Curating Lived Islam In The Muslim World

Beginning with the medieval period, this book collates and reviews first-hand scholarship on Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, as noted down by eminent British travellers, sleuths and observers of lived Islam. The book foregrounds the pre-colonial and pre-Orientalist phase and locates the multi-disciplinarity of Britain’s relationship with Muslims over the last millennium to demonstrate a multi-layered interface. Fully sensitive to a gender balance, the book focuses on specially selected individuals and their transformative experiences while living and working among Muslims. Examining the writings of male and female authors including Adelard, Thomas Coryate, Mary Montagu and Fanny Parkes, the book analyses their understanding of Islam. Moreover, the author explores the works of a salient number of representative colonial British women to move away from the imperious wives stereotype and shed light on gender and Islam in Near East and South Asia by illustrating the status of women, tribal hierarchies, historic and architectural sites and regional politics. Going beyond familiar views about colonialism, travel writings and memsahibs without losing sight of the complex relations between Britain and Asian Muslims, this book will be of interest to academics working on British history, Imperial history, the study of religions, Shi’i Islam, Islamic studies, Gender and the Empire and South Asian Studies.

Drinking, Fasting, and Tattoos reveals the problematics of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies via Lived Religion (LR) by using qualitative and collaborative methodologies. It offers LR as a potential recovery for the tensions across different disciplines of gender and women’s studies, theology, migration studies, and religious studies. It also problematizes major assumptions about Islam that have led to the current scholarship, such as churchification of Islam in Europe. It breaks a tripled silence around women, refugees, and unaffiliated Muslims. It draws attention to permeable boundaries between academic disciplines, secular and religious, researcher and researched divides while challenging current paradigms in academia, particularly the ones that still validate Euro-American frameworks. More specifically, Syrian women refugees whose representations can be expanded to Muslim women migrants in the Global North, present firsthand accounts regarding their faith-based practices and interpretations of Islam. The accounts reveal empowerment, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, and thus agency in unlikely places.

This book employs the figure of curation—the selection, arrangement, and display of objects, concepts, and things—to explore the cultures of platform capitalism. Considering its rise in the global art world as an authorial, meaning-making activity and an organizational-entrepreneurial endeavour, it looks at curation as the interweaving of innovative concepts, elaborate storytelling, and trusted experts leaking out from galleries to hashtags. Its logic encompasses diverse spheres ranging from high-brow art and the fashion world to low-brow experience economies and economies of authenticity, from confidence cultures and relationship gurus to algorithmic spectacles. More than an economy, “curate and be curated” is a diffused imperative amidst the disorienting spread of information that digital platforms enable: What to post, what to wear, what to eat, what friends to have, what music to hear, what films to watch, what places to visit, what socks to choose, and what opinion to have about serious issues like climate change, military coups, AI, genetics, space colonization, and cryonics, or everyday issues like football, fashion, and diet. Drawing on critical platform theory, material culture, and multi-sited ethnography, the book examines curated worlds of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration, including the luxury fashion brands Vetements and Balenciaga, Airbnb food experiences, and the figure of the life coach. The book argues that the curatorial imperative endorses an aspirational class imaginary and the idea that handling self-narratives is a strategic means of socialization that can assist upward mobilities as well as neoliberal narratives of well-being, promotion, and success. This book will be of key interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, curating, contemporary art theory, critical management studies, and art history, as well as to more general readers interested in new media, platforms, and digital culture.

This volume gives voice to cultural institutions working with collections of Islamic art and material culture globally, including many from outside Western Europe and North America. The contributions inform a vibrant, ongoing global conversation around curatorship in this field, one that embraces the responsibilities, challenges and opportunities for those engaged in it. Contributors—including art historians, curators and education specialists—discuss curatorial methodologies in theoretical and practical terms, present new exhibitions of Islamic art and culture, and explore the role of educational and engagement practices related to Islamic collections and Muslim audiences.

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives. It complements existing studies by focusing not on mosque-going, activist Muslims, but on how people live out their faith in schools, workplaces and homes, and in dealing with problems of health, wellbeing and relationships. As well as offering fresh empirical studies of everyday lived Islam, the book offers a new approach which calls for the study of ’official’ religion and everyday ’tactical’ religion in relation to one another. It discusses what this involves, the methods it requires, and how it relates to existing work in Islamic Studies.

What is the extraordinary text that is the Quran - and how does it relate to the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad? How did a legacy so richly varied in faith, law and civilization emerge from the message of the Revelation that came to be called 'Islam' (or submission to God's will)? This immaculately researched yet thoroughly accessible book offers a journey into the full range of experience - past and present, secular and sacred - of the diverse people and cultures of the Muslim world. Threads of continuity and change are woven through each chapter to make a coherent narrative covering a broad variety of themes and topics. Poets, cities and the architecture of mosques are as much a part of the exploration as multiple aspects of scripture, the status of women in the faith, and the emergence of a 'digital community' of believers. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, understanding what Islam is about and what Muslims believe is a vital concern across all frontiers. "A Companion to the Muslim World" is an attractive venture by distinguished scholars to contribute toward this urgent process of comprehension.

In This Book The Author Ecologises Islam And Studies It. In Relation To Non-Violence, Arts And Sciences, Secularism, Marxism-Leninism; Its Philosophy, Political System, Morality, Ilfluence On Hinduism Etc.