Beyond Belief

Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447210638
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Book Description
Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is, in the Naipaul way, a very rich and human book, full of people and their stories: stories of family, both broken and whole; of religion and nation; and of the constant struggle to create a world of virtue and prosperity in equal measure. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of the non-Arab Islamic states: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia? How do the converted peoples view their past – and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns, after a gap of seventeen years, to find out how and what the converted preach. ‘Peerless . . . the human encounters are described minutely, superbly, picking up inconsistencies in people’s tales, catching the uncertainties and the nuances . . . there is a candour to his writing, a constant precision at its heart’ – Sunday Times

Beyond Islam

Author: Sami Zubaida
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857718649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
In this magisterial work, Sami Zubaida draws on a distinguished career's worth of experience trying to understand the region to address the fundamental question in Middle East studies: what is the Middle East? He argues, controversially, that to see it through the prism of Islam, as it is conventionally viewed, is to completely misunderstand it. Many of what we think of as the 'Islamic' characteristics of the region are products of culture and society, not religion.To think of Islam itself as an essential, anti-modern force in the region rather than something shaped by specific historical-economic processes is, Zubaida argues, a mistake. Instead, he offers us an alternative view of the region, its historic cosmpolitanism, its religious and cultural diversity, its rapid adoption of new media cultures, which reveals a multi-faceted and complex region teeming with multiple identities. Wide-ranging, erudite and powerfully argued, Zubaida's work will be essential reading for future generations of students of this fascinating region.

Beyond Debt

Author: Daromir Rudnyckyj
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655208X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Beyond Timbuktu

Author: Ousmane Oumar Kane
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674969359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries. Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange. The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.

Jihad Beyond Islam

Author: Gabriele Marranci
Publisher: Berg
ISBN: 1845201582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
By observing the current crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, this book explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. In the end, jihad is what Muslims say it is. Marranci offers us a nuanced and anthropolitical understanding of Muslims' lives beyond the predictable clichés.

Beyond Shariati

Author: Siavash Saffari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107164168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
A new reading of Ali Shariati's intellectual legacy on Iranian political discourse and concepts of Islam and modernity.

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture

Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119068576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1442

Book Description
The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

Islam Beyond Borders

Author: James Piscatori
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Revealing how the one community of the faith in the Qur'an, the umma, affects competing politics of identity in the Muslim world.

Beyond Jihad

Author: Kim Ezra Shienbaum
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
ISBN: 1933146192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
This collection of non Western scholarly voices is a long awaited remedy to the lack of critical commentary by Muslim intellectuals on the nature of modern Jihadi terrorism and the political debate within Islam over the direction of resistance to modernization and secularization of traditional societies. The work is divided into three parts: 1) Understanding the Islamist Mind. 2) Understanding Islamism and Politics. 3) Beyond Jihad: Expanding the Circle of Sanity. Major figures such as Dr. Ali Sina, Sayeed M. Said and Syed Kamran Mirza contribute previously unpublished essays; indeed the work has virtually new essays from all contributors. With historical introductions by Dr Kim Sheinbaum and Jamal Hasan. Introduction is by terrorism expert Dr.Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad and the PBS documentary " Jihad in America". " A long needed discussion by superb scholars...recommended for research libraries. Professor P duQuenoy, American University in Cairo.

Shattering the Myth

Author: Bruce B. Lawrence
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691004877
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Islam, Bruce Lawrence argues, is a complex, international religious system that cannot be reduced to stereotypes. As Lawrence demonstrates, Islam is a religion shaped as much by its own postulates and ethical demands as by the specific circumstances of Muslim people in the modern world. It is time, Lawrence believes, to replace inaccurate images of Islam with a recognition of the multifaceted character of this global religion and of its widely diverse adherents. Shattering the Myth provides significant insights into the history of Islam and a greater understanding of the varied experiences of Muslims today.