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What distinguishes this book is its emphasis on the unique challenges that arise from the relationship between Jordanian locals and Syrian refugees, as well as how mental health practitioners can navigate these complexities. It sheds light on the obstacles that such practitioners face in their work and offers valuable insights into how to overcome them.
What distinguishes this book is its emphasis on the unique challenges that arise from the relationship between Jordanian locals and Syrian refugees, as well as how mental health practitioners can navigate these complexities. It sheds light on the obstacles that such practitioners face in their work and offers valuable insights into how to overcome them.
Each new volume reports on the most current information available from surveyed countries, offering an annual overview of statistical and demographic data, topical issues of public debate, shifting transnational networks, change to domestic policies and legal frameworks, and major activities in Muslim organisations and institutions. Supplementary data is gathered from a variety of sources and evaluated according to its reliability.
In addition to offering a relevant framework for original research, the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe provides an invaluable source of reference for government and NGO officials, journalists, policymakers, and related research institutions.
Each new volume reports on the most current information available from surveyed countries, offering an annual overview of statistical and demographic data, topical issues of public debate, shifting transnational networks, change to domestic policies and legal frameworks, and major activities in Muslim organisations and institutions. Supplementary data is gathered from a variety of sources and evaluated according to its reliability.
In addition to offering a relevant framework for original research, the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe provides an invaluable source of reference for government and NGO officials, journalists, policymakers, and related research institutions.
When a culture is under siege and many have lost a former way of life it may not be clear how a society looks itself in the mirror, finds its reflection. Alex Pillen’s portrayal of Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World locates such lines of reflection within everyday language. The fear of a random geopolitical pair of dice is global, a fear to be honed when reading this account of uniqueness in the face of totalising loss
When a culture is under siege and many have lost a former way of life it may not be clear how a society looks itself in the mirror, finds its reflection. Alex Pillen’s portrayal of Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World locates such lines of reflection within everyday language. The fear of a random geopolitical pair of dice is global, a fear to be honed when reading this account of uniqueness in the face of totalising loss
Abstract
Gog and Magog are portrayed in the Quran as two malevolent forces that once wreaked havoc on earth and will reappear near the end of time. Hadiths elaborate their natures and actions and served as the principal source for premodern Muslim treatment of the two. In the modern period, Gog and Magog have, besides remaining objects of Quran exegesis, received considerable attention from apocalyptic writers. This article contributes to current scholarship on the modern Muslim discourse on Gog and Magog by examining the views of some notable Sunnī Quran commentators, which have thus far been almost entirely neglected. I show that they adopt either a literal interpretation, whereby Gog and Magog are understood as certain humans, or a metaphorical interpretation, whereby they are conceived as symbols of various phenomena. I also survey, in contrast to most previous researchers, the ideas of several non-Arab writers, especially the Trinidadian Imran Nazar Hosein (b. 1942), author of several apocalyptic works, including a book on Gog and Magog and their dominance in today’s world. My discussion highlights the remarkable diversity of perspectives among Muslim scholars as well as the tendency to demythologize Gog and Magog by either avoiding hadiths or understanding them in light of contemporary circumstances.
Abstract
This paper explores the concept of adab in Islamic education in Singapore and argues that it is an integral but relatively misunderstood and neglected concept. Adab is a term that embraces holism and forms the basis of an epistemic framework of an Islamic way of knowing. It is concerned with the education of the intellect and the spirit in the development of a morally upright person. Adab is also considered to be a set of ethical values serving as a spiritual beacon to provide order and clarity to knowledge. Unfortunately, due to colonisation and the secularisation of the Islamic education system in Singapore, adab has suffered a diminution, both in meaning and application. It is now taken to refer almost entirely to notions of good etiquette and reduced only to traditional understandings of social grace. Based on interviews with Islamic education subject matter experts, we identify and clarify the correct understanding and value of this concept. The paper also suggests that the correct and proper consideration of adab provides us with the opportunity to examine and reconsider the core values of Islamic education and its relevance in secular education.
Abstract
This article explores the approach of contemporary Shīʿī Iranian cleric Ayatollah Yūsef Ṣāneʿī to the rights of non-Muslims. It addresses his ideas with regard to three key issues: 1) the notion of the ritual impurity (najāsat) of non-Muslims and interfaith marriage; 2) the inheritance of a Muslim and a non-Muslim; and 3) the retaliation (qiṣāṣ) and the blood money of a Muslim and a non-Muslim. The article demonstrates that Ṣāneʿī, as a reformist Shīʿī scholar, uses a variety of methods to challenge traditional Shīʿī jurisprudential rulings about people of other faiths, arguing that their rights should be enhanced considerably. Ṣāneʿī’s ideas, as will be argued, represent a significant break with dominant Shīʿī views concerning the rights of people of other faiths. His ideas have the potential to eliminate some of the inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims prescribed in traditional jurisprudential literature, and to increase social relationships between Muslims and people of other faiths.
Abstract
This article examines the Egyptian Islamic Supreme Court (al-Maḥkama al-ʿUlyā l-Sharʿiyya), thereafter the isc, and its role in overseeing Islamic judicial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The isc introduced new procedural requirements for dispensation of justice and assumed the responsibility to defend the jurisdiction of Islamic courts against persistent attempts by British colonial administrators and reform-minded political and bureaucratic elite to limit, if not undermine, their authority. The isc marked the recalibration of the legal and judicial authority of the Chief Judge of Egypt (qāḍī Miṣr, an Ottoman administrative judicial position) along with Shaykh al-Azhar and the Muftī of Egypt (who used to exercise oversight of Islamic courts’ decisions and procedures), in favor of this institutional apparatus. The creation of the isc demonstrates the centrality of the regulatory authority of the Ministry of Justice in fostering any potentiality for Islamic law as a system of governance. The continuous attempts to regulate Islamic courts since the 1880s cannot be examined in isolation from the procedural developments pursued in the secular National and Mixed Courts. The role of the isc was determinative of Islamic judicial practice in lower Islamic courts across Egypt. As a result, operations of Islamic courts were readjusted to a set of evolving norms concerning internal coherence, judicial reasoning, adoption of procedural rules to reflect directives from the Ministry of Justice, and attention to the updated rules of evidence and appeal. This process underscores how Islamic judicial practice was both transformed and made possible through an interwoven set of institutions, actors, and traditions. I argue that this institution, the isc, provides an ideal site for critical and interdisciplinary reflection aimed at exploring both the structural and the contextual history of law in colonial Egypt.
Abstract
For all of British Colonial Indirect Rule’s avowed deference to Islamic law and institutions in Northern Nigeria, it radically transformed them. Of the most overt areas in which this occurred was the colonial state’s elimination of diya, the payment of compensation for unlawful killing. Justified by the colonial state on the basis of good order, the abolition of diya was the product of a debate over who had the prerogative to respond to crimes directed at the person: the aggrieved individual or the state. Prominent Muslim jurists argued in favor of the former, citing source texts and the precolonial practice that gave life to those textual prescriptions. On the other hand, colonial administrators insisted that the response to crimes against the person was the state’s prerogative and that interpersonal resolution of such matters challenged imperial authority, the protection of which was not without basis in Islamic law. At the same time, the peculiar design of Northern Nigerian indirect rule meant that statutory, and therefore, unequivocal elimination of diya, remained elusive—at least until the eve of independence. This article traces the contours of the debate over the fate of diya as a lens through which one may apprehend the impact of colonial indirect rule on Islamic law, particularly criminal law, in Northern Nigeria. The demise of diya illuminates colonial indirect rule for what it was: a “constitutional trick” that paid lip service to Islamic law and institutions while radically transforming their essence and, eventually, eliminating them. Ultimately, however, that the means through which the demise of diya was brought about—the reconfiguration of the precolonial constitutional balance between political and juristic authorities—is, at least, as significant as the demise of diya itself. Indeed, that constitutional transformation has endured, surviving colonialism and finding expression in nascent attempts to reinstate Islamic law in the postcolonial state.
Abstract
Until the end of the imperial period, the Volga-Ural Muslim communities in the Russian empire practiced several methods of intergenerational property transfer, such as waṣiyyat (bequest), hiba (gift), ṣulḥ/takhāruj (peaceful settlement) and the “science of the shares” (ʿilm al-farāʾiḍ). The Volga-Ural Muslims considered them all as legitimate ways of property division according to Islamic law (sharīʿa). However, a significant shift occurred in the early 1820s when the Russian imperial state confirmed the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly as the court of appeal for family and inheritance matters. Subsequently, Volga-Ural Muslims began to petition the oa, seeking a reconsideration of their inheritance divisions, specifically requesting a division “according to sharīʿa”. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of these petitions resulted in divisions based on the science of the shares. I argue that the oa served as an extra-communal venue where Muslims could challenge intra-familial or communal methods of inheritance division, and request divisions based on the science of the shares.