Bøker i Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks-serien

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

Scholars, saints, and the state.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

How do people in the African diaspora practice Islam? While the term "e;Black Muslim"e; may conjure images of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, millions of African-descended Muslims around the globe have no connection to the American-based Nation of Islam. The Call of Bilal is a penetrating account of the rich diversity of Islamic religious practice among Africana Muslims worldwide. Covering North Africa and the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Europe, and the Americas, Edward E. Curtis IV reveals a fascinating range of religious activities--from the observance of the five pillars of Islam and the creation of transnational Sufi networks to the veneration of African saints and political struggles for racial justice. Weaving together ethnographic fieldwork and historical perspectives, Curtis shows how Africana Muslims interpret not only their religious identities but also their attachments to the African diaspora. For some, the dispersal of African people across time and space has been understood as a mere physical scattering or perhaps an economic opportunity. For others, it has been a metaphysical and spiritual exile of the soul from its sacred land and eternal home.