Conspicuously, Islam has become a key concern in most European societies with respect to issues of immigration, integration, identity, values and inland security. As the mere presence of Muslim minorities fails to explain these debates convincingly, new questions need to be asked: How did »Islam« become a topic? Who takes part in the debates? How do these debates influence both individual as well as collective »self-images« and »image of others«? Introducing Switzerland as an under-researched object of study to the academic discourse on Islam in Europe, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the objective by putting recent case studies from diverse national contexts into comparative perspective.

Using declassified documents from Israeli archives, Alisa Rubin Peled explores the development, implementation, and reform of the state's Islamic policy from 1948 to 2000. She addresses how Muslim communal institutions developed and whether Israel formulated a distinct "Islamic policy" toward shari'a courts, waqf (charitable endowments), holy places, and religious education. Her analysis reveals the contradictions and nuances of a policy driven by a wide range of motives and implemented by a diverse group of government authorities, illustrating how Israeli policies produced a co-opted religious establishment lacking popular support and paved the way for a daring challenge by a grassroots Islamist Movement since the 1980s. As part of a wider debate on early Israeli history, she challenges the idea that Israeli policy was part of a greater monolithic policy toward the Arab minority.

This Fall 2010 (VIII, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Islam: From Phobia to Understanding,” includes the proceedings of an international conference on “Debating Islamophobia,” co-organized by the issue co-editors in Madrid, Spain, in May 2009. Beginning with the lead article by the late Nasr Abu-Zayd (1943-2010) from which the title of the issue is adopted, and to whose author this collection is dedicated in celebration of his life and work, the papers explore the nature and meaning of Islamophobia and its diverse unfolding in specific national and historical contexts. The covered themes are: “Religions: From Phobia to Understanding,” “Unconscious Islamophobia,” “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,” “Islamophobia: a French Specificity in Europe?,” “Terror and the Politics of Containment: Analysing the Discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ and its Workings of Power” “Fundamentally Danish? The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis as Transitional Drama,” “Historiographic Narratives: The Discourse Strategies for Constructing Expellable “Moorish” Subjects,” “Islamophobia and Sexism: Muslim Women in the Western Mass Media,” “Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term ‘Islamophobia,'” and “The Homelessness of Muslimness: The Muslim Umma as a Diaspora.” The publication is an academic contribution to the study of Islamophobia, a tool for social researchers and useful to overcome the prejudices and institutional barriers that produce second-class citizens at the heart of Western Europe. Contributors include: Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Gema Martín-Muñoz (also as journal issue guest editor), Nasr Abu-Zayd, Vincent Geisser, Farish A. Noor, Heiko Henkel, José María Perceval, Laura Navarro, Javier Rosón Lorente, S. Sayyid, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

When the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice announced it would begin offering Sharia-based services in Ontario, a subsequent provincial government review gave qualified support for religious arbitration. However, the ensuing debate inflamed the passions of a wide range of Muslim and non-Muslim groups, garnered worldwide attention, and led to a ban on religiously based family law arbitration in the province. Debating Sharia sheds light on how Ontario's Sharia debate of 2003-2006 exemplified contemporary concerns regarding religiosity in the public sphere and the place of Islam in Western nation states. Focusing on the legal ramifications of Sharia law in the context of rapidly changing Western liberal democracies, Debating Sharia approaches the issue from a variety of methodological perspectives, including policy and media analysis, fieldwork, feminist examinations of the portrayals of Muslim women, and theoretical examinations of religion, Sharia, and the law. This volume is an important read for those who grapple with ethnic and religio-cultural diversity while remaining committed to religious freedom and women's equality.

The War of Ideas is about the fundamental principles of human society. It is a global war: the foes have resorted to arms to protect and promote their worldview. This book brings together some of the most important voices from different partisan, theoretical and religious perspectives to argue and forecast the next phase in the War of Ideas.

Brings together prominent Muslim voices to debate the nature of moderate, as opposed to fundamentalist, Islam and what moderation means in both a theological and a geopolitical sense.

Featuring paired pro/con pieces written specifically for this volume, Debating Terrorism and Counterterrorism : Conflicting Perspectives on Causes, Contexts, and Responses encourages students to grapple with the central debates surrounding the field of terrorism. With topics ranging from the root causes of terrorism, the role of religion in terrorism, whether suicide terrorism is ever justified, whether the spread of democracy can help defeat terrorism, and what trade-offs should exist between security and civil liberties, Gottlieb's outstanding cast of contributors returns, compelling students to wrestle with the conflicting perspectives that define the field. Stuart Gottlieb frames the paired essays with incisive headnotes, providing historical context and preparing students to read each argument critically. Each selection has been updated to account for recent world events, policy changes, and new scholarship. New to the reader, and by reviewer request, is a chapter, "Can Global Institutions Make a Difference in Fighting Terrorism?"

By the last decade of the twentieth century, the great questions of modernity seemed to be answered. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and global communism, the liberal democratic capitalist project seemed to be the only one left standing, and in the 1990s the "liberal ideal" spread worldwide. Today, of course, this universalistic narrative rings hollow. The global distribution of power has shifted and the preeminence of the West is receding as new directions for world order emerge. China is rapidly ascending as a peer competitor of the United States, bringing with it a powerful new global narrative of grievance and revision. Political Islam also burst onto the global scene as a multifaceted transnational movement reshaping regional political order and geopolitical alignments. With the rapid advance of climate change, there have arisen new narratives of global endangerment and dystopia. Far from converging, fragmentation and contestation increasingly dominate debates over world order. In Debating Worlds, Daniel Deudney, G. John Ikenberry, and Karoline Postel-Vinay have gathered a group of eminent scholars in the field to analyze the various ways in which the West's dominant narrative has waned and a new plurality of narratives has emerged. Each of these narratives combines stories of the past with understandings of the present and attractive visions of the future. Collectively, the contributors map out these narratives, focusing primarily on their key features, origins, and implications for world order. The narratives prominent on the world stage are a volatile mix of components, but they also differ in scope--some are regional and civilizational without global aspirations, while others cast themselves as globally expansive and universally ambitious. Covering the most influential narratives currently shaping world politics, Debating Worlds is an essential volume for all scholars of international relations.

Immigration, racism and nationalism have become hotly debated issues in the Western world. This highly original and controversial work focuses on the language used by the vast majority who regard themselves as being open to a multi-cultural society. Using Belgium as a case study and drawing parallels with the UK, US, Europe and the former Yugoslavia, the authors analyse this language and reveal a remarkable consistency between these liberal voices, such as in news-reporting, and the language used by radical racist and nationalist groups.

Is Ali Mazrui a visonary or a "vacuous" intellectual? Is he recationary, revolutionary or essentially a radical pragmatist? These questions were the focus of a special plenary session of the Conference of the African Assocation of Political Science that took place in Harrare, Zimbabwe, in June 2003. The forum was intended to interrogate Ali Mazrui's contributions in the last forty years or so of his career as an academic. The question themselves capture the magnitude of polarization among different sections of Mazrui's audiences generated by his often provocative propositions amd prescriptions on a wide range of issues---from the role of intellectuals in Africa's transformation to the imperative of pax-Africana, from Tanza-philia to Islamophobia, from the condition of the Black woman to the destiny of the Black race. It is some the exchanges, sometimes intense and even acrimonious, arising from Mazrui's ideas on continetal and global African affairs, from the 1960s ti the present, that constitute the subject matter. Together, they are not only a celebration of Ail Mazrui's own intellectual life as one long debate, but also an intellectual mirror of the conours of some of the hotly contested terrains in Africa's quest for self-realization.