Author: Bayram Sevinç

Published in: Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, Vol. 13, Issue 3 (November 2024), pp. 410–431

Publication Date: November 21, 2024

Publisher: Brill

Abstract:

Over the past two decades, Islamic movements and activism in the USA have progressed. The weak part of the explanation models for Islamic activism is an inclusive description of obstacles in the discursive field. These obstacles are essentially sources of symbolic violence in discourse. There is also a debate regarding the discursive representation of Muslims. Native and immigrant Muslims in the USA have struggled against the dominance of external discourses. Therefore, this study examines the essential boundaries and obstacles of the discursive field that activist Muslims (digital activists particularly) encounter when constructing discourses in the USA. In this study, I used the current activism findings to investigate the discursive field’s fundamental boundaries and obstacles. The research proves that barriers such as stigmatization, racialization, nativism, security paradigm, gender, marginalization, and discrimination form the main basis of symbolic violence.

Source: Brill Publishers

Author: Etin Anwar, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Published in: Religions, Vol. 15, Issue 6 (June 2024), pp. 706-726

Publication Date: June 6, 2024

Publisher: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Basel, Switzerland

Abstract:

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies.

The outcome of this research demonstrates:

1. How Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves;
2. How Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions;
3. How the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and
4. How Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements.

Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies.

Keywords: Islamic liberation theology; agency; Women’s March; Justice activism; Islamic feminist resistance

Read the full article HERE.

Source: MDPI

Author: Rhea Rahman, Brooklyn College, City University of  New York

Published in: Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 93, No. 2 (May 2023), pp. 256-272

Publication Date: May 13, 2023

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract:

Muslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, Rhea Rahman explores the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. She examines the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different interpretations and practices of what it means to ‘do well’. Situating an understanding of ‘development’ in an analysis of global racial capitalism, the author argues that, as an Islamic inspired aid organization based in the UK, Islamic Relief is both subject to anti-Muslim racism and complicit in a white-adjacent racialized project of ‘development’ in Africa. She foregrounds the whiteness of development to show how modernist development practice makes it impossible to see other ways of conceptualizing ‘doing well’ that are also deeply grounded in Islam.

Source: MUSE

Authors: Muzammil Quraishi and Matthew Wilkinson

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 17, Issue 3, pp. 411–431

Publication Date: May 3, 2023

Publisher: Springer

Abstract:

Filling a significant gap in prisons research, this paper articulates the experiences and perspectives of a group of Muslim prison officers interviewed as part of an international study examining Islam in prison. These Muslim prison officers occupied a precarious occupational cultural space between Us (prison officers) and Them (Muslim prisoners) which presented both risks of exclusion, religious and racial prejudices and opportunities to build bridges between prisoners and staff and to educate, especially in the dimension of religion.

The very presence of Muslim prison officers in prisons challenged traditional occupational cultural stereotypes around both prison officers and Muslims. The disproportionately large numbers of Muslim prisoners in Europe and the haphazard way that Muslim prison officers often encounter the profession, suggest both that better training focused upon Islam in prison for existing prison officers is vital and that more directed recruitment of Muslim prison officers is needed.

Source: Springer

Author: Fredrick Walter Lorenz

Published in: Journal of World History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 2023), pp. 241-276

Publication Date: June 2023

Publisher: University of Hawai’i Press

Abstract:

This article examines Ottoman and British collaborative efforts to intervene in and transform Muslim religious and cultural affairs in the Cape of Good Hope from 1862 to 1869. It focuses on how the Ottoman sultan reinstated the Ottoman Empire’s prestige globally in the decade following the Crimean War by employing religious scholars and British agents in Cape Town to expand the empire’s sphere of influence in Africa through “soft power.” This was part of a larger collaborative enterprise between Ottoman and British authorities, which Fredrick Walter Lorenz calls Ottoman-British trans imperialism. The Author argues that the project of Ottoman-British trans imperialism in Cape Town encountered opposition when confronted by customary and charismatic forms of Islam and the divided loyalties of local Muslim communities. This crucial examination of the Cape Colony highlights how local collaboration and resistance mediated trans imperial ambitions in Cape Town and redefined the social networks and local ties among Cape Muslims.

Source: MUSE

Authors: Jennifer A. Selby and Rehan Sayeed

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 17, Issue 3, pp. 467–488

Publication Date: August 4, 2023

Publisher: Springer

Abstract:

Drawing on qualitative interviews with 278 self-identified Muslims from across Canada, this article examines how Muslim Canadians engage with sources of religious authority online. Jennifer A. Selby and Rehan Sayeed focus on how participants assess the authoritativeness of websites, which figures they follow, and whether the Canadian context factors into how they interpret Islam-related material online.

The authors both agree and disagree with scholarship that characterizes the Internet as democratizing the traditions of Islam (Bunt, 2018; Eickelman & Anderson, 2003; Mandaville in Theory, Culture & Society, 24:101–115, 2007; Robinson in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19:339–354, 2009; Sands in Contemporary Islam 4:139–155, 2010), and with who see it as unchanging (Berkey, 2016). Their interlocutors suggest that the online context fosters a notable and visible bi-directionality of authority; moreover, content remains shaped by view counts and algorithms. Lastly, despite the online nature of the World Wide Web, the materiality, textuality, and visual markers of the Qur’an remain vital for Their interlocutors.

Source: Springer

Author: Navhat Nuraniyah

Published in: Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 1-9

Publication Date: June 2023

Publisher: International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research

Abstract:

When the Indonesian government proscribed the non-violent Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) in May 2017, some observers warned of the “radicalizing effects” of repression. The banning of traditionalist Islamist group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), in late 2020 also raised concerns over potential backlash. The country’s largest moderate Muslim group, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), even urged its followers to remain vigilant against the latent threat of “ex-HTI and ex-FPI” members who “continued to operate underground”. This article goes beyond such unsubstantiated claims to investigate how HTI and FPI have actually adapted to the changing political environment and what explains their divergent tactics. It also assesses the potential for militant splinters.

Read the full text HERE.

Author: Inaash Islam

Published in: Feminist Formations, Vol. 35, Issue 2, Summer 2023, pp. 174-197

Publication Date: September 28, 2023

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Abstract:

What is the relationship between Islamic principles of modesty and practices of aesthetic labor in the industries of influencer marketing and fashion? Inaash Islam responds to this question by examining the aesthetic labor of self-proclaimed modest Muslim female social media influencers to show how Islamic modesty—as it is understood via patriarchal interpretations of Islamic texts, and by cultural authorities in secular circles of fashion, is deemed inherently antithetical to Muslim female aesthetic labor in the fashion and influencer marketing industries. Her findings show that Muslimah influencers face a doubly burdened challenge: on the one hand, Muslim women are expected to modify their performances of modesty to align with the secular expectations of aesthetic labor in these industries, but on the other, they are expected to observe modesty according to patriarchal interpretations of Islamic texts. In either case, failure to abide by racialized and gendered expectations renders Muslim women vulnerable to critique from Muslim and non-Muslim communities. She argues that this conflict illustrates that Islamic modesty is deemed fundamental to contemporary conceptions and embodied performances of Muslim womanhood online and plays a key role in shaping racialized and gendered expectations of Muslim women held by Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the west.

Authors: Nadiya N. Ali, Lucy El-Sherif, and Hawa Y. Mire

Published in: ReOrient, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 78-100 (23 pages)

Publication Date: September 9, 2023

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Abstract:

The existing Islamophobia literature has come to illustrate how the Muslim subject “can at a moment’s notice be erected as [an] object of supervision and discipline” (Morey and Yaqin 2011: 5–6). In the popular imagination, Muslimhood has come to stand for an undifferentiated culturally alien oriental subject defined through the prism of racialized violence and irrationality. Although much of the anti-Islamophobia efforts–academic and community-based – work to combat the reductiveness of a universalized Muslim figure, these efforts tend to uncritically take up the brown Muslim figure as the starting point of inquiry, thereby further reifying the homogenizing racialization of dominant discourses. This article opens up the possibilities to expand thinking on the lifeworld of Islamophobia by addressing the erasure that happens with this homogenizing approach to Islamophobia. In particular, The Authors consider the dialogical nature between the operational life of Islamophobia and the differing proximities to whiteness our intersectional subject positions make available. And in turn, how these availabilities come to shape the experience of Islamophobia is a prime focus of analysis. The Authors ask: how does the systemic demarcation of Muslim subjectivity, across racial, ethnic, class, regional, and ideological lines, interact with how Islamophobia is experienced and operationalized? Leveraging an auto-ethnographic approach, They provide first-person narratives of Islamophobic encounters from our respective geopolitical and social locations to deconstruct and delineate an intersectional understanding of Islamophobia.

Read the full text Here.

Source: JSTOR

Author: Atta Barkindo

Published in: Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 12-17 (6 pages)

Publication Date: March 2023

Publisher: International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research

Abstract:

In November 2015, the Islamic State (IS) dedicated the eighth issue of its English-language monthly propaganda magazine, Dabiq, to the propagation of strict Islamic governance in Africa, with the title “Sharia Alone will Rule Africa”. It was done to counter the growing tentacles of Al-Qaeda (AQ) in Africa. The issue also outlined IS’ strategy on how to mobilize, create and support various regional groups, known as provinces or wilayat, around the continent, whose members carry out violence in its name. In early 2014, different jihadist groups around Africa, such as Boko Haram, began pledging allegiance to then IS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leading the region to become the new IS wilayat in Africa. While each province undertook IS-approved activities in terms of violence and governance, one unifying element was total submission to the vision of a self-styled global Sunni caliphate. Today, some African militant groups have regional partners with networks spanning the North African region and straddling the Sahara into East and West Africa. At the same time, it has become an IS recruitment hub, with the terror group co-opting indigenous partners and interfacing with local imams (prayer leaders) to control, influence or intimidate other Islamic sects with similar ideologies to join their cause. Since early 2022, IS has conducted half of its claimed global operations in Africa. This means Africa has emerged as the new center of gravity for IS. With existing structural issues of poverty and dispossession across different African regions, there is the potential for IS to consolidate its presence and serve as a threat to the global order. Against this backdrop, this article examines the place of Boko Haram-Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) in this expanding terror network of IS across Africa. It highlights the future scenarios that could emerge if this trend is not checkmated.

Read the full text HERE.

Source: JSTOR