There are roughly eight million Muslims in south-east Europe, among them Albanians, Bosniaks, Turks and Roma -- descendants of converts or settlers in the Ottoman period. This new history of the social, political and religious transformations that this population experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- a period marked by the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and by the creation of the modern Balkan states -- will shed new light on the European Muslim experience. Southeast Europe's Muslims have experienced a slow and complex crystallisation of their respective national identities, which accelerated after 1945 as a result of the authoritarian modernisation of communist regimes and, in the late twentieth century, ended in nationalist mobilisations that precipitated the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo during the break-up of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. At a religious level, these populations have re--mained connected to the institutions established by the Ottoman Empire, as well as to various educational, intellectual and Sufi (mystic) networks. With the fall of communism, new transnational networks appeared, especially neo-Salafist and neo-Sufi ones, although Europe's Balkan Muslims have not escaped the wider processes of secularisation.

This book discusses the role of Islam in the political and social developments in the Balkans after the fall of communism. It explores comparatively the transformations of Muslim identities under the influence of various national and transnational, domestic and global factors.

In the growing body of literature about the evolution and the role of Islam in Europe as a whole and the Balkans in particular, this volume holds a special place as it offers a multidisciplinary approach to the encounter-transformation-discontinuity-continuity of Islam in the region. Thus, it provides excellent material for students of social and political studies, history and even architecture, at the bachelor and master level. At the same time, it aspires to attract the attention of researchers and academics who are interested in the evolution of Islam in the Balkans. It should be noted that the style and the language of the articles in this volume would also make it easily accessible to the general interested reader who is not detached from the latest social and political developments in the Balkans. In this regard, the volume would also be useful for a number of think tank members and even politicians in the Balkans, providing them with knowledge of the region’s past and present, with hope for an integrated future.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

The tragic events that began to unfold in the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s have drawn the world's attention to the history and rich culture of the Muslim communities of Bosnia especially, but also of Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia - the historic heartland of Muslim Europe. Here H. T. Norris breaks new ground by focusing on their religious and intellectual links with the Arab world, Persia and Central Asia, whereas the few previous publications on the subject have been mostly concerned with the more obvious links between the Balkan Muslims and the Turks. Norris illustrates from a wide range of sources the many channels through which the Arabs and Persians were linked with Balkan peoples, especially after the Ottoman conquest, in their art, architecture, literature and religion - direct contacts were also forged through Sufism. From the earliest times, also, many Balkan Muslim soldiers and bureaucrats, as well as scholars and poets, made an impact on the wider Islamic world, the most prominent being Mohammed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt. The resurgence of Muslim identity in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo has of course much to do with the aggressive nature of Serbian nationalism. But it is also a legacy of the region's relations over many centuries with the Arab countries and Persia, now given a new meaning in the wake of Serbian attempts to 'cleanse' Sarajevo and other cities of their Muslim inhabitants. As the wider world has become aware, for the first time in several generations, of the phenomenon of Muslim Europe, many people of all persuasions now want to know and understand more about it, and the forces which have been tearing ancient communities apart and threatening a wider conflagration. Up till now, the sources available to them have been largely concerned with power politics, economics and demography. H. T. Norris's cultural investigation, the fruit of many years' research, corrects this imbalance.

Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies.

"Salafism has emerged as one of the most visible and questioned faces to contemporary Islam. In many countries from the East to the West, this fundamentalist vision seeking to restore a vision of Islam that is supposed to be pure and unchanged is increasingly successful. This is the case in France where thousands of Muslims are now dedicated to living this puritanical and fundamentalist religiosity. In connection with some Islamic countries, starting with Saudi Arabia, they appeal to a transnational narrative through which they promote a new face of globalization today. Reacting both political Islam and Jihadism, they prefer becoming entrepreneurs in order to seek for economic success. Splitting from the rest of the society, they prefer building a counter-narrative on behalf of which they represent the purest form of the Islamic identity nowadays. Through a prolonged immersion in French Salafist communities for several years, this book sheds light on the lifestyle, representations, profiles, and trajectories of these communities. By focusing on quietist Salafism and its formative ties with several Gulf countries, especially with Saudi Arabia, this book is also an attempt to understand contemporary religious globalizations. Besides this political globalization of Salafism, this also sheds light on a dynamic that is less centred on formal political entities, and which primarily refers to a globalization taking place in the margins that have been little studied for too long"--

Using a wealth of primary sources and covering the entire Ottoman period, Ottoman Women in Public Space challenges the traditional view that sees Ottoman women as a largely silent element of society, restricted to the home and not seen beyond the walls of the house or the public bath. Instead, taking women in a variety of roles, as economic and political actors, prostitutes, flirts and slaves, the book argues that women were active participants in the public space, visible, present and an essential element in the everyday, public life of the empire. Ottoman Women in Public Space thus offers a vibrant and dynamic understanding of Ottoman history. Contributors are: Edith Gülçin Ambros, Ebru Boyar, Palmira Brummett, Kate Fleet and Svetla Ianeva.

Light upon Light: Essays in Islamic Thought and History in Honor of Gerhard Bowering brings together studies that explore the richness of Islamic intellectual life in the pre-modern period.

Translating a collection of the most important descriptions of the Turks found in medieval Arabic texts into English, this book aims at delineating the coming of the Turkic people in the eleventh century, their military successes in Iran and Iraq, and the emergence of the sultanate. The book introduces the reader to the history of the Islamic Caliphate and the Turkic people. This introduction is followed by annotated translated sources which illuminate; the view of the Eurasian steppes in Muslim-Arabic geographical writing from the pre-Saljūq period, the self-image and ideology of the victorious Saljūqs and their fundamental claim to legitimacy, and the conventional narrative of the coming of the Saljūqs in later Arabic historiography. Illustrating the variety of sources available on the history of Turkic tribes in the Eurasian steppes and in central Islamic lands, ranging from geographical writing, to chronicles, to mythological legends, this book will be an essential resource for students and scholars with an interest in Turks and image, History, and Middle East Studies.