front cover of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
Rian Thum
Harvard University Press, 2014

For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past.

Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints.

Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.

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Sacred Spaces
A Journey with the Sufis of the Indus
Samina Quraeshi
Harvard University Press, 2010

Sufism, the mystical path of Islam, is a key feature of the complex Islamic culture of South Asia today. Influenced by philosophies and traditions from other Muslim lands and by pre-Islamic rites and practices, Sufism offers a corrective to the image of Islam as monolithic and uniform.

In Sacred Spaces, Pakistani artist and educator Samina Quraeshi provides a locally inflected vision of Islam in South Asia that is enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. A unique account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland in search of the wisdom of the Sufis, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia. Illuminating essays by Ali S. Asani, Carl W. Ernst, and Kamil Khan Mumtaz provide context to the journey, discussing aspects of Sufi music and dance, the role of Sufism in current South Asian culture and politics, and the spiritual geometry of Sufi architecture.

Quraeshi relies on memory, storytelling, and image making to create an imaginative personal history using a rich body of photographs and works of art to reflect the seeking heart of the Sufi way and to demonstrate the diversity of this global religion. Her vision builds on the centuries-old Sufi tradition of mystical messages of love, freedom, and tolerance that continue to offer the promise of building cultural and spiritual bridges between peoples of different faiths.

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The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi
Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms
Sachiko Murata, William C. Chittick, and Tu Wei-mingForeword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Harvard University Press, 2009

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. It was heavily influenced by several classic texts in the Sufi tradition. Liu’s approach, however, is distinguished from that of other Muslim scholars in that he addressed the basic articles of Islamic thought with Neo-Confucian terminology and categories. Besides its innate metaphysical and philosophical value, the text is invaluable for understanding how the masters of Chinese Islam straddled religious and civilizational frontiers and created harmony between two different intellectual worlds.

The introductory chapters explore both the Chinese and the Islamic intellectual traditions behind Liu’s work and locate the arguments of Tianfang xingli within those systems of thought. The copious annotations to the translation explain Liu’s text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.

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Saladin
Anne-Marie Eddé
Harvard University Press, 2011

Working simultaneously on two levels, Saladin represents the best kind of biography—a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin’s military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Eddé’s narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of the Crusades from an Arab perspective.

Saladin became a legend in his own time, venerated by friend and foe alike as a paragon of justice, chivalry, and generosity. Arab politicians ever since have sought to claim his mantle as a justification for their own exercise of power. But Saladin's world-historical status as the ideal Muslim ruler owes its longevity to a tacit agreement among contemporaries and later chroniclers about the set of virtues Saladin possessed—virtues that can now be tested against a rich tapestry of historical research. This tension between the mythical image of Saladin, layered over centuries and deployed in service of specific moral and political objectives, and the verifiable facts of his life available to a judicious modern historian is what sustains Anne-Marie Eddé's erudite biography, published to acclaim in France in 2008 and offered here in smooth, readable English translation.

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Science and Religion
Christian and Muslim Perspectives
David Marshall, Editor. Afterword by Archbishop Rowan Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Science and Religion is a record of the 2009 Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars convened annually by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The essays in this volume explore how both faith traditions have approached the interface between science and religion and throw light on the ongoing challenges posed by this issue today. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts together with commentary that illuminates the scriptures, the ideas of key religious thinkers, and also the legacy of Charles Darwin.

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Sculpting the Self
Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing
Muhammad U. Faruque
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life.

This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and other languages. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution to the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.

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Sea of the Caliphs
The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World
Christophe Picard
Harvard University Press, 2018

“How could I allow my soldiers to sail on this disloyal and cruel sea?” These words, attributed to the most powerful caliph of medieval Islam, Umar Ibn al-Khattab (634–644), have led to a misunderstanding in the West about the importance of the Mediterranean to early Islam. This body of water, known in Late Antiquity as the Sea of the Romans, was critical to establishing the kingdom of the caliphs and for introducing the new religion to Europe and Africa. Over time, it also became a pathway to commercial and political dominion, indispensable to the prosperity and influence of the Islamic world. Sea of the Caliphs returns Muslim sailors to their place of prominence in the history of the Islamic caliphate.

As early as the seventh century, Muslim sailors competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of this far-flung route of passage. Christophe Picard recreates these adventures as they were communicated to admiring Muslims by their rulers. After the Arab conquest of southern Europe and North Africa, Muslims began to speak of the Mediterranean in their strategic visions, business practices, and notions of nature and the state. Jurists and ideologues conceived of the sea as a conduit for jihad, even as Muslims’ maritime trade with Latin, Byzantine, and Berber societies increased.

In the thirteenth century, Christian powers took over Mediterranean trade routes, but by that time a Muslim identity that operated both within and in opposition to Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.

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Secular Power Europe and Islam
Identity and Foreign Policy
Sarah Wolff
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Secular Power Europe and Islam argues that secularism is not the central principle of international relations but should be considered as one belief system that influences international politics. Through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, author Sarah Wolff shows how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. Through three case studies, Wolff encourages the reader to unpack secularism as a bedrock principle of IR and diplomacy. This book argues that the EU’s interest and diplomacy activities in relation to religion, and to Islam specifically, are shaped by the insistence on a European secular identity that should be reconsidered.

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Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment
Akeel Bilgrami
Harvard University Press, 2014

Bringing clarity to a subject clouded by polemic, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment is a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as concepts in different parts of the modern world. At a time when secularist and religious worldviews appear irreconcilable, Akeel Bilgrami strikes out on a path distinctly his own, criticizing secularist proponents and detractors, liberal universalists and multicultural relativists alike.

Those who ground secularism in arguments that aspire to universal reach, Bilgrami argues, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of politics. To those, by contrast, who regard secularism as a mere outgrowth of colonial domination, he offers the possibility of a more conceptually vernacular ground for political secularism. Focusing on the response to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Bilgrami asks why Islamic identity has so often been a mobilizing force against liberalism, and he answers the question with diagnostic sympathy, providing a philosophical framework within which the Islamic tradition might overcome the resentments prompted by its colonized past and present.

Turning to Gandhi’s political and religious thought, Bilgrami ponders whether the increasing appeal of religion in many parts of the world reflects a growing disillusionment not with science but with an outlook of detachment around the rise of modern science and capitalism. He elaborates a notion of enchantment along metaphysical, ethical, and political lines with a view to finding in secular modernity a locus of meaning and value, while addressing squarely the anxiety that all such notions hark back nostalgically to a time that has past.

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Secularizing Islamists?
Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan
Humeira Iqtidar
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism.

This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

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Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies
Edited by Chitra Raghavan and James P. Levine
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Contradicting the views commonly held by westerners, many Muslim countries in fact engage in a wide spectrum of reform, with the status of women as a central dimension. This anthology counters the myth that Islam and feminism are always or necessarily in opposition. A multidisciplinary group of scholars examine ideology, practice, and reform efforts in the areas of marriage, divorce, abortion, violence against women, inheritance, and female circumcision across the Islamic world, illuminating how religious and cultural prescriptions interact with legal norms, affecting change in sometimes surprising ways.
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The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam
Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890
Said Amir Arjomand
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Dismissing oversimplified and politically charged views of the politics of Shi'ite Islam, Said Amir Arjomand offers a richly researched sociological and historical study of Shi'ism and the political order of premodern Iran that exposes the roots of what became Khomeini's theocracy.
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Shared Saints and Festivals among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Medieval Mediterranean
Alexandra Cuffel
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
This book explores shared religious practices among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, focusing primarily on the medieval Mediterranean. It examines the meanings members of each community ascribed to the presence of the religious other at "their" festivals or holy sites during pilgrimage. Communal boundaries were often redefined or dissolved during pilgrimage and religious festivals. Yet, paradoxically, shared practices served to enforce communal boundaries, since many of the religious elite devised polemical interpretations of these phenomena which highlighted the superiority of their own faith. Such interpretations became integral to each group’s theological understanding of self and other to such a degree that in some regions, religious minorities were required to participate in the festivals of the ruling community. In all formulations, “otherness” remained an essential component of both polemic and prayer.
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Sharia Incorporated
A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present
Edited by Jan Michiel Otto
Leiden University Press, 2010
The aim of Sharia Incorporated is to provide unbiased and contextual information about a topic that has of late been hijacked by politics in the Muslim world as well as in the West. Sharia Incorporated, written by laudable international scholars, is an ambitious study of the incorporation of Islamic law traditions into national legal systems. The book also explores the sensitive topic of ‘Western’ human rights and other rule of law standards in a Muslim world. It provides an in-depth analysis of the role of sharia in the historical and legal formation of twelve representative Muslim states, with a unique comparison of key issues raised by the ‘Islamic awakening’ of recent decades. In the preface Jan Michiel Otto goes to the heart of the prevailing environment in which Western discourses tend to oversimplify the substance and effect of Islam and sharia.
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The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology
Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program
Joseph Alagha
Amsterdam University Press, 2002

As the recent war in Lebanon demonstrated, an understanding of the Lebanese Shi‘ite militant group Hizbullah remains an important component of any attempt to solve the problems of the Middle East. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology provides an in-depth analysis of the group’s motivations, tracking the changes it has undergone since Hizbullah’s founding by Lebanese Shi‘ite clergy in 1978. Joseph Alagha demonstrates that Hizbullah, driven at its founding chiefly by religious concerns, in the latter half of the 1980s became a full-fledged social movement, with a structure and ideology aimed at social change. Further changes in the 1990s led to Hizbullah’s becoming a mainstream political party—but without surrendering its militarism or willingness to use violence to advance its ends.
            In tracking these changes, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology covers such disparate topics as Hizbullah’s views of jihad, suicide and martyrdom, integration, pan-Islamism, anti-Zionism, and the relationship with Israel and the United States. It will be necessary reading for both scholars and policymakers.
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Shi'ism
A Religion of Protest
Hamid Dabashi
Harvard University Press, 2012

For a Western world anxious to understand Islam and, in particular, Shi’ism, this book arrives with urgently needed information and critical analysis. Hamid Dabashi exposes the soul of Shi’ism as a religion of protest—successful only when in a warring position, and losing its legitimacy when in power.

Dabashi makes his case through a detailed discussion of the Shi’i doctrinal foundations, a panoramic view of its historical unfolding, a varied investigation into its visual and performing arts, and finally a focus on the three major sites of its contemporary contestations: Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. In these states, Shi’ism seems to have ceased to be a sect within the larger context of Islam and has instead emerged to claim global political attention. Here we see Shi’ism in its combative mode—reminiscent of its traumatic birth in early Islamic history. Hezbollah in Lebanon claims Shi’ism, as do the militant insurgents in Iraq, the ruling Ayatollahs in Iran, and the masses of youthful demonstrators rebelling against their reign. All declare their active loyalties to a religion of protest that has defined them and their ancestry for almost fourteen hundred years.

Shi’sm: A Religion of Protest attends to the explosive conflicts in the Middle East with an abiding attention to historical facts, cultural forces, religious convictions, literary and artistic nuances, and metaphysical details. This timely book offers readers a bravely intelligent history of a world religion.

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A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886
The Safarnâmeh of Mirzâ Mo?ammad ?osayn Farâhâni
By Mirzâ Farâhâni
University of Texas Press, 1990

Western accounts of the Hajj, the ritual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, are rare, since access to Mecca is forbidden to non-Muslims. In the Muslim world, however, pilgrimage literature is a well-established genre, dating back to the earliest centuries of the Islamic era. A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca is taken from the original nineteenth-century Persian manuscript of the Safarnâmeh of Mirzâ Moḥammad Ḥosayn Farâhâni, a well-educated, keenly observant, Iranian Shiʿite gentleman.

This memoir holds a wealth of social and economic information about Czarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Northern Iran, and Arabia. The author is a meticulous observer, recording details of distances, currencies, accommodations, modes of travel, and so on. He records the experiences encountered by pilgrims of his day: physical hardships, disease, generosity and compassion, banditry, hospitality, comradeship, and exaltation. And, without prejudice, he discusses the tensions between the Shiʿites and the Sunnites in the holy places—tensions that still exist and have erupted in bloody clashes during recent pilgrimages.

A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca will appeal to a wide audience of general readers, Middle Eastern scholars, anthropologists, and historians.

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Sin, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation
Christian and Muslim Perspectives
Lucinda Mosher and David Marshall, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2016

Sin, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation: Christian and Muslim Perspectives is a collection of essays and scripture passages studied at the 2014 Building Bridges seminar.

Thoughtful and provocative, the book begins with the complete texts of the opening lectures by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen and Jonathan A. C. Brown and contains essays by Christoph Schwöbel, Ayman Shabana, Susan Eastman, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Philip Sheldrake, and Asma Afsaruddin. Peppered throughout with relevant scripture passages and commentary, the text concludes with an extensive account of the informal conversations at the seminar that conveys the lively and respectful dialogue that is the hallmark of this meeting.

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Slave of Allah
Zacarias Moussaoui Vs the USA
Katherine C. Donahue
Pluto Press, 2007
In 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui became the first person to stand trial for the events of September 11, 2001. This timely book provides a close insight into the Moussaoui trial from an anthropological perspective. Katherine C. Donahue was present at the trial. Based on first-hand evidence, this book provides a unique picture of an al Quaeda convert in the process of forming his identity just when he is calling the death sentence upon himself. It is the story of an extra-national opposition to western democracy, seen through the experience of a man who calls himself a "slave of Allah."



The book begins with his arrest and moves to the courtroom, telling the tale of Moussaoui's struggle with his defense lawyers and raising questions about his ability to be "represented" given his national and personal identity. Donahue explores his background in France as the son of Moroccan immigrants and follows him to London, Afghanistan, and Malaysia as he joins the growing fraternity of an Islam without borders. He acquires an extra-national identity in which his loyalty is no longer constituted by his national identity, but by his allegiance to fundamental Islam.

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Social Origins Of Islam
Mind, Economy, Discourse
Mohammed Bamyeh
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety
Sufis and the Dissemination of Islam in Medieval Palestine
Daphna Ephrat
Harvard University Press, 2008

This book represents the first continuous history of Sufism in Palestine. Covering the period between the rise of Islam and the spread of Ottoman rule and drawing on vast biographical material and complementary evidence, the book describes the social trajectory that Sufism followed. The narrative centers on the process by which ascetics, mystics, and holy figures living in medieval Palestine and collectively labeled “Sufis,” disseminated their traditions, formed communities, and helped shape an Islamic society and space. The work makes an original contribution to the study of the diffusion of Islam’s religious traditions and the formation of communities of believers in medieval Palestine, as well as the Islamization of Palestinian landscape and the spread of popular religiosity in this area.

The study of the area-specific is placed within the broader context of the history of Sufism, and the book is laced with observations about the historical-social dimensions of Islamic mysticism in general. Central to its subject matters are the diffusion of Sufi traditions, the extension of the social horizons of Sufism, and the emergence of institutions and public spaces around the Sufi friend of God. As such, the book is of interest to historians in the fields of Sufism, Islam, and the Near East.

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The State of Islam
Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan
Saadia Toor
Pluto Press, 2011

The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.

Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.

Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.

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The State, Ulama and Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia
Norshahril Saat
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The Suharto (1966-98) government of Indonesia and the Mahathir (1981-2003) government of Malaysia both launched Islamisation programmes, upgrading and creating religious institutions. The author argues that, while generally ulamas, or religious teachers, had to support state ideologies, they sometimes succeeded in ŸcapturingŒ the state by influencing policies in their favour. The author builds his argument on strong fieldwork data, especially interviews, and he engages in critical discussion of comparative politics paradigms and the concept of capture.
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The Struggle for Inclusion
Muslim Minorities and the Democratic Ethos
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Paul M. Sniderman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The politics of inclusion is about more than hate, exclusion, and discrimination.  It is a window into the moral character of contemporary liberal democracies.  The Struggle for Inclusion introduces a new method to the study of public opinion: to probe, step by step, how far non-Muslim majorities are willing to be inclusive, where they draw the line, and why they draw it there and not elsewhere.  Those committed to liberal democratic values and their concerns are the focus, not those advocating exclusion and intolerance.
 
Notwithstanding the turbulence and violence of the last decade over issues of immigration and of Muslims in the West, the results of this study demonstrate that the largest number of citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are more open to inclusion of Muslims than has been recognized. Not less important, the book reveals limits on inclusion that follow from the friction between liberal democratic values.  This pioneering work thus brings to light both pathways to progress and polarization traps. 
 
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The Study of Religion and the Training of Muslim Clergy in Europe
Academic and Religious Freedom in the 21st Century
Willem Drees
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Religious scholarship can be offensive tobelievers, as conflicts from the time ofGalileo and Spinoza to the recent critiqueof Danish religious scholars in the wake ofthe infamous Muhammad cartoons haveshown. Studies of this type of scholarshiphave been appropriated by believers as ameans of reinventing their own identities– as the training of twentieth-centuryMuslim clergy demonstrates. This volumeoffers a unique collection of training materialsfrom European Muslim clergy sincethe 1940s – including Third Reich reports on debriefing imams, surveillance files onMuslim activists, and information onBosnian clergy and their training centres– as well as an exploration of religion andacademic freedom in general, accompaniedby appendices in both Arabic and English.
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Sufi Lyrics
Bullhe Shah
Harvard University Press, 2015

A modern translation of verses by Bullhe Shah, the iconic eighteenth-century Sufi poet, treasured by readers worldwide to this day.

The poetry of Bullhe Shah (d. 1758) is considered one of the glories of premodern Panjabi literature. Born in Uch, Panjab, in present-day Pakistan, Bullhe Shah drew profoundly upon Sufi mysticism in his writings. His lyrics, famous for their vivid style and outspoken denunciation of artificial religious divisions, have long been held in affection by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and they continue to win audiences today across national boundaries and in the global Panjabi diaspora. Indeed, many young people in South Asia are already acquainted—albeit unknowingly at times—with the iconic eighteenth-century Panjabi poet’s words through popular musical genres of the twenty-first century.

The striking new translation in English is presented alongside the Panjabi text, in the Gurmukhi script, re-edited on the basis of the best modern Pakistani and Indian editions. Bullhe Shah’s Sufi Lyrics thus offers at once the most complete and most approachable version of this great poet’s works yet available.

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Sufi Lyrics
Selections from a World Classic
Bullhe Shah
Harvard University Press, 2021

A modern translation of verses by Bullhe Shah, the iconic eighteenth-century Sufi poet, treasured by readers worldwide to this day.

Bullhe Shah’s work is among the glories of Panjabi literature, and the iconic eighteenth-century poet is widely regarded as a master of mystical Sufi poetry. His verses, famous for their vivid style and outspoken denunciation of artificial religious divisions, have long been beloved and continue to win audiences around the world. This striking new translation is the most authoritative and engaging introduction to an enduring South Asian classic.

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Sufi Masters and the Creation of Saintly Spheres in Medieval Syria
Daphna Ephrat
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This book explores the creation of saintly spheres surrounding Sufi masters who functioned as embodiments of Islamic sainthood and imprinted their tangible mark on the land. Situated in the Syrian milieu of the counter-crusader period that was marked by intense religious excitement and re-sanctification of the landscape, the study centres on the role of Sufi saints as revivers of the prophetic legacy and as patrons of fellow believers, and their association with the glorious history of ancient Syrian cities and the expanding sacred landscape. Based upon a variety of literary sources, including hitherto unexplored saintly vitas, the investigation aims to contribute to an understanding of the process through which the religious and charismatic leadership of the venerated shaykhs was sustained and diffused, and their holiness emplaced and commemorated.
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Suicide Bombers
Allah's New Martyrs
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Pluto Press, 2005

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The Suspect
Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State
Rizwaan Sabir
Pluto Press, 2021
'An instant classic. Sabir is an inspiration' Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming!

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? The Suspect draws on the author's lived experiences of being suspected of terrorism to take the reader on a journey through British counterterrorism practices and the policing of Muslims.

Rizwaan Sabir describes what led to his arrest for suspected terrorism, his time in detention, and the surveillance he was subjected to on release from custody, including stop and frisk on the roadside, detentions at the border, and monitoring by police and government departments throughout his research.

Writing publicly for the first time about the traumatizing mental health effects of these experiences, he argues that these harmful outcomes are not the result of errors in government planning, but the consequences of using a counterinsurgency warfare approach to surveillance. If we are to break this injustice, we need to resist counterterrorism policy and practice.
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SWEDENBORG AND ESOTERIC ISLAM
HENRY CORBIN
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 1995

This volume makes two essays by Henry Corbin, the eminent French scholar of Islam, available in English for the first time. Although his primary interest was the esoteric tradition of Islam, Corbin was also a lifelong student of the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg. The first essay, "Mundus Imaginalis, or The Imaginary and the Imaginal," clarifies Corbin's use of the term he coined, mundus imaginalis, or "the imaginal world." This important concept appears in both Swedenborgian and esoteric Islamic spirituality. The second piece, "Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics," compares the revelation of the internal sense of the sacred boks of two distinct religions, Christianity and Islam.

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