99 books match the query 'Muslims' and 5 start with w

cover of War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims

War on Error

Real Stories of American Muslims

Melody Moezzi

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim. Their approaches to religion couldn’t be more diverse: from a rapper of Korean and Egyptian descent to a bisexual Sudanese American to a converted white woman from Colorado living in Cairo and wearing the hijab. These individuals, whether they were born to the religion or came to it on their own, have made their own decisions about how observant they’ll be, whether or not to fast, how often to pray, and what to wear. Though each story is unique, each is also seen through the searching eyes of Melody Moezzi, herself an American Muslim of Iranian descent. She finds that the people she interviews are horrified that, in a post-9/11 world, they have seen their religion come to be represented, in the minds of many Americans, by terrorism. These thoughtful and articulate individuals represent the truth about the faith and its adherents who are drawn to the logic, compassion, and tolerance they find in Muslim teachings. Moezzi, ever comfortable with contradiction and nuance, is a likable narrator whose underlying assumption that “faith is greater than dogma” is strengthened as she learns more about her religion and faces her own biases and blind spots. This fresh new voice, combined with the perceptions and experiences of her fellow American Muslims, make for a read that is both illuminating and enjoyable.
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cover of We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities

We Are All Moors

Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities

Anouar Majid

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

In 1609 King Philip III ordered the expulsion of all Moriscos—Spaniards of Muslim descent—from Spain in an ongoing attempt to establish a homogeneous state and remove the last vestiges of Islam from his nation. Four centuries later, Spain and Europe are once again outraged by the presence of Islam within their borders, and, for many, the millions of Muslim immigrants now living there pose a fundamental challenge to European identity. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the vast Hispanic community in the United States, both legal and illegal, has raised similar fears. Exacerbated by globalization and 9/11, these nativist, anti-Islamic, and broadly anti-immigrant attitudes fatally undermine meaningful dialogue and progress essential to creating a more peaceful and just world.

In We Are All Moors, Anouar Majid contends that the acrimonious debates about immigration and Islam in the West are the cultural legacy of the conflict between Christians and Moors. Offering a groundbreaking new history of the West’s perception and treatment of minority cultures, Majid explores how “the Moor” emerged as the archetypal Other against which Europe would define itself. The characteristics attributed to this quintessential minority—racial inferiority, religious impurity, cultural incompatibility—would be reapplied to other non-European and non-Christian peoples: Native Americans, black Africans, Jews, and minority immigrant communities, among others.

The Moor, Majid reveals, has served as an unacknowledged but potent metaphor for all minority peoples in the West, endlessly reincarnated by the majority. Only by recognizing the connections between current fears about immigration and Islam and medieval Christianity’s crusade against the Moor, he argues, can we begin to redress centuries of oppression, learn from the tragedies of the past, and find common ground in a globalized world.

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cover of What Is Islamophobia?: Racism, Social Movements and the State

What Is Islamophobia?

Racism, Social Movements and the State

Edited by Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills and David Miller

Pluto Press, 2017

Since Israel began its construction in 2002, the Wall has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. 

Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services. 

This book explores the Palestinian experience of the Wall in their international context. What are the real intentions behind the Israeli security argument? Is it a means of securing territory permanently through an illegal annexation of East Jerusalem? The West Bank Wall is a cutting account of the impact of the wall and how it affects prospects of a future peace in the Middle East.
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cover of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route

White Enclosures

Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route

Piro Rexhepi

Duke University Press, 2022

For all its history of intersecting empires, the Balkans has been rarely framed as a global site of race and coloniality. This, as Piro Rexhepi argues in White Enclosures is not surprising, given the perception of the Balkans as colorblind and raceless, a project that spans post-Ottoman racial formations, transverses Socialist modernity and is negotiated anew in the process of postsocialist Euro-Atlantic integration. Connecting severed colonial histories from the vantage point of body politic, Rexhepi turns to the borderland zones of the Balkans to trace past and present geopolitical attempts of walling whiteness. From efforts to straighten the sexualities of post-Ottoman Muslim subjects, to Yugoslav nonaligned solidarities between Muslims of the second and third world, to Roma displacement and contemporary emergence of refugee carceral technologies along the Balkan Route, Rexhepi points not only to the epistemic erasures that maintain the fantasy of whiteness but also to the disruption emanating from the solidarities between queer- and transpeople that fold the Balkans back into global efforts to resist the politics of racial capitalism. 
 
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cover of Women, Jews and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile

Women, Jews and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile

Louise Mirrer

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Through a detailed analysis of medieval Spain's best known literary works, this book examines two common images of woman--the sexually attractive matron of the Christian upper classes, and the beautiful, pure, and sexually ripe upper-class Muslim or Jewish woman who is submissive to Christians. Suggesting a link between these images and the issues of political and military power, religious difference, and language in the context of reconquest Castile, the book argues that female representation in the literature provides a resolution of Christian-Muslim military conflict.
This volume is the first in the field of medieval Hispanic studies to reexamine the canon in the light of recent critical work on language, gender, power, and the effects of domination. It shows how the texts imaginarily liberate Christian women from the authority of their husbands, in order to demonstrate how women's access to the discourses of power leads to tragedy and ruin for the men who fail to silence them.
Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile makes the argument that dominant-"other" struggle, waged on the terrains of gender, religion, and war, is the most appropriate paradigm for discussing literary texts produced in the last centuries of reconquest. More than any other culture, medieval Spain reminds us of the provisional nature of national, religious, and sexual identity.
Exploring the gendering of subjects in society, the volume will be of interest to those in cultural and gender studies, Hispanic studies, medieval studies, and Middle Eastern studies. All texts are translated, and maps and illustrations help orient the reader.
Louise Mirrer is Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota.
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