Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
Retaining, reconfiguring, and renouncing traditional embodiments of sex, gender, and sexuality. Read the full article »
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The “Islamic state” is a construct of modernity, of Muslim intellectuals trying to cope with modernity, secularization, and colonialism.
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There is a great deal to be said regarding the role of nonviolent modes of addressing human conflict, a topic often neglected by interpreters of the just war tradition; but severing the notions of just peace and just war is a mistake. Indeed, notions of just peace and just war go together.
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The battles these women had waged for legal, religious, economic, social, and other forms of equality since the 1980s had started to bear fruit; new opportunities had opened to women, and debates about their legal rights had reached the public press and political platforms.
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Located in northwestern Lombok, the capital of West Nusa Tenggara province, Mataram, is perhaps the island’s most dynamic location for the unfolding of inter-religious engagement, competition, and potential conflict. Mataram offers some examples of inter-religious convergence and harmony. Nevertheless, conflicts and violence have occurred.
Read More →In a theme that resonates well with Contending Modernities, Khan has consistently spoken of his (and everyone’s) multiple identities, in his case these being: British, European, Western, Pakistani-origin, Muslim, human rights lawyer, the son of a bus driver and a product of a working-class council estate home. Thus, Khan’s election has the potential to be hugely inspiring and empowering to “minority” or “underdog” groupings, like Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008. Read the full article »
Read More →London began this past balmy weekend with the news that Sadiq Khan has been elected Mayor of London in a landslide victory–achieving the biggest personal mandate of any politician in UK history.
“Victory for Sadiq Khan highlights tolerant face of London,” says the Financial Times. Indeed, despite some efforts to present Sadiq as a secret Al-Qaeda-supporting fanatic out to impose public beheadings south of the London Eye, Londoners–or at least 57 per cent of them–do not seem to have bought into the idea that Khan is in fact a secret extremist. Read the full article »
Read More →There is no doubt the election of Sadiq Khan is a momentous occasion, a shock to the xenophobic fear-mongering flooding Europe from the UK to Greece. But we should not fetishize the fact that he is a Muslim, but rather celebrate the tenacity of a working-class immigrant family to raise a child with the audacity to imagine himself running such a magnificent city. His Muslim background and demeanor, his family’s Muslim names, his use of the Qur’an in his official ceremonies, all signal a significant symbolic register in European self-consciousness: Muslims are here, and are here to stay. Read the full article »
Read More →The recent London mayoral election was never going to be a run-of-the-mill poll no matter what the gadflies might have told us about Muslims having a long history of running Western cities. Not in this moment, in which Muslims figure in Western public opinion as a threat to civilizational order near and far. On the contrary, coming just one day after Donald Trump’s rise as presumptive Republican nominee for the Presidency of the United States, the election of Sadiq Khan, son of working-class Pakistani immigrants and a practicing Muslim, could only have been an exceptional moment. Read the full article »
Read More →The framework of radicalization, extremism, and terror may seem a grim background to be celebrating the election of Sadiq Khan as the Mayor of London and, indeed, the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital. But it is a necessary one in order to appreciate the importance and potential of the moment. The burden of being a demographic “first” is never an easy one, especially for “firsts” laden with social, cultural, and political symbolism—for that we can observe the many trials, tribulations, and, at times, the missed opportunities of the presidency of Barack Obama in the US. Read the full article »
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