Although there has emerged a huge interest in the Muslim communities in Britain since 9/11 and 7/7, few academic studies have focused on the political processes within Muslim communities and the impacts these have on civic engagement. This book examines the political biographies and religious identities of British Muslims of Pakistani descent.

To what extent are Muslims in Europe integrated? Muslims are increasingly making themselves noticed in the political process of Europe. But what is happening behind the often sensational headlines? This book looks at the processes and realities of Muslim participation in local and national politics in a range of Eastern and Western European countries: voting patterns in local and national assemblies, membership of elected councils and national parliaments, and the tensions between ethnic, political and religious identities. It also asks how political participation and wider integration issues interrelate and considers how Muslims - as ethnic groups, or through specific institutions - seek to locate themselves within European political society.

This radical book argues that translocal forces are leading the emergence of a wider Muslim public sphere. It will be invaluable for researchers in international relations, Islamic studies, cultural studies, sociology, religion and politics.

Contemporary Anti-Muslim Politics provides a succinct but potent critique of the policies of Western nations toward Muslims, particularly the aggressive foreign policies of the United States and the exclusionary domestic policies of Europe. These policies have already claimed millions of Muslim lives. For decades, policies that rely on war, exclusion, and ghettoization have triggered conflict escalation. The actions of groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram are reactions to this history. Their tactics exacerbate negative stereotyping of Muslims generally and Western military strategies cause many Muslims to pursue survivalist politics that enable and strengthen such groups. Anti-Muslim politics in Western nations takes many forms beyond war and exclusion, including racialization, stereotyping, sacrilegious cultural assaults, mass media scapegoating, and even tolerance, which implies something unpalatable in need of toleration. The gridlock brought by pluralism and constitutionalism, both in Europe and the United States, serves few people well, but it has locked Muslims into an especially abusive status quo.

The surge in divisive and far-right politics and growing Islamophobia in Britain pose new challenges for Muslim advocacy organisations. British Muslim activism has taken centre stage in the public sphere as a result. Yet for over fifty years Muslim advocacy groups have worked to preserve religious identity, lobby the state and provide concerted responses to the political establishment. This is the first book to chart critically the national and global factors influencing the political mobilisation of British Muslim activists as Muslims. Khadijah Elshayyal traces the changes of thought, direction and method within Muslim identity politics after 1960, noting key organisations and turning points such as the Rushdie Affair, the 9/11 attacks, the 7/7 bombings and the current conflict in Syria. The book argues that the Rushdie Affair prompted new debate around the subject of freedom of expression, which has continued to be a point of contention ever since. Providing a history of the interaction between Muslim advocacy groups and the state, and the impact of state policy on Muslim communities, Muslims Identity Politics shows that that Muslim citizens continue to experience an `equality gap' and recommends where transformation and progress can be made. Based on primary sources and in-depth interviews, this book is a vital resource for government officials, policy-makers and researchers interested in multiculturalism, Islamophobia and security issues in Britain.

There is a struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims unfolding across the Islamic world. The conflict pits Muslims who support pluralism and democracy against others who insist such institutions are antithetical to Islam. With some 1.3 billion people worldwide professing Islam, the outcome of this contest is sure to be one of the defining political events of the twenty-first century. Bringing together twelve engaging essays by leading specialists focusing on individual countries, this pioneering book examines the social origins of civil-democratic Islam, its long-term prospects, its implications for the West, and its lessons for our understanding of religion and politics in modern times. Although depicted by its opponents as the product of political ideas "made in the West" civil-democratic Islam represents an indigenous politics that seeks to build a distinctive Islamic modernity. In countries like Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, it has become a major political force. Elsewhere its influence is apparent in efforts to devise Islamic grounds for women's rights, religious tolerance, and democratic citizenship. Everywhere it has generated fierce resistance from religious conservatives. Examining this high-stakes clash, Remaking Muslim Politics breaks new ground in the comparative study of Islam and democracy. The contributors are Bahman Baktiari, Thomas Barfield, John R. Bowen, Dale F. Eickelman, Robert W. Hefner, Peter Mandaville, Augustus Richard Norton, Gwenn Okruhlik, Michael G. Peletz, Diane Singerman, Jenny B. White, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere. As they examine the role of women in public life and Islamic perspectives on modernization and free speech, the authors probe the diversity of the contemporary Islamic experience, suggesting general trends and challenging popular Western notions of Islam as a monolithic movement. In so doing, they clarify concepts such as tradition, authority, ethnicity, pro-test, and symbolic space, notions that are crucial to an in-depth understanding of ongoing political events. This book poses questions about ideological politics in a variety of transnational and regional settings throughout the Muslim world. Europe and North America, for example, have become active Muslim centers, profoundly influencing trends in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. The authors examine the long-term cultural and political implications of this transnational shift as an emerging generation of Muslims, often the products of secular schooling, begin to reshape politics and society--sometimes in defiance of state authorities. Scholars, mothers, government leaders, and musicians are a few of the protagonists who, invoking shared Islamic symbols, try to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate and public life. These symbolic politics explain why political actions are recognizably Muslim, and why "Islam" makes a difference in determining the politics of a broad swath of the world.

This book studies the engagement of various Muslim communities with Bihar politics from colonial times to present-day India. It debunks several myths in highlighting Muslim resistance to the Two-Nation theory, and counters the ‘Isolation Syndrome’ faced by Muslim communities after Independence. Using rare archival sources and hitherto unexamined Urdu texts, this book offers a nuanced exploration of complex themes such as the struggle against Bengali hegemony, communalism, regionalism and alienation before Independence, recent language politics, the political assertion of low-caste Muslims in current Bihar, as well as their quest for social and gender justice. An important contribution to the study of South Asian Islam, this book will interest students and scholars of modern Indian history, politics, sociology, religion, gender, and minority studies.

For centuries, Muslim countries and Europe have engaged one another through theological dialogues, diplomatic missions, political rivalries, and power struggles. In the last thirty years, due in large part to globalization and migration from Islamic countries to the West, what was previously an engagement across national and cultural boundaries has increasingly become an internalized encounter within Europe itself. Questions of the Hijab in schools, freedom of expression in the wake of the Danish Cartoon crisis, and the role of Shari'a have come to the forefront of contemporary European discourse. The Oxford Handbook of European Islam is the first collection to present a comprehensive approach to the multiple and changing ways Islam has been studied across European countries. Parts one to three address the state of knowledge of Islam and Muslims within a selection of European countries, while presenting a critical view of the most up-to-date data specific to each country. These chapters analyze the immigration cycles and policies related to the presence of Muslims, tackling issues such as discrimination, post-colonial identity, adaptation, and assimilation. The thematic chapters, in parts four and five, examine secularism, radicalization, Shari'a, Hijab, and Islamophobia with the goal of synthesizing different national discussion into a more comparative theoretical framework. The Handbook attempts to balance cutting edge assessment with the knowledge that the content itself will eventually be superseded by events. Featuring eighteen newly-commissioned essays by noted scholars in the field, this volume will provide an excellent resource for students and scholars interested in European Studies, immigration, Islamic studies, and the sociology of religion.

The involvement of minorities in politics has been the subject of a considerable number of studies. However, these studies are rarely concerned with the views of Muslims on their participation in the political processes of non-Muslim societies. Several Western scholars have thought and still think that the world, from the perspective of Muslims, can be divided in accordance with the dichotomy of the classical Islamic Law that distinguishes between the "Territory of Islam" and the "Territoryof War". however, during the last decennia various Muslim scholars have tried to reinterpret the position of Muslims in non-Muslim societies in new religious terms by which this classification has been emended and corrected. In this book, four different views are distinguished: the pragmatic, idealistic or utopian, re-interpretative, and traditionalist views. It goes without saying that the practical implementaion of these views to a large degree depends upon the types of Muslim organizations and representative bodies in those societies, as well as their denominational and ethnical backgrounds. From an international comparative perspective it appears that, contrary to the situation in Australia, Muslims of most Western European states have been thus far unsuccessful in creating representative organizations at national levels. This is also illustrated by studies of Muslim organizations in Germany, Italy and the united Kingdom. Another important factor consists of the views of the younger generations of Muslim immigrants about the compatibility of their Islamic identiity and full participation in the non-Muslim, secular societies in which they are living. Research on this subject contained in the present book responds to this question in an affirmative way.