Refashioning Islam: elite women and piety in Bangladesh

This paper attempts to explore the development of Islamic identity of a group of elite women in Dhaka, Bangladesh. These women constitute a significant group in the country where 10% of the rich control 40% of the national wealth, and the 10% of the poorest control 1.84% of the national wealth.* Socially, politically and economically, elite women and their families are powerful and have access to resources and political influence. Many of these women who did not grow up with a very strict religious orientation came to Islam and consolidated religious thoughts and practices through a weekly Quran reading class. This particular Quran class began in 2002. The classes were initiated by a foreign diplomat’s wife who was Muslim, and have continued even after her departure from the country in 2004. While Dhaka houses many meetings of Muslim men and women to discuss Islamic ideas and practices, this particular class was quite unique in its ability to attract and convert elite women whose lives were seemingly perfect. This urban elite phenomenon of Islamic revivalism has not been the subject of any in-depth research in Bangladesh, and this work therefore, is the first of its kind and largely introductory.     

Muslim religious oratory on Swedish public service radio

This article analyses religious Morning Services, delivered by eight Muslim speakers, broadcast on Swedish public service radio during 2013 and 2014. Morning Services have been broadcast on Swedish radio since 1930, but only in recent years have non-Christian speakers been invited to contribute. Inviting religious minority speakers is understood as a strategy for incorporating selected representatives of religious minorities into hegemonic practices and discourses. The analysis identifies four shared discourses produced in the material and relates these discourses to hegemonic views regarding legitimate public expressions of religiosity in Sweden. The discourses are: 1) a positive discourse on religious pluralism, 2) a discourse that emphasises practical self-help-like effects of Muslim religious practice, 3) a discourse that articulates religiosity as challenging purported negative aspects of current society, 4) a discourse that raises difficulties which Muslims in Sweden face. The Muslim Morning Services illustrate a complex dialectic, as, on the one hand, they endorse hegemonic values and ideals and thereby contribute to and legitimise the status quo, while, on the other hand, their individual voices, personal narratives, and religious messages signify change through their use of public space which was previously unavailable to Muslims.     

A theory of Islamic political radicalism in Britain: sociology, theology and international political economy

This polemical essay based on on-going ethnographic research explores the phenomenon of Islamic political radicalism in Western Europe, in particular Britain, and the challenges that emerge in relation to the maintenance of a successful multicultural project. Analysing recent events in Western Europe, namely the Madrid train bombings and the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 and the London suicide bombings in 2005, this paper argues that Islamic political radicalism is on the increase because of factors that are both endogenous and exogenous to the various Muslim minority communities. Local, national and international pressures conspire to compound the aspirations, expectations, attitudes and perceptions of already disenfranchised groups. First, the layers of the ‘radicalisation onion’ are peeled away to explore the nature of the experience of Muslim minorities, analysing questions of evolving Islamic political identities in the context of the 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent ‘war on terror.’ Second, the dynamics of Islamic political radicalisation are discussed, specifically alluding to the Qur’anic ideals that ‘Jihadis’ variously appropriate. Finally, the discussion explores the ways in which the nation-state has involved Muslim elite groups in acting as a bridge between government and the Muslim citizen. Many young Muslims view these actions cynically with elites vying for position and profile in an intensely active period of political manoeuvring. In conclusion, it is argued that should the status quo remain intact, the threat of Islamic political radicalisation will persist and solutions will be as much dependent on the nation-state becoming aware of its potential role while disaffected Muslim minorities continue to develop theological and sociological approaches to life in the non-Muslim West.     

Islam,immigrants and the state: Religion and cultural politics in Australia

This paper explores the relationship between religious practice and the cultural marginality of Islam in the West. Its focus is the religious organization and practice of Muslim immigrant communities in Australia. It interprets immigrant religious culture as a dimension of the process of incorporation of migrants in class cultures. Its theoretical approach derives from Bourdieu's analysis of the social world as both a symbolic system and system of power relations. It argues that the process of incorporation of immigrants structures the reconstitution of religious culture in migration selectively, creating a distinctive Islamic culture linked to new social movements in the Islamic world.     

Discussions about indigenous,national and transnational Islam in Russia

ABSTRACT

Transnational Islam is increasingly presented in the Russian political rhetoric as a security threat. Therefore, Russian politicians and authorities attempt to support indigenous or national forms of Islam. Similar policies are implemented in several western European countries. Yet they tend to disregard the heterogeneity of the Muslim community, they create exclusions and they are often conceived as imposing outside evaluations and interpretations on Islam. This contribution analyses initiatives intended to develop a national Islam in post-Soviet Russia. While the aims, methods and problems in different countries are often quite similar, the values and norms underlying these initiatives vary and reflect the societies from which they emerge. This contribution argues that since the 1990s, the changes in the political line of the Kremlin have impacted the project for a ‘national’ Islam by placing less emphasis on liberal values and more emphasis on adherence to loyalism and political conservatism.     

“It's Just Your Turn”: Performing Identity and Muslim Australian Popular Culture

Academic accounts of Muslim integration and inclusion in multicultural Australia are often at pains to emphasize that Muslim identity and Australian national identity are compatible with each other. While this political manoeuvre remains both important and relevant, it nevertheless chances reinscribing the very terms of debate it seeks to contest and worryingly aligns closely with prevalent governmental techniques to “domesticate” Muslim difference. Furthermore, it risks presenting both “Muslim” and “Australian” identities as self-evident, taken-for-granted categories. In this article, I consider two Muslim Australian popular cultural productions – namely, the television programme Salam Café and the stand-up comedy show Fear of a Brown Planet – in order to explore how Muslim and Australian identities, and the relationships between them, are performed, contested and rearticulated. What is most salient about both productions, the article argues, is that they present the identity of “Australian” as a site of political and cultural contestation, with the “nation” a contingent site through which multicultural politics are actualized. Such a move is salient for Australian multiculturalism more broadly, but is especially so for Muslim communities – not least because it undermines the West/Islam dichotomy altogether.     

Identity practices, ingroup projection, and the evaluation of subgroups: a study among Turkish-Dutch Sunnis

This research focuses on religious subgroup evaluations by examining the attitude of Turkish-Dutch Sunni Muslims towards Alevi and Shiite Muslims. Following the Ingroup Projection Model, it was expected that Sunni participants who practice Islam will project their self-defining subgroup practices on the superordinate Muslim category, which will be related to more ingroup bias towards Alevis, a Muslim subgroup that performs different religious practices. Two studies yielded consistent evidence that practicing Islam increased ingroup bias towards Alevis. Furthermore, in Study 2, we found evidence that the effect of practicing Islam on ingroup bias was mediated by relative ingroup prototypicality (RIP). Moreover, practicing Islam did not affect RIP in relation to Shiites who perform the same religious practices that we examined. These findings support the Ingroup Projection Model.     

The White Cross in Muslim Java: Muslim–Christian Politics in the Javanese City of Salatiga

The interplay of religion and politics has been a consistent theme within the literature of political radicalism and religious violence in the contemporary Muslim world. Indonesia, which has long paraded its multi-layered history of religions, recently emerged as one of the main sites of Muslim–Christian violence. The religious volatility that has characterized Indonesia over the past decade has, however, left variations in vitality between faith-based organizations under-researched. In order to examine how the Christian churches undergird their institutions in the world's largest Muslim country, this article takes as its case study Salib Putih (White Cross) in the Javanese city of Salatiga and traces how a legal issue comes to transcend the boundary between religion and politics at local and national levels.     

Hand, heart and handphone: State shari`a in the age of the SMS

The state implementation of Islamic law in the special autonomous region of Aceh (Indonesia) presents a complex and compelling case for examining some of the central themes of this special issue, particularly the attempt to understand the complex entanglements of secular nation states with contemporary religious movements. These dynamics are particularly energized in contemporary Aceh, where a state-directed project for the formal implementation of shari`a has been pursued alongside broader agendas for social reconstruction following the devastating 2004 tsunami and the subsequent end of decades of violent conflict between the ‘Free Aceh Movement’ (GAM) and the central Indonesian government. This article explores a heretofore un-examined source base – that of ‘Text Messages (SMS) to the Editor’ printed in a local newspaper – to gain new perspective on local debates over the role of Islam and official state structures in building a ‘new Aceh’. This material presents a striking example of the complexity and contestation of popular discourses on Islamic law and society well beyond the realm of specialist spokesmen.     

Christian‐Muslim influence in Pondicherry,South India∗

Christian‐Muslim influence on modern Hindu and Hindu‐inspired movements and religious institutions has always been a neglected area of study. In this paper, we try to fill this gap to some extent, by concentrating our interest and study on the Hindu‐inspired Sri Aurobindo Movement of Pondicherry in the Tamil country. In the course of the paper, we show how values of Islamic and Christian‐West origins have made crucial in‐roads into modern Hindu religious thought and practice. We have brought out especially the striking resemblances between the Sri Aurobindo Movement and Islam. Values like egalitarianism, brotherhood and universalism, so alien to Hindu traditions and genius and so familiar to Islam and Christianity seem to have been successfully incorporated as core values by modem variants and interpretations of Hinduism. Though our study concentrates only on Christian‐Muslim influence on the Sri Aurobindo Movement, anybody can see that it has great relevance to many modern Hindu and Hindu‐inspired movements in India.     

Are Muslims a Distinctive Minority? An Empirical Analysis of Religiosity,Social Attitudes,and Islam

Scholarly and public discourses on Muslim immigrants in Europe have questioned if Islam is an impediment to sociocultural adaptation and whether Muslims are a distinctive group in their religiosity and social values. We use a new survey of 480 British Muslims in conjunction with the British Social Attitudes Survey to examine differences between Muslim and non‐Muslim Britons on religiosity (practice, belief, salience) and moral and social issues regarding gender, abortion, and homosexuality. Muslims are more religious than other Britons, including both British Christians and religious “nones.” Muslims also are more conservative than other Britons across the range of social and moral attitudes. Multivariate analysis shows, however, that much of the difference on moral issues is due to socioeconomic disadvantage and high religiosity among Muslims. Although being a highly religious group in an otherwise secular country renders Muslims distinctive, factors that predict social conservatism among all Britons—high religiosity and low SES—apply similarly to Muslims.     

Pragmatic Dogma: Understanding the Ideological Continuities in Iran's Response to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks

ABSTRACT

Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie cemented Iran's space within Western discourses surrounding blasphemy and Islam. The fatwa has earned its place within the polarizing debate between free speech and religious tolerance, which fundamentally serves the political ambitions of those involved. This article therefore argues that, in order to understand accusations of blasphemy in Iran, one must address the political concerns in which the accusation takes place since these reveal Iran's tendency towards pragmatic dogma – the practice of meeting the needs of the state in a way that accords with its religious ideology. The responses of Iranian officials to the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015 provide a useful case study for the analysis of this pragmatic dogma, since the Islamic Republic pursued a different approach to the Charlie Hebdo “blasphemy” from that which it had followed with Rushdie. Instead of condoning the killings, Iran's political and religious elite chose to condemn the actions of both the cartoonists and the gunmen, without outlining a punishment. The article will argue that this case demonstrates many of the continuing themes in Iran's approach to blasphemy, since the Charlie Hebdo cartoons have largely been used to reinforce the Islamic Republic's overall worldview.     

Religious identification and politicization in the face of discrimination: support for political Islam and political action among the Turkish and Moroccan second generation in Europe

Taking an approach from religion as a social identity and using large-scale comparative surveys in five European cities, we investigate when and how perceived discrimination is associated with religious identification and politicization among the second generation of Turkish and Moroccan Muslims. We distinguish support for political Islam from political action as distinct forms of politicization. In addition, we test the mediating role of religious identification in processes of politicization. Study 1 estimates multi-group structural equation models of support for political Islam in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In line with a social identity model of politicization and across nine inter-group contexts, Muslims who perceived more discrimination identified (even) more strongly as Muslims; and high Muslim identifiers were most ready to support political Islam. In support of a competing social stigma hypothesis, however, negative direct and total effects of perceived discrimination suggest predominant depoliticization. Using separate sub-samples across four inter-group contexts in Belgium, Study 2 adds political action tendencies as a distinct form of politicization. Whereas religious identification positively predicts both forms of politicization, perceived discrimination has differential effects: Muslims who perceived more discrimination were more weary of supporting political Islam, yet more ready to engage in political action to defend Islamic values. Taken together, the studies reveal that some Muslim citizens will politicize and others will depoliticize in the face of discrimination as a function of their religious identification and of prevailing forms of politicization.     

Explaining Muslim Americans’ Opinions on Salient Issues

Despite numerous individual success stories of living the American dream, the Muslim American community still remains one of the most misunderstood and underrepresented minorities in the United States. This study investigates the views of this community by mapping and explaining members' investigates on a number of issues of social and political import. It shows that the issue attitudes of Muslim Americans are rather uniform on some social and non-social issues but very diverse on others. Moreover, it also shows that the differences of opinion that were uncovered can be explained by a variety of factors including a respondent's ethnic or national origin and how committed a respondent is to the practice of Islam, defined by the frequency of mosque attendance. While these results are temporally limited, they do show that this is a very diverse community and set a strong foundation for further quantitative and qualitative investigations of how Muslim Americans' religious practices, ethnic backgrounds, and socio-economic characteristics affect their essential social and political beliefs.     

Pentecostal Movements,Islam and the Contest for Public Space in Northern Nigeria

The article considers the changing relationship between independent Pentecostal and charismatic groups and radical Islamic movements in Northern Nigeria between the 1970s and the early years of the twenty-first century. All these groups, be they Christian or Muslim, represent a new dimension in religious fundamentalism in contemporary Nigeria. In spite of being internal revivalist groups within their respective religious traditions, they reflect negative attitudes toward each other. Their relationship has been marked by continuous competition for public space. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the demonization of Islamic groups was a feature of Pentecostal discourse. Through their involvement in political activities under the umbrella of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), evangelicals and Pentecostals developed a common front in the face of Muslim fundamentalism.     

Voices of Islamic Authorities: Friday Khutba in Malaysian Mosques

Malaysia has been introducing Islamization policies since the 1980s and has used Friday khutbas (sermons) to convey government and religious authorities’ ideas and interpretations of Islam. We used content analysis of the texts of khutbas delivered in 2013 and 2014 in six states in Malaysia, all of which were obtained from those states’ Islamic authorities’ websites. This research found that weekly Friday khutbas have been used to announce the Islamic authorities’ commitment to safeguard the integrity of Sunni Islam, to monopolize the interpretation of Islam, to establish the collective mistreatment of minority Muslim groups and to promote the implementation of hudud law. Our analysis demonstrates that the control exercised by the government and religious authorities over mosques, covering aspects ranging from a mosque’s administration and appointment of the imam to the preparation of the khutba text has created an ideal opportunity for the government to influence the Muslim society’s understanding and stance on a variety of social, religious and political issues in a multi-ethnic community.     

Humanities,Social Sciences and Islamic Studies

Three avenues in Islamic studies are distinguished. The humanities study the languages, texts and history of Islam as a civilisation and religion. The main difficulty confronting them is to understand properly the texts studied. Anthropology, sociology and political science constitute the main contribution of the social sciences. Here the main difficulty lies in explaining religious data correctly within their context. In religious studies, the third avenue, the main problem is to interpret correctly the way in which Muslim communities and persons have understood their cultural tradition and the religious elements which belong to it. Focusing on the people's intentions which make Islam a religion rather than a social system or ideology enables Islam to be understood from the perspective of religious studies.     

The vicious circle of religious prejudice: Islamophobia makes the acculturation attitudes of majority and minority members clash

Public discourse often portrays Islam as the main obstacle for Muslim minorities' integration, paying little attention to the contextual factors hindering this process. Here, we focus on islamophobia as one destructive factor that hinders the mutual integration between Muslim minority and Western majority members, affecting both groups. In Study 1, the more islamophobic majority members were, the more they expected Muslims to give up their heritage culture and the less they wanted them to integrate. In Study 2, only when Muslims experienced substantial religious discrimination did religious identity negatively relate to national engagement and particularly positively relate to ethnic engagement. Together, the studies suggest that religious prejudice in the form of islamophobia is a major obstacle to Muslims' integration because it increases the incongruity between majority and minority members' acculturation attitudes.     

MYSTICISM AS MORALITY

Sufism—spiritual practice, intellectual discipline, literary tradition, and social institution—has played an integral role in the moral formation of Muslim society. Its aspiration toward a universal kindness to all creatures beyond the requirements of Islamic law has added a distinctly hypernomian dimension to the moral vision of Islam, as evidenced in a wide range of Sufi literature. The universal perspective of Sufism, fully rooted in Islamic revelation, yields a lived (and not just studied) ethics with the potential to view and embrace all creatures through a single ethical vision, regardless of religious or other affiliation. This side of Islam, both acknowledging and surpassing the outlook of the legal heritage, offers important insight into understanding the nature of Muslim society as both Islamic and meta‐Islamic in religious orientation. Sufism, still significant in today's Islamic world, thus offers important material for locating Islam as part of an international order with principles and standards that resonate deeply with the moral vision of Islam itself.