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Bayat (ed.), “Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam”

9780199766079This June, Oxford University Press will publish Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam edited by Asef Bayat (Leiden University). The publisher’s description follows.

At least since the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, political Islam or Islamism has been the focus of attention among scholars, policymakers, and the general public. Much has been said about Islamism as a political and moral/ethical trend, but scant attention is paid to its ongoing development. There is now a growing acknowledgment within the scholarly and policy communities that Islamism is in the throes of transformation, but little is known about the nature and direction of these changes. The essays of Post-Islamism bring together young and established scholars and activists from different parts of the Muslim World and the West to discuss their research on the changing discourses and practices of Islamist movements and Islamic states largely in the Muslim majority countries. The changes in these movements can be termed ‘post-Islamism,’ defined both as a condition and a project characterized by the fusion of religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty. Post-Islamism emphasizes rights rather than merely obligation, plurality instead of singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scriptures, and the future instead of the past.

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Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Rzeznik, “Church and Estate”

978-0-271-05967-9mdIn July, Penn State Press will publish Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-Era Philadelphia by Thomas F. Rzeznik (Seton Hall University). The publisher’s description follows.

In Church and Estate, Thomas Rzeznik examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. The book demonstrates how their religious beliefs informed their actions and shaped their class identity, while simultaneously revealing the ways in which financial influences shaped the character of American religious life. In tracing those connections, it shows how religion and wealth shared a fruitful, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship.

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Cohen, “Divine Service? Judaism and Israel’s Armed Forces”

Divine Service_PPC.QXD_radicalism unveiledThis July, Ashgate will publish Divine Service? Judaism and Israel’s Armed Forces by Stuart A. Cohen (Ashkelon Academic College, Israel). The publisher’s description follows.

Religion now plays an increasingly prominent role in the discourse on international security. Within that context, attention largely focuses on the impact exerted by teachings rooted in Christianity and Islam. By comparison, the linkages between Judaism and the resort to armed force are invariably overlooked. This book offers a corrective. Comprising a series of essays written over the past two decades by one of Israel’s most distinguished military sociologists, its point of departure is that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, quite apart from revolutionizing Jewish political activity, also triggered a transformation in Jewish military perceptions and conduct. Soldiering, which for almost two millennia was almost entirely foreign to Jewish thought and practice, has by virtue of universal conscription (for women as well as men) become a rite of passage to citizenship in the Jewish state. For practicing orthodox Jews in Israel that change generates dilemmas that are intellectual as well as behavioural, and has necessitated both doctrinal and institutional adaptations. At the same time, the responses thus evoked are forcing Israel’s decision-makers to reconsider the traditional role of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) as their country’s most evocative symbol of national unity.

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Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Castellino & Cavanaugh, “Minority Rights in the Middle East”

MinorityRights_MIddleEastThis April, Oxford University Press published Minority Rights in the Middle East by Joshua Castellino (Middlesex University) and Kathleen A. Cavanaugh (National Univ. of Ireland, Galway). The publisher’s description follows.

Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law.

The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analyzing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

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Devji, “Muslim Zion”

Muslim_ZionIn August, Harvard University Press will publish Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea by Faisal Devji (Univ. of Oxford). The publisher’s description follows.

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.

A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.

Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

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Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Perovic (ed.), “Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France”

Sacred_SecularThis May, Bloomsbury Publishing will publish Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France edited by Sanja Perovic (King’s College). The publisher’s description follows.

The opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘modernity’ has long held the status of a self-evident truth. Recently, however, there has been a growing realization that religion has not died out and may be more compatible with modern society than previously assumed.This development is particularly striking in France where laïcité has long been the official doctrine.

How did religion become opposed to the secular and modern? If distinctions between sacred and secular are less adequate than commonly believed, how do these two categories interact? Addressing these questions, this book explores the persistence of religious categories on the cultural landscape of early modern France. France was the birthplace of Europe’s first secular state and the centre of two movements considered indispensable to secularization – the Enlightenment and Revolution of 1789. As such France is vital for understanding how religious antecedents informed modern political institutions and ideals. By uncovering the role of religion in shaping categories most often associated with modernity this book offers a new perspective on the master narrative of secularization.

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Cohen & Numbers (eds.), “Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States”

This July, Oxford University Press will publish Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States edited by Charles L. Cohen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Ronald L. Numbers (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The publisher’s description follows.

Religious pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape, including a proliferation of new spiritualities, the emergence of widespread adherence to ”Asian” traditions, and an evangelical Christian resurgence. These recent phenomena–important in themselves as indices of cultural change–are also both causes and contributions to one of the most remarked-upon and seemingly anomalous characteristics of the modern United States: its widespread religiosity. Compared to its role in the world’s other leading powers, religion in the United States is deeply woven into the fabric of civil and cultural life. At the same time, religion has, from the 1600s on, never meant a single denominational or confessional tradition, and the variety of American religious experience has only become more diverse over the past fifty years. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.