an and a critical analytical study of the Sunnah which has come to inspire a number of modern and contemporary intellectuals (including for instance Nurcholish Majid, Amina Wadud, Mohammad Talbi, Ebrahim Moosa and Abdullah Saeed). His reform ideas, primarily known and discussed within Muslim intellectual circles, became the subject of widespread interest in countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey. Rahman represents a transitional figure between Islamic modernism (from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century) and “neo-modernism”, a term coined by himself and introduced in order to highlight a critical approach to the early reform-thought and to actualize Islam’s potential in a present context. Rahman’s contributions include works on theology, philosophy, law, ethics, education and many of them are now available in several languages.