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

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: Abdul-Azim Ahmed

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 16, pp 135–154

Publication Date: July 18, 2022

Publisher: Springer

The field of ‘Islamic Studies’, like ‘Religious Studies’, is a broad-church. It includes a number of epistemological and ontological positions associated with a range of disciplines. The diversity inherent in a category such as ‘Islamic Studies’ is challenged by a bifurcation of two predominant approaches found within the field, the textual and the sociological. In this paper, Dr. Abdul-Azim Ahmed seeks to propose a new concept for contemporary Islamic studies, that of Anglophone Islam, which will allow a broader range of scholarship to be contextualized in relation to each other. The concept also opens a new set of questions to be explored by scholars of Islamic studies. It will be of particular interest to scholars involved in contemporary Islamic studies in fields such as American Muslim studies, British Muslim studies and European Muslim studies, but will also have utility to theological, historical and philosophical scholars of Islam working in the English language.

About the Author

Dr Abdul-Azim Ahmed is Assistant Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Wales. He has an academic background in the sociology of religion; His PhD looked at the everyday life of a British mosque and he is currently in the process of writing books on mosques in the UK and Muslims in Wales. He is also Editor of On Religion magazine, a quarterly publication on religion, society and current affairs. He currently works as a researcher on equality issues for a non-governmental organization in Wales.

Download the full article HERE.

Source: Springer

Authors: Jannat Fatima Farooqui and Archana Kaushik

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 16, Issue 1

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

Publication Date: March 5, 2022

In the West, Islam has been historically ‘othered’ as a religion and frequently linked to negative media representation, terrorism, and fundamentalism. As the aftermath of 9/11 witnessed a global rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and action, there was a parallel increase in academic research on the Muslim community, including adults, youth, and children. In this paper, a systematic literature review was undertaken to explore how empirical studies over the last two decades have investigated experiences of growing up as young Muslims in an age of Islamophobia.

Based on objective inclusion and exclusion criteria, pertinent databases were searched for research with contextual, temporal, topical relevance. NVivo Plus software was used for content-coding, quantitative processing, and qualitative thematic analyses of data. A rigorous screening process resulted in the identification, compilation, and methodical review of 87 journal articles, between 2001 – 2021, on the topic ‘Islamophobia and Young Muslims.’

The descriptive analysis represented that there has been a substantial increase in empirical studies on young Muslims in the last five years, particularly in the field of educational studies. A majority of these studies covered experiences of adolescent Muslims, between 13-20 years, residing in western countries like U.K., U.S.A., and Australia. Qualitative research designs were frequently employed, with a sample size of >50 participants. Through the word-count frequency output of NVivo, four meaningful and recurrent themes of ‘Islamophobia’, ‘Identity’, ‘School’, and ‘Women’ were derived. Content analysis of these themes revealed that studies widely researched on diverse interpretations of Islamophobia in the lives of young Muslims, identity negotiation strategies adopted by Muslim minority youth, school-based religious bullying, and gendered facets of Islamophobia.

Research gaps showed a requirement for studies that capture heterogeneous narratives of Muslim youth in non-western countries and early childhood settings. Future research recommendations are of a unique child or youth-based theoretical conceptualization of Islamophobia, that particularly highlights youth perspectives of their own lived realities.

Source: Springer

Article: “How Young Muslims and Christians Structure Human Rights: An Empirical Study in Germany”

Author: Hans-Georg Ziebertz, University of Wuerzburg

Published in: The Ambivalent Impact of Religion on Human Rights, pp.125-153

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Publication Date: November 2021

The main question of this research paper is how young Christians and Muslims in Germany structure different areas of human rights. International conventions claim that all human rights are equal, universal, indivisible and interdependent. As a unity all human rights express the modern understanding of humanity and predictability of social and societal relations. This paper focusses on the normative claim of unity from an empirical perspective when queried how young people perceive and structure human rights. Since the claims to universality of both, human rights and religions, are not always free of tension, the question is also if Muslims and Christians differ regarding the structure and valuation of human rights. The empirical analysis among N = 1785 young people shows first that human rights are not seen as an alliance of equal rights and second that Muslims and Christians show as well commonalities as differences in their attitudes towards human rights.

Read full article HERE.

Source: ResearchGate

Author: Oliver Scharbrodt, University of Birmingham

Published in: Journal of Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life (2018)

Published Online: November 8, 2018

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

Academic scholarship on Shia Muslim minorities in the West has described them as ‘a minority within a minority’ (Sachedina 1994: 3) or as ‘the other within the other’ (Takim 2009: 143), referring to a certain sense of double-marginalization of Shia Muslims in non-Muslim societal contexts. They need to undertake particular efforts to maintain both an Islamic as well as particular Shia identity in terms of communal activities and practices and public perception and recognition, responding to the rise of Islamophobia more generally and anti-Shia sectarianism more specifically. This article problematizes this notion of a double-marginalization of Shia minorities in the West as too simplistic.

The article investigates the dynamics around the creation of transnational Shia communal spaces in north-west London, the public representation of Shia Muslim identities by networks and organizations based there to illustrate their multilocal connectivities and internal heterogeneity. The article is based on research in the borough of Brent, north-west London, and presents novel insights into Shia spaces in Britain and thereby makes an important contribution to complexifying academic discourse on Muslims in Britain which has focussed on Sunni Muslims almost exclusively.

The ethnographic data is contextualized by providing background information on the historical and social formations of the networks and the centres examined in the article. To analyze the multilocal spatial manifestations and connections of these network, the article utilizes Werbner’s notion of ‘complex diasporas’ (2002, 2004, 2010) and recent contributions to the development of a spatial methodology in Religious Studies (Knott 2005; Vásquez 2010; Tweed 2006; McLoughlin and Zavos 2014). The article thereby constitutes the very first attempt to apply recent contributions on the nature of diasporic religions and their spatial multilocality to the case study of Twelver Shia networks based in London.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Springer

Series Ed.: Turner, Bryan S.

Publisher: Springer

The book series Muslims in Global Societies is designed to accommodate the growing social scientific research on Islam and Muslims focusing on contemporary issues derived from the challenges of globalization, the global village, and global movements. Until recently, the historical, political, and comparative approach to Islam has been preferred over social scientific research and themes. Muslims in Global Societies aims to fill this gap by responding directly to a scholarly demand for an active forum for the discussion of new ideas, fieldwork experiences, challenging views, and methodological and theoretical approaches to Muslim life, from a global perspective. The book series, which will not be limited to a specific geographical location, will publish innovative social scientific monographs and collections, which combine scholarly rigor with readable prose for the benefit of scholars and students in various academic fields related to the world of Islam.

Focus

The book series provides insights into the contemporary dynamics of Muslim life by focusing on questions concerning the dynamics between Muslim communities, both in Islamic countries and the West, and contemporary globalization processes. Muslims in Global Societies aims to provide monographs and essay collections which, through a high standard of ethnographic and sociological analysis, disclose the networks in which contemporary Muslim communities form their identities, operate, and change.

Manuscript Submission

The series will welcome works that explore Muslim culture and religion with respect to:

– Global flows of ideas and knowledge

– Economic networks and religion

– Flows of people through migration

– The global development of the Muslim diaspora

– Global revivalism and the emergence of religious centers

– Religious pilgrimage

– Global network of reformism and Islamic Education

– Formation of identities

Readership

Muslims in Global Societies will be the first social scientific book series to focus on globalization and the dynamics of Muslim life. The book series, with its strong multidisciplinary approach, will be of interest to scholars and students alike in various academic fields related to the world of Islam.

Founding Editors

Gabriele Marranci, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Cardiff University, Wales, UK.

g.marranci@gmail.com

Bryan Turner, the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, USA

bryan.turner@uws.edu.au

Assistant Editors Ronald Lukens-Bull (University of North Florida)

Editorial Advisory Board

Jon W. Anderson (Catholic University of America)

El-Sayed el- Aswad (University of Bahrain)

Marjo Buitelaar (University of Groningen)

Vincent Crapanzano (CUNY)

McGuire Gibson (University of Chicago)

Robert W. Hefner (Boston University)

Amir Hussain (Loyola Marymount University)

Habibul Haque Khondker (Zayed University)

Nikki Keddie (UCLA)

Göran Larsson (University of Gothenburg)

Gregory Starrett (University of North Carolina)

Daniel Martin Varisco (Hofstra University)

Mark Woodward (Arizona State University)

All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.

Source: Springer International Publishing AG

Authors: Terence Lovat, Robert Crotty

Publisher: Springer (2015)

At the present time, when so-called Islamic radicalism, terrorism and Jihadism occupy major media space, with Islam often depicted as the main culprit, the book attempts a tour de force. It proposes that Islam is as much victim as culprit in the history that has led to the current hostility. This is because the common claims of both mainstream and radical Islam that Islam represents the high point of the Abrahamic tradition, and therefore a purification of Judaism and Christianity, have been largely ignored, misunderstood or blatantly rejected by these faiths and therefore by ‘the West’ in general. This rejection has effectively rendered Islam as the poor cousin, if not the illegitimate sibling, of the tradition. In turn, this has created long-term resentment and hostility within Islam as well as robbed the ‘Judaeo-Christian West’ of a rich, inter-faith understanding of the wider Abrahamic tradition. The book explores these claims through textual, historical and theological analyses, proposing that many of them stand up better to critical scrutiny than has been commonly acknowledged. It further proposes that seeing Islam in this way has potential to re-awaken its self-understanding as a leader of accord among the Abrahamic faiths, of the kind that characterized the era of Convivencia when, in medieval Spain, Islam constructed and contributed to advanced civilizations characterized by relatively harmonious co-existence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The book focuses on the role that a more respected and self-confident Islam could play in forging enhanced inter-faith relations in a world that desperately needs them as it struggles to understand and deal with modern and particularly vicious forms of radical Islamism.

Table of contents:

• An Introduction to the Abrahamic Religions
• A Theory of Religion and Being Religious
• The Story from the Vantage Point of Judaism
• The Story from the Vantage Point of Christianity
• The Story from the Vantage Point of Islam
• The Heart of the Ibrahimic Story in Islam
• The Increasing Cogency of Islamism
• The Historical Exemplar: La Convivencia
• Re-constructing Convivencia in the Twenty-First Century

Read more at: Springer.com