Pragmatic Muslim Politics

This book analyses and discusses the use of Islamic terms and symbols in the political party Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC). It is based on interviews with the leading members of the party and on analyses of the party’s official documents. It describes the history of Muslims in Sri Lanka, presents the analytical framework used, and discusses the official documents and narratives of party members, as well as the details of the Ashraff and Hakeem terms in Parliament. The book provides knowledge about the state of religion and politics in Sri Lanka, and provides insight into how a religious political Muslim party functions as a pragmatic rather than fundamentalist movement. Representing a recent study on the complex relationship between religion and politics, this book greatly advances our understanding of the power of religion and its effect on both individual lives and society.

This book is employed for the study of the Islamic polity and political leadership and examines the basic features of the Islamic polity. It provides a theoretical framework for the study of political authority in the Islamic world signifying individual leaders' characteristics.

Can Islam Be French? is an anthropological examination of how Muslims are responding to the conditions of life in France. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of the country's Muslims themselves. Bowen asks not the usual question--how well are Muslims integrating in France?--but, rather, how do French Muslims think about Islam? In particular, Bowen examines how French Muslims are fashioning new Islamic institutions and developing new ways of reasoning and teaching. He looks at some of the quite distinct ways in which mosques have connected with broader social and political forces, how Islamic educational entrepreneurs have fashioned niches for new forms of schooling, and how major Islamic public actors have set out a specifically French approach to religious norms. All of these efforts have provoked sharp responses in France and from overseas centers of Islamic scholarship, so Bowen also looks closely at debates over how--and how far--Muslims should adapt their religious traditions to these new social conditions. He argues that the particular ways in which Muslims have settled in France, and in which France governs religions, have created incentives for Muslims to develop new, pragmatic ways of thinking about religious issues in French society.

The involvement of minorities in politics has been the subject of a considerable number of studies. However, these studies are rarely concerned with the views of Muslims on their participation in the political processes of non-Muslim societies. Several Western scholars have thought and still think that the world, from the perspective of Muslims, can be divided in accordance with the dichotomy of the classical Islamic Law that distinguishes between the "Territory of Islam" and the "Territoryof War". however, during the last decennia various Muslim scholars have tried to reinterpret the position of Muslims in non-Muslim societies in new religious terms by which this classification has been emended and corrected. In this book, four different views are distinguished: the pragmatic, idealistic or utopian, re-interpretative, and traditionalist views. It goes without saying that the practical implementaion of these views to a large degree depends upon the types of Muslim organizations and representative bodies in those societies, as well as their denominational and ethnical backgrounds. From an international comparative perspective it appears that, contrary to the situation in Australia, Muslims of most Western European states have been thus far unsuccessful in creating representative organizations at national levels. This is also illustrated by studies of Muslim organizations in Germany, Italy and the united Kingdom. Another important factor consists of the views of the younger generations of Muslim immigrants about the compatibility of their Islamic identiity and full participation in the non-Muslim, secular societies in which they are living. Research on this subject contained in the present book responds to this question in an affirmative way.

How do old ideas continue to appear relevant in a modern world? A sociological approach to Islam allow us to approach an answer to this question. In Lifeworlds of Islam, Mohammed A. Bamyeh shows that Islam has typically operated not in the form of standard dogmas, but more often as a compass for practical individual orientations or "lifeworlds." Through a comprehensive sociological analysis of Islam, he maps out how Muslims have employed the faith to foster global networks, public philosophies, and engaged civic lives both historically and in the present. Bamyeh further argues that all three fields are poorly understood in recent literature, which tends to focus on one specific problem or another and does not take into account the variety of lifeworlds in which Islam operates. The book contends that the larger preoccupations of ordinary Muslims-how to imagine a global society, how to guide life in the manner of a total philosophy, and how to relate to the world of daily struggles in organized or semi-organized civic forums and social movements-are neither unique to the present period nor to religious life. They are rather shared universal quandaries. A focused empirical lens on the career of a religion, Lifeworlds of Islam contributes to the larger literature and provides insight into the nature of global citizenship, the philosophical needs of individuals, and the ethical values that foster social participation.

The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe’s Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. He documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims places these efforts--particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils--within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state-mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, Laurence sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority’s transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.

Community and Consensus in Islam, first published in 1989, represented a bold attempt to introduce the role of ideas in the interpretation of Indo-Muslim politics between 1860 and the Partition of India in 1947. It questioned the widely held view at the time that Indian Muslim politics of the period could be explained by reference to pragmatic interests alone. Instead, Farzana Shaikh argued that the influence of ideas rooted in Islamic tradition must form a crucial dimension of any wellgrounded explanation of the determinants of Indo-Muslim political practice. In this masterful study the configurations of colonial politics in India are set against the backdrop of tensions between two contrasting intellectual traditions - the Islamic and the liberal-democratic - to show how their different assumptions about the proper ends of political action sharpened the opposition between diverse constitutional positions that led to Partition. Today it stands as a vital contribution to the debate about this momentous event.

This book analyses the evolution of key Islamist movements and parties in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. It offers a novel and exhaustive study of the evolution of Islamists as shaped by the interplay of domestic, regional, and international factors. Providing an in-depth, theoretically grounded and empirically rich study of political Islam, the volume explores how the overly under-appreciated interaction of domestic, regional and international factors impacts the development of contemporary Islamist actors. By tracing how they adapt and resist to challenging environments within and beyond national boundaries, it charts and explains many of the critical changes and continuities in their organisational set-up, policy choices, ideological leanings, and narratives. Through an inside-out perspective and actor-centered approach, this book aims to overcome the ‘compartmentalisation’ of the domestic and international spheres as well as the ‘obsession’ with moderation for Islamists. Specifically, the book chapters address how Islamist actors (re)interpret external events, norms, ideas, and practices from abroad in the light of the constraints and opportunities of their respective domestic environments. At the crossroads of comparative politics, international relations and area studies, it is a key resource for practitioners and scholars interested in party politics, social movements, political Islam and North Africa. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Contemporary Politics.

In this book, Yusef Waghid constitutes his argument in defence of ta’arruf (associational knowing) as an expanded conception of ta’dib (good education). In the first part of the book he elucidates Abu Bakr Effendi’s position on a Muslim educational philosophy which can be couched as rational, pragmatic and critical. As a backdrop to this, in the second part of the book, he argues for a notion of Muslim educational philosophy according to ta’arruf (associational knowing) on the basis that it enhances the notion of an autonomous self and its capabilities; summons different people to engage in deliberative encounters; and provokes the self to be reflectively open towards that which remains in becoming. This leads him to posit that ta’arruf (associational knowing) has the potential to cultivate humanity. His notion of ta’arruf extends practices of tarbiyyah (rearing), ta’lim (learning), and ta’dib (good education) associated with Muslim educational philosophy.

This book deals with two different pragmatic approaches to textual communication: (i) the mainstream approach followed by the 'Ash'ari s, Hanafi s and Mu'tazili s, (ii) the salafite approach followed mainly by the Hanbali s, defended and elaborated by Ibn Taymiyyah. One of the primary aims of the book is to explore and formulate several Muslim legal theorists' pragmatic theories, communicative principles and linguistic views, construct them in the form of models and set them within a general uniform framework. Another aim is to reveal a corpus of information and data which, though highly relevant to modern pragmatics, is still unknown. This study, which can be seen as an extensive introduction to 'medieval Islamic pragmatics', is the first attempt to examine the approaches followed by the Salafi s or the mainstream from a pragmatic viewpoint. There has been no attempt to explain the principles and the strategies utilised by the medieval Sunni Muslim legal theorists in their account of how communication works and how successful interpretation is achieved. Of course, a lot of work has been done on different Islamic sects and their different positions over the interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah, but these studies fall short of delving into the underlying communicative principles that motivate their differences over interpretation. The author's formulation of the Muslim legal theorists' views is enhanced by setting up a reliable theoretical foundation and by delving into their underlying philosophical principles. This involves relating the legal theorists' insights into interpretation and communication to their relevant ontological, epistemological and theological outlooks, and comparing these insights with their modern pragmatic counterparts.