In light of the ongoing public debate that focuses on differences between Islam and the West, this book suggests a change of perspective. It departs from the observation that both western Orientalists and Islamist activists have defined Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious, political and social system. In shifting from differences to similarities, it leaves behind the increasingly circular debate about the "true" nature of Islam in which the Muslim religion has been represented either as intrinsically hostile to or as principally compatible with modern culture. Instead, it associates the evolution of a particularly essentialist image of Islam with a complex process of cross-cutting (self)-interpretations of Muslim and Western societies within an emerging global public sphere. Putting its focus on the life and work of a number of paradigmatic individuals, the book investigates the intellectual encounters and discursive interdependencies among western and Muslim intellectuals. In a historical genealogy it deconstructs the essentialist image of Islam in uncovering its conceptual foundations in the modern transformation of European and Muslim societies from the nineteenth century onwards. Thereby, the changing infrastructure of the global public sphere has facilitated the gradual popularization, trivialization, and dissemination of a previously elitist discourse on Islam and modernity. In this way, the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing system has been turned into accepted knowledge in the Western and Muslim worlds alike.

This second edition of a collection of essays reports on how new media-fax machines, satellite television and the Internet - and the new uses of older media-cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone and the press - shape belief, authority and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The book suggests new ways of looking at the social organization of communications and the shifting links among media of various kinds in local and transnational contexts. The extent to which today's new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understanding of gender, authority, social justice, identities and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this work.

This collection of essays examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask - often both simultaneously - discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. It builds on scholarship that re-imagines theories and practices of the public in modern and contemporary societies. While examining disparate time periods and locations, each contributor views modern and contemporary public spheres as crucial to the functioning, and understanding, of political and societal power in Muslim majority countries.

Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East explores the many facets associated with the questions of modernity and minority in the context of religious communities in the Middle East by focusing on inter-communal dialogues and identity construction among the Jewish and Christian communities of the Middle East and paying special attention to the concept of space.This volume draws examples of these issues from experiences in the public sphere such as education, public performance, and political engagement discussing how religious communities were perceived and how they perceived themselves. Based on the conference proceedings from the 2013 conference at Leiden University entitled Common Ground? Changing Interpretations of Public Space in the Middle East among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the 19th and 20th Century this volume presents a variety of cases of minority engagement in Middle Eastern society. With contributions by: T. Baarda, A. Boum, S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah, A. Massot, H. Müller-Sommerfeld, H.L. Murre-van den Berg, L. Robson, K.Sanchez Summerer, A. Schlaepfer, D. Schroeter and Y. Wallach

This text explains why the French government decided to ban religious clothing from public schools and why the 2004 law, which targeted Islamic headscarves, created such a fury.

The return of religion to the public sphere raises various dilemmas. Rights and values, pluralism and identity, justice and efficacy, autonomy and tradition, and integration and toleration cannot always be balanced without the loss of something valuable. This volume of essays tackles such dilemmas from two perspectives. To begin, major contemporary theorists rethink the place of religion in the public sphere from republican, liberal and critical-theoretical viewpoints. Contributors then bring together theory and practice to better conceptualize and assess the latest developments in European jurisprudence with respect to religion.

In recent years, Islam has become a more visible force, not only in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but also in Western Europe and the United States. Greater attention to religious observance (prayer, fasting, dress, pilgrimage) has accompanied the creation of new institutions (mosques, finance houses, insurance companies, schools, clinics, and hospitals). Religiously inspired social and political movements have proliferated. Only a few decades ago, Muslims were virtually invisible in Europe and America. Today, increased immigration has changed the religious landscape of the West. Mosques and Islamic centers are found in European and American cities and towns. Muslims are visible in nearly every area of social and political life. A list of major Islamic cities and populations today must include not only Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, and Islamabad, but also Paris, London, New York, and Detroit. This demographic and cultural shift requires that we speak not only of the relationship between the traditional Islamic world and the West, but also about Islam in the West. It has also meant that Islam has been obliged to modernize, to grapple with its status as a minority religion in some parts of the world and a majority one in others. Modernizing Islam speaks to the significance, origins, influences, and implications of Islam's changes, and thus to the various ways in which this religion is becoming a truly global force, shaping such realms as law, politics, education, and ethics, among many others

This book explores the public role of Islam in contemporary world politics. “Public Islam” refers to the diverse invocations and struggles over Islamic ideas and practices that increasingly influence the politics and social life of large parts of the globe. The contributors to this volume show how public Islam articulates competing notions and practices of the common good and a way of envisioning alternative political and religious ideas and realities, reconfiguring established boundaries of civil and social life. Drawing on examples from the late Ottoman Empire, Africa, South Asia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East, this volume facilitates understanding the multiple ways in which the public sphere, a key concept in social thought, can be made transculturally feasible by encompassing the evolution of non-Western societies in which religion plays a vital role.

Senior scholars of Islamic studies and the anthropology of Islam gather in this volume to pay tribute to one of the giants of the field, Dale F. Eickelman.