Islam And The Challenges Of Modernity

Tariq Ramadan attempts to demonstrate, using sources which draw upon Islamic thought and civilization, that Muslims can respond to contemporary challenges of modernity without betraying their identity. The book argues that Muslims, nurished by their own points of reference, can approach the modern epoch by adopting a specific social, political, and economic model that is linked to ethical values, a sense of finalities and spirituality. Rather than a modernism that tends to impose Westernization, it is a modernity that admits to the pluralism of civilizations, religions, and cultures. Table of Contents: Foreword Introduction History of a Concept The Lessons of History Part 1: At the shores of Transcendence: between God and Man Part 2: The Horizons of Islam: Between Man and the Community Part 3: Values and Finalities: The Cultural Dimension of the Civilizational Face to Face Conclusion Appendix Index Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor in Identity and Citizenship at Erasmus University. He was named by TIME Magazine as one of the one hundred innovators of the twenty-first century

Since Europeans first colonized Arab lands in the 19th century, they have been pressing to have the area's indigenous laws and legal systems accord with Western models. Although most Arab states now have national codes of law that reflect Western influence, fierce internal struggles continue over how to interpret Islamic law, particularly in the areas of gender and family. From different geographical and ideological points across the contemporary Arab world, Haddad and Stowasser demonstrate the range of views on just what Islam's legal heritage in the region should be. For either law or religion classes, Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity provides the broad historical overview and particular cases needed to understand this contentious issue. Visit our website for sample chapters!

" In this first volume of the Yearbook of Sociology of Islam Georg Stauth brought together Islamologists and Sociologists who explore Islam and modern applications of Islamic thought as a way of demonstrating in a variety of social fields the ambiguity of the effective use of religious ideas and specifically Islamic models of social order to promote change. Far away from being apologetic, this collection of papers intends to show that the transcendental visions of Islam have been used as a foundational matrix for an indigenized ""Islamic Sociology"" as much as they played an important role in the modern restructuration of local symbolic and political orders. Analysis and discourse are privileged components in the scientific part of both the Islamic and the Western world. Accordingly, this volume attempts to contribute to the ongoing dialogue among sociologists about the effective ""history"" of exchange between Islamic visions and modernity. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Mohammed Arkoun, Friedemann Büttner, Fanny Colonna, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Peter Heine, Armando Salvatore, Reinhard Schulze, Georg Stauth, Karin Werner, Sami Zubaida Editor: Georg Stauth teaches sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. "

This book examines Dār al-Iftā, the official Saudi religious establishment for issuing fatwas, between 1971 and 1999. Specifically, it explores the challenges that this scholarly body encountered when applying Wahhābī interpretations of the Shari'a to late twentieth-century modernity.

Tradition and Modernity focuses on how Christians and Muslims connect their traditions to modernity, looking especially at understandings of history, changing patterns of authority, and approaches to freedom. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts from 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, from John Henry Newman to Tariq Ramadan, accompanied by illuminating commentaries.

In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.

"The objective of this book is to identify and examine the place of religion as such an abstract category in modern Islamic discussions from the nineteenth century to the present. It shows how ideas of religion facilitated the transformation of religious discourses, both when accepting and resisting modernity.The central focus is on intellectuals who grappled with reconciling Islam with successive waves of modernization. "Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse" begins with early discussions in Egypt and colonial India on the essence of religion and its social value in the light of modern challenges in science and politics. It then moves from these discussions, and explores key contributions by twentieth century Muslim intellectuals on the meaning of identity, state, law, and gender. Above all, Abdulkader Tayob offers the reader a creative way of understanding modern Islamic discourse, uncovering the deep structural foundations of its approach to religion, religious values and spirituality." -- from book jacket.