Recognizing Islam

The recent crises in the Arab world have flooded the media with sensationalist portraits of Islam as a threatening and irrational presence that moves whole societies to cultural assertiveness, political intransigence, and economic frenzy. In Recognizing Islam, Michael Gilsenan, a historian and anthropologist, offers an original and much-needed understanding of the complex role of religion in the turbulent Middle East--a powerful challenge to the Western view of Islam as monolithic and all-determining, the key to the "Arab mind" and to a whole series of otherwise inexplicable events and institutions. Drawing extensively on twenty years of fieldwork in cities, villages, and tribal communities in the Middle East, Gilsenan explores a variety of social worlds that all claim Islamic affiliation: the feudal aristocracy of northern Lebanon, the working-class Sufi brotherhoods of Egypt, the new bourgeoisie of Algeria and Morocco. In each, he shows how Islam evolves in relation to shifting social, political, economic, and class structures even as it helps to shape them. Gilsenan restores to Islam and Islamic societies the variation and breadth of a living tradition that we grant, as a matter of course, to Christian relgion and Christian society. At once evocative and informative, his work provides the nuanced portrait of Islam that is now more indispensable than ever.

Islam is more than a set of laws, rites and beliefs presented as a religious and social totality. As a word it covers a multitude of everyday forms and practices that are interwoven in complex, sometimes almost invisible ways in daily existence. Drawing exclusively on his own fieldwork in Egypt, South Arabia and the Lebanon, the author explores the nature of Islam and its impact on the daily lives of its followers; he shows that all the Western stereotypes of Islam and its practitioners need to be treated with considerable scepticism. He demonstrates also that the understanding of Islam is dependent on recognizing a variety of class tensions and oppositions within an Islamic society. These have become all the more crucial in recent years with the growth of a capitalist economy, in which the forms and functions of the state have expanded considerably. This study focuses on the social and cultural divisions between very different groups and classes, ranging from the working masses of Cairo to the new bourgeoisie of Algeria and Morocco. The accent of the book is on the forms and transformations of Islam within these different societies. The impact of colonialism is discussed in this context, and reformist and radical Islamic movements are analyzed in relation to shifting structures in class and society at large. First published in 1982.

Recent crises in the Middle East have flooded the media with sensationalist and inaccurate portraits of Islam. This revised edition of Gilsenan's classic work shows that Islam covers a multitude of forms and practices which are woven into daily existence in complex and sometimes almost invisible ways. Gilsenan explores a variety of social worlds all claiming Islamic affiliation: the feudal aristocracy of northern Lebanon, the working class Sufi brotherhoods of Egypt, and the new bourgeoisies of Algeria and Morocco.

This booklet was compiled to refute the misconceived notions that Islam is a violent, brutal and intolerant religion which calls upon its followers to wage war, called jihad, against all non-Muslims, that Islam prohibits freedom of religion, and propagates its message by force, and that it does not tolerate any criticism of its teachings and urges Muslims to kill anyone who speaks against it. This book shows that: · Islam teaches Muslims to live in peace with all others in the world, tolerating religious differences. · It recognises for everyone the freedom to believe in and practise whatever religion they wish. · It requires Muslims to show self-restraint and patience in the face of verbal abuse of their religion. · It deplores any kind of violent attack on the general public of any country, innocently going about their daily business.

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.

This book argues that multiculturalism remains a relevant and vital framework through which to understand and construct inclusive forms of citizenship. Responding to contemporary ethnic and religious diversity in European states and the position of religious minorities, debates in multiculturalism have revitalized discussion of the public role of religion, yet multiculturalism has been increasingly challenged in both political as well as academic circles. With a focus on Britain and through a study of the narratives of British converts to Islam, this book engages in debates centered around multiculturalism, particularly on the issues of identity, recognition, and difference. Yet, it also identifies and interrogates multiculturalism’s shortcomings in relation to specifically religious identities and belonging. In a unique and innovative analysis, this book combines a discussion of multiculturalism in Britain with insights from political theology. It juxtaposes multiculturalism’s concepts of ethno-religious identity and recognition with the notions of religiosity and hospitality to offer a new perspective on religious identity and the implications of this for thinking with and about multiculturalism and multicultural social and political relations.

In recent years, extensive scholarly studies have been conducted on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the media. Despite the growing attention paid to the representations of Islam in the media, two important issues have been relatively neglected. Firstly, previous studies have focused on the mainstream (secular) media representations of Islam and Muslims. There has been no significant research or attention devoted to the discursive construction of Islam and Muslims in the British Christian media. Secondly, the studies on the representations of Islam and Muslims in the media have arguably relied on the paradigms developed in various post-colonial social theories such as ‘Orientalism’, ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘cultural racism’, and ‘Islamophobia’. While these theoretical approaches provide useful insights and critical tools for analysing the social condition we live in, they have clearly been developed upon the empirical premise that media discourse has the power to control and maintain unjust social representations of other cultures. The problem is that the ‘ideological baggage’ of domination and control dominates these theories to the point that the control paradigm becomes inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society. This book responds to these challenges. Taking the British Christian media as its focus, the study presented in this book fills the gap created by the absence of sociological research on Islam and Muslims constructed, reconstructed and represented in the religious media. From this perspective, this study is developed to facilitate a deeper understanding of public discourses and narratives on Islam and Muslims, as represented in the media with a religious background. While acknowledging the insights of previous studies on the media representations of Islam and Muslims, conducted using the conceptual frameworks drawn from post-colonial social theories, this study takes a different turn in analysing the British Christian media representations of Islam and Muslims through the lens of the politics of recognition as a theoretical framework.

The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French and, consequently, secular and liberal-society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society. Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences. Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy brilliantly demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis.