Book reviews

Michael Rywkin

Moscow's Muslim Challenge – Soviet Central Asia

Armonk (N.Y.): M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982, pp. 200; $25.00

E. Allen Richardson

Islamic Cultures in North America: Patterns of Belief and Devotion of Muslims from Asian Countries in the United States and Canada, New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1981, 64 pp. $3.95.

Muhammad Imran

Position and Prospects of Islam in Latin American Lahore: Malik Sirajuddin & Sons, 1979, Price n. m.     

Muslims in Fiji: a brief survey

Chaitwat Satha‐Anand

Islam and Violence: A Case Study of Violent Events in the Four Southern Province, Thailand, 1976–1981.

Monographs in Religion and Public Policy. No. 2., Department of Religious Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1986, pp.54 (bibliography).

Malise Ruthven

Islam in the World

London: Oxford University Press, 1984, Price $10.95

Mumtaz Ahmad (Ed.)

State Politics and Islam

Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1986.160 pp. n.p.

Akbar S. Ahmed

Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society

London, Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1988, pp.253.

David Gilmartin

Empire and Islam — Punjab and the Making of Pakistan

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988, pp. xii+258.

Kail C. Ellis, ed.

The Vatican, Islam, and the Middle East

Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987, pp 344.     

Book reviews

Peter G. Gowing & Robert D. Mc. Amis (ed.)

The Muslim Filipinos: Their History, Society and Contemporary Problems,

Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1974, pp. 311.

Cesar Adib Majul

Muslims in the Philippines,

Manila: Saint Mary's Publishing, 1978, pp. 392.

T.J.S. George

Revolt in Mindanao: The Rise of Islam in Philippines Politics

Kuala Lumpur; Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 294.     

Book review

Ethnicity, Race and American foreign policy: A History Alexander DeConde Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992, 270 pp., $40.00 cloth; $15.95 paper.     

Book review

The Jama Mapun. A Changing Samal Society in the Southern Philippines

Eric Casino

Quezon City (Philippines), Ateneo De Manil University Press, 159 pages; $12.00, $7.75 (paper)     

Economic status of Muslims in Korea: a preliminary report

Summary

This study hardly meets the minimum requirements for identifying the economic status of the Muslim minority in Korea. As more data becomes available it would be possible to present a more sustained effort. However some interesting findings can be highlighted even at this early stage:

First, so far as the Korean Muslim population is concerned, it is heavily concentrated in the Seoul area. Further, 34% of the total Korean Muslim population is presently residing in Islamic countries. Secondly, 50% of Korean Muslims have an education above high school which is comparatively higher that the average for non‐Muslim Koreans. Also, the opening of the Korea Islamic University will play a critical role in the future growth of the Islamic faith. Thirdly, according to occupational patterns, more than one‐third (35%) of all Muslims are engaged in academic pursuits. In comparison, 20% of Korean Muslims fall in the category of employee. Lastly, the 20–30 and 30–40 age groups, representing primarily students and employees respectively, make up over 65% of the total Korean Muslim population in Korea.     

Muslims in Europe: the lost tribe of Islam?

The Muslim presence in Europe has caused the Christian churches to focus their attention on a number of issues arising out of this presence and the following article is a review of three papers put out by church organizations. Starting chronologically from the earliest paper to the most recent, I have first summarized the contents of each paper before analysing and commenting on them collectively. The three Church Research Papers on Muslims in Europe are Witness to God in a Secular Europe, Conference of European Churches, Geneva 1985, The Image of Islam in German School Textbooks by Udo Tworuschka, Muslims in Europe. No. 32, 1986, and Islamic Law and its Significance for the Situation of Muslim Minorities in Europe, Report of a study project, Muslims in Europe, No. 35,1987.     

How Australian Female Muslim Students Interpret Challenges in High School Sports

Abstract

The present study focuses on the experiences of female Muslim students in school sporting activities in Australian public high schools. Specifically, the study examines how the students interpret their engagement in relation to their Islamic background. The study aims to provide deeper understanding and greater awareness of female Muslim students’ participation in sporting activities within the public high school environment and the challenges they may face. The study employed critical race and social identity theories as an analytical framework. In addition, the study utilized qualitative research methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 female Muslim students and 4 teachers responsible for sporting activities in school. The findings of the study reveal that despite a variety of sporting activities provided by Australian public high schools, some of these activities were challenging for Muslim girls to participate in. The study also found that there is a strong relationship between students’ Islamic background and their participation in schools sporting activities. The study recommends that educators and teachers who work with youth from different background are provided training on equity issues arising from ethnicity, race, culture, religion and other identity categories.     

Modern Muslim Thought in the Balkans: The Writings of Mehmed ef. Handžić in the El-Hidaje Periodical in the Context of Discrimination and Genocide

Abstract

The withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a significant impact on the population of the region, especially on the Muslims. Muslim intellectual life was strongly influenced by the arrival of a new political and social order and cultural and religious value system. During this period, Balkan Muslims painfully and irreversibly became an administrative part of Europe. The aim of this paper is to examine the main themes which characterized the writings of Bosnian Muslim intellectuals in the post-Ottoman period, particularly on the eve of and during the Second World War. This work examines the writings of Mehmed Hand?i?, a prominent Bosnian scholar that were published in the El-Hidaje Periodical from 1939 to 1945. The paper brings the scholar's views and commentaries on a variety of topics such as the impoverished Muslim state, the history of Islam and Muslims, and patriotism and nationalism from the Muslim point of view. In most ofHand?i?’swritings the focus is on Muslim intellectual responses to the new political and social changes as well as challenges of the ongoing Second World War. However, hiswritings and reflections continue to have far-reaching effects on Bosnian Muslims and remain relevant to the Bosnian Muslim situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the world observes the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in 2015.     

Pools,Piety, and Participation: A Muslim Women's Sports Club and Urban Citizenship in Germany

Abstract

This paper introduces the Muslim Women's Sports Club (MWSC) in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes this club's role and contribution in the construction of urban citizenship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate that this club is a vibrant space of civic participation. I argue that associations like this sports club are crucial sites of Muslim civic engagement where individuals configure forms of religiously circumscribed citizenship. The club plays a vital, but largely overlooked, role in the urban civic sphere, as it articulates and strengthens the bonding and civic participation of pious Muslim women and creates cross-ethnic relationships and networks. Some members are initiated into the landscape of civic associations, as they learn about their rights, duties, and potentials, through cooperation with other associations or institutions. I argue that an association such as the MWSC, regardless of its rather invisible activities, is a full-fledged part of the urban public sphere in Germany. Theoretically I engage questions of urban citizenship and civic participation in the context of a faith and/or identity-based association.     

‘Did queer Muslims even exist?’ – racialised grids of intelligibility in Swedish LGBTQ contexts

ABSTRACT

This article explores racialised grids of intelligibility around gender identity and sexuality in white Swedish LGBTQ contexts. By analysing personal stories shared on a separatist Instagram account by and for LGBTQ people racialised as non-white and/or Muslim, the article identifies some of the predominant narratives through which they become intelligible, both to other people and to themselves. Four frameworks are particularly recurring: the notion of them being victims of a ‘hateful other’, strong expectations to come out, exotification and tokenism (both sexualised and otherwise), and a general lack of representation. I argue that all of these revolve around notions of LGBTQ people racialised as non-white and/or Muslim as never quite belonging and thus never quite recognisable. They are instead frequently situated between white, gender-equal and LGBTQ-friendly ‘Swedishness’ and threatening, LGBTQ-phobic racialised ‘others’, made intelligible only in relation to either of these.     

A Fragmented Discourse of Religious Leadership in France: Muslim Youth between Citizenship and Radicalization

Abstract

At a time when public debates about radicalization of Muslim youth in the West are taking center stage and when questions about “home-grown” security threats are increasing in the wake of a number of terrorist attacks in many émigré societies, this article provides fresh empirical insights from the perspective of religious leadership. It outlines a picture of a highly diverse Muslim religious landscape where competing religious discourses are struggling to attract and support Muslim youth facing social dislocation and identity crises within increasingly contested social milieus. The article argues that a typology of religious leadership is clearly emerging where a spectrum of faith-based orientations and religious practice emphasize, to different degrees, notions of attachment to universal ethics and individual agency. The fact that conservative, sometimes radical, interpretations of such contestations represent a minority of voices is heartening even though the actual damage by such minority is often disproportionate to its actual size within the so-called silent majority. The empirical insights provided by the religious leaders interviewed for this study offer hope that the future of Western Muslims is more positive than we are led to think, if the possibility of combining devout faith with local political engagement becomes a real and sustainable conduit towards social inclusion and intercultural understanding and if necessary support and understanding are extended by the host communities.     

Circumcising the body: negotiating difference and belonging in Germany

ABSTRACT

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

Melbourne's Islamic Museum of Australia: The “White-Washed ‘I’” as an Apollonian Celebration of Liberal Myths

Abstract

This paper examines how the Melbourne's Islamic Museum of Australia tells a story of an “Australian Islam” through its use of material and artistic objects; how it symbolizes and synthesizes the assumed binary of East and West, through spatial expressions that narrate a religious community's “growing up” in a changing urban and Australian context. Furthermore, it looks at how the curators, intentionally or otherwise, deal politically with the Muslim community's affective relationships that are shaped by their experiences as a minority that endures a persistent Islamophobia in the community. By examining the role the Museum's material artefacts play in intercultural relations within a multicultural Australia the paper draws from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, to argue that the Museum reflects an Apollonian sense of art that attempts to regulate and control the wilder excesses of a Dionysian and communal spirit. The Apollonian view translates to an expressive and abstract celebration of liberal myths about progress and individuality that purposely relegates the more dangerous struggles of Muslim immigrants dealing with the conditions of a Dionysian post-colony to the shadows.     

Witnessing an Islamic Rite of Passage and a Local/Non-Local Articulation

This paper examines power relations predicated on the recourse to a Muslim identity by the Luri inhabitants of a remote, inaccessible place in south-western Iran known for their tenuous observance of the Islamic rules propagated by the faith's gate-keepers at the centre. The Muslimhood is asserted by the Lurs as an articulation of localness within the wider national context through a ritual practice characterised by spatial paucity that facilitates the deployment of an image of a 'historical' precedent, an abstract narrative of the Muslim community (ummat) in diverse contexts. Thus, the specific spatial and temporal limits that condition their differentiated access to sources of power based on class, gender and race are superseded by the Lurs in an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' with others creating an anti-structural domain and a 'plebeian public sphere' in which ordinary people appear as the agents as well as beneficiaries of the expanding domain of politics through a forged brother/sisterhood. Effective in this universalisation of politics is the use of slogan as a genre devised to overcome the structural inequalities that characterise the encompassing national system. The greater the structural gap, the paper argues, the more appealing the ritualistic use of slogan as an accessible anti-structural device susceptible to articulate the sacred with the profane. The 'plebeian' use of slogan, therefore, increasingly exposes the contradictory practice of becoming a Muslim in a peripheral location.     

The Role of Labeling and Bias in the Portrayals of Acts of “Terrorism”: Media Representations of Muslims vs. Non-Muslims

Several high-profile negative events involving Muslim perpetrators have recently been covered by the media. We investigated whether the same negative actions are more likely to be labeled “terrorism” when they are committed by Muslims than when they are committed by White non-Muslims. In Experiment I (n?=?60), using a real article about a Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a non-Muslim perpetrator, we found that participants were more likely to identify a crime as terrorism when it was perpetrated by a Muslim. The label “terrorism” also mediated the effect of Muslim identity on negative judgments of the behavior. In Experiment II (n?=?60), we replicated the results of Experiment I and clarified that the effects persisted when we used a real article about a non-Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a Muslim perpetrator. We discuss implications for cross-group communication and representations of Muslims in the media.     

‘Settling’ the multicultural nation-state: Little Mosque on the Prairie,and the figure of the ‘moderate Muslim’

This paper analyzes Little Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified in Little Mosque on the Prairie – serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. While Little Mosque on the Prairie makes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials.     

Islamophobia in Western Europe: A Comparative,Multilevel Study

Abstract

This study examines the prejudice against the Muslim immigrants in Western countries. The literature explains anti-Muslim prejudice almost exclusively by individual-level factors. Alternately, this study conducts a comparative, multilevel analysis to include cross-level processes as well. The analysis covers 16 Western European countries, and the data come primarily from the fourth wave of the European Values Study in 2008. Results offer strong support for the relevance of the country-level factors to individual prejudice, while confirming the findings of the major individual-level perspectives. More specifically, the findings suggest that the individuals who live in countries with (1) an official religion or (2) a liberal citizenship regime are more likely to be tolerant toward Muslims. The study also offers some support for the contact hypothesis.     

Failure of Muslim Leadership in America From the Perspective of First-Generation Muslim Americans: A Phenomenological Study

While leadership is a foundational component of guidance in most societies, Muslim children born in America to immigrant parents lack such guidance. A qualitative case study was recently conducted with six first-generation Muslim American college students and professionals. The purpose of this study was six-fold: to examine the concept of leadership in Muslim communities in America, to observe perceptions of Muslim leadership in mosques and community centers, to examine the practice and beliefs of Muslims in America, to view the social interaction of Muslim Americans within their community, to view the mentorship and leadership aspects of Muslim Americans in their community and to inspect marital and cultural aspects within those societies. Findings reveal four themes that show that Muslim Americans are subject to role confusion as they go through adolescence and need a leadership role model to assist them through this stage.