Making Islam Work

The development of Islamic landscapes in Europe, is first and foremost related to Islamic authority. Religious authority relies on persuasiveness and deals with issues of truth, authenticity, legitimacy, trust, and ethics with reference to religious matters. This study argues that Islamic authority-making among European Muslims is a social and relational practice that is much broader and versatile than theological proficiency and personal status. It can also be conferred to objects, activities, and events. The book explores various ways in which Islamic authority is being constituted among Muslims in Western Europe with a particular focus on the role of ‘ordinary’ Muslims. This book is available in its entirety in Open Access.

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.

This book looks anew at the vexing question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, examining histories of Islamic politics and social movements in the Middle East since the 1970s.

The rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic science to European science during the Renaissance. The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations of Islamic scientific thought were laid well before Greek sources were formally translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Drawing on an account by the tenth-century intellectual historian Ibn al-Naidm that is ignored by most modern scholars, Saliba suggests that early translations from mainly Persian and Greek sources outlining elementary scientific ideas for the use of government departments were the impetus for the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. He argues further that there was an organic relationship between the Islamic scientific thought that developed in the later centuries and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance. Saliba outlines the conventional accounts of Islamic science, then discusses their shortcomings and proposes an alternate narrative. Using astronomy as a template for tracing the progress of science in Islamic civilization, Saliba demonstrates the originality of Islamic scientific thought. He details the innovations (including new mathematical tools) made by the Islamic astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work. Rather than viewing the rise and fall of Islamic science from the often-narrated perspectives of politics and religion, Saliba focuses on the scientific production itself and the complex social, economic, and intellectual conditions that made it possible.

This pioneering study examines the process of reasoning in Islamic law. Some of the key questions addressed here include whether sacred law operates differently from secular law, why laws change or stay the same and how different cultural and historical settings impact the development of legal rulings. In order to explore these questions, the author examines the decisions of thirty jurists from the largest legal tradition in Islam: the Hanafi school of law. He traces their rulings on the question of women and communal prayer across a very broad period of time - from the eighth to the eighteenth century - to demonstrate how jurists interpreted the law and reconciled their decisions with the scripture and the sayings of the Prophet. The result is a fascinating overview of how Islamic law has evolved and the thinking behind individual rulings.

Muslims around the world are passionate about trying to make a difference, and they are willing to make great sacrifices to see a positive change in the world. Yet when it comes to the administrative and organizational features of running a successful Muslim student association, youth group, or other local, national, or international Islamic organization, it is important to ensure that we lead with effectiveness, efficiency, and a duty to Allah. Tried and Tested: 123 Guidelines for Collective Islamic Work shares realistic and practical operational guidelines that are a prerequisite for success in collective Islamic work, whether it is running an organization or working in the field of da'wah. It will help provide structure, clarity, and a clear purpose when it comes to personnel training, administration, and networking, and it will help Islamic groups minimize mistakes. By applying these easy-to-understand, clear principles, collective Islamic work can become much more efficient and effective.

In much of the Muslim world, religion is the central foundation upon which family, community, morality, and identity are built. The inextricable embedment of religion in Muslim culture has forced a new generation of non-believing Muslims to face the heavy costs of abandoning their parents’ religion: disowned by their families, marginalized from their communities, imprisoned, or even sentenced to death by their governments. Struggling to reconcile the Muslim society he was living in as a scientist and physician and the religion he was being raised in, Ali A. Rizvi eventually loses his faith. Discovering that he is not alone, he moves to North America and promises to use his new freedom of speech to represent the voices that are usually quashed before reaching the mainstream media—the Atheist Muslim. In The Atheist Muslim, we follow Rizvi as he finds himself caught between two narrative voices he cannot relate to: extreme Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry in a post-9/11 world. The Atheist Muslim recounts the journey that allows Rizvi to criticize Islam—as one should be able to criticize any set of ideas—without demonizing his entire people. Emotionally and intellectually compelling, his personal story outlines the challenges of modern Islam and the factors that could help lead it toward a substantive, progressive reformation.

Unlike many narratives about the Czech lands, which place them on the periphery of their own history, this study considers Czechs as central characters, looking both east and west to find their place in the early modern world. Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 1453-1683 works through the descriptive and ethnographic texts produced by Czech speakers about Islam and the Ottoman Empire to show how they used this discourse to create Czech identities. Rather than simply constructing identity in opposition to the Islamic Other, Laura Lisy-Wagner shows how these authors played the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires off each other, creating an autonomous space for themselves in between. Lisy-Wagner introduces sources that are new to English-language historiography and uses them in a way that is new to Czech historiography as well. The chapters are organized based on different categories of agents-travelers, ethnographers, religious leaders, artists, and political revolutionaries-whose voices cast ideas of Europe and Czech identity in the early modern period in a new and different light.