Reflections On Reason Religion And Tolerance

This is an attempt to reflect on Islam as it appears in the context of Fethullah Gulen's teachings, an influential Turkish-Muslim scholar who inspired a movement of education and interfaith dialogue. Grinell's extensive study of Islam and of Gulen allows him to pinpoint a unique expression of values and beliefs that could alter the typical understanding of Islam and Muslims in the West. He draws upon his previous studies of the Gulen Movement and comparatively places Gulen in a wider context of faith and society. What is the concept of knowledge in Islam as understood by Gulen? How is faith and service to people connected? Is Gulen after building a sultanate? Does the Gulen movement have a (hidden) political agenda? How traditional or modern is Gulen? These are some of the questions Grinell attempts to answer from his perspective. As a humanistic researcher on Islam, Grinell believes we definitely have something to learn from Islam.

On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the "superstitious" view of God held by most atheists and agnostics and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity. There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade -- Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular -- nor for many conventional believers. --Résumé de l'éditeur.

For the Sake of Allah explores the Gülen Movement, also known as Hizmet, a religio-social movement inspired by Fethullah Gülen, one of the most prominent Islamic scholars of Turkish origin in the modern world. Notwithstanding the current purge of Hizmet under the Erdoğan regime, it is one of the most interesting faith-based movements to arise from a Muslim society in the twentieth century. Since the late 1960s, Hizmet has opened thousands of schools around the world and has also contributed to relief efforts in Turkey and abroad.

"Rethinking Islam and Human Rights is the first book to delineate an original way of understanding the organic production of Islamic knowledge on human rights that overcomes the fragmented nature of the ('rapprochement') literature that focuses on change in the context of either Islamic scripture (formalized Islamic knowledge) or Islamic sensibility (experiential Islamic knowing). Thus, this book combines an appreciation for both facets of religious knowledge with an emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between the two. To achieve this, this book weaves together theoretical insights from a range of disciplines, while reworking process tracing methodology, to focus on a single case study analysis of Hizmet's practices (also known as the 'Gülen movement') to flesh out the dynamics of this interactive change and the centrality of practice-based knowledge production therein. In doing so, this book analytically demonstrates how and why social movement practice organically, unassumingly, unintentionally and, often-times, counter-intentionally produces socially transformative formalized Islamic knowledge on human rights. As a result, this book shows how it is possible to account for the production, assimilation, legitimization, and externalization of Islamic knowledge through a single relational process on some of the most intransigent issues in the context of Islam and human rights, that is apostasy and women's rights. Consequently, this book offers us an original, distinctive and important pathway of re-assessing age-old challenges at the cross-sectional impasse of change, stability, and religious knowledge production, which extends beyond those associated with Islam and human rights"--

The relationship between religion, intolerance and conflict is the subject of intense discussion, particularly in the context of the ongoing threat of terrorism. This book contains papers written by scholars in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology exploring the scientific and conceptual dimensions of religion and human conflict.

This book aims to examine and critically analyse the role that religion has and should have in the public and legal sphere. The main purpose of the book is to explain why religion, on the whole, should not be tolerated in a tolerant-liberal democracy and to describe exactly how it should not be tolerated – mainly by addressing legal issues. The main arguments of the book are, first, that as a general rule illiberal intolerance should not be tolerated; secondly, that there are meaningful, unique links between religion and intolerance, and between holding religious beliefs and holding intolerant views (and ultimately acting upon these views); and thirdly, that the religiosity of a legal claim is normally a reason, although not necessarily a prevailing one, not to accept that claim.

The creation of a secular education system was one of the great social experiments designed to break down religious intolerance within society. One element of this design was administrative, involving the creation of non-denominational schools, and another element involved a centralised curriculum. In this collection of essays, political philosophers, lawyers, sociologists, theologians and educators explore the role of state schools in promoting tolerance within 21st century multicultural, religiously pluralistic societies.