Islam and Higher Education in Transitional Societies explores and illuminates the intersection of Islam and higher education in changing societies. The critical question explored in this book is, what role does Islam play in higher education in transitional societies?

Insight into key contemporary global issues relating to the lives and experiences of young Muslims.

Family remains the most powerful social idiom and one of the most powerful social structures throughout the Arab world. To engender love of nation among its citizens, national movements portray the nation as a family. To motivate loyalty, political leaders frame themselves as fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters to their clients, parties, or the citizenry. To stimulate production, economic actors evoke the sense of duty and mutual commitment of family obligation. To sanctify their edicts, clerics wrap religion in the moralities of family and family in the moralities of religion. Social and political movements, from the most secular to the most religious, pull on the tender strings of family love to recruit and bind their members to each other. To call someone family is to offer them almost the highest possible intimacy, loyalty, rights, reciprocities, and dignity. In recognizing the significance of the concept of family, this state-of-the-art literature review captures the major theories, methods, and case studies carried out on Arab families over the past century. The book offers a country-by-country critical assessment of the available scholarship on Arab families. Sixteen chapters focus on specific countries or groups of countries; seven chapters offer examinations of the literature on key topical issues. Joseph’s volume provides an indispensable resource to researchers and students, and advances Arab family studies as a critical independent field of scholarship.

This book emphasizes the inherently democratic nature of education; from those who practice in higher education institutions and are involved in decision-making, to those questioning the methods of reform processes in those institutions. As they are faced with increasing pressures to restructure and change their organizations in line with global institutional demands the foundations upon which their leadership and governance are based are called into question. This book takes a critical approach to understanding higher education leadership and governance. The overarching questions asked in this book are: how has higher education come to be assembled in contemporary governance practices within the context of global demands for reform and how are issues of justice being taken up as part of and in resistance to this assemblage?

Islam in Transition focuses on the ways in which Islamic religion still engenders powerful loyalties within what is now a predominantly secular society and how, in their continual adherence to their religion, many young British Pakistanis find a welcome sense of stability and permanence. By presenting material collected in field-work study and by using extensive quotations from interviews, the author argues that in a world where concepts of identity are always being challenged traditional sources of authority and allegiance still survive.

Addresses the social significance of orthodox Islam during the medieval period in Baghdad.

Tracing historical and political dynamics underlying nearly 20 years of authoritarian rule, Verma addresses five issues: Islam, secular nationalism, citizenship, democracy and human rights, arguing that modernization has led to tensions in Malaysia.

For more than three decades, Gerard A. Postiglione has witnessed the globalization of education and society in Hong Kong, China and the wider Asian region. His research emphasizes the diversity and complexity of the region, from studies of education and the academic profession during Hong Kong’s retrocession, to reform of ethnic minority education and the rise of world class universities in the Chinese mainland, as well as the complexity of mass higher education in an increasingly dynamic Asia. This selection of 12 of his most representative papers and chapters documents his scholarship in comparative higher education in China, Hong Kong and Asia.

How do old ideas continue to appear relevant in a modern world? A sociological approach to Islam allow us to approach an answer to this question. In Lifeworlds of Islam, Mohammed A. Bamyeh shows that Islam has typically operated not in the form of standard dogmas, but more often as a compass for practical individual orientations or "lifeworlds." Through a comprehensive sociological analysis of Islam, he maps out how Muslims have employed the faith to foster global networks, public philosophies, and engaged civic lives both historically and in the present. Bamyeh further argues that all three fields are poorly understood in recent literature, which tends to focus on one specific problem or another and does not take into account the variety of lifeworlds in which Islam operates. The book contends that the larger preoccupations of ordinary Muslims-how to imagine a global society, how to guide life in the manner of a total philosophy, and how to relate to the world of daily struggles in organized or semi-organized civic forums and social movements-are neither unique to the present period nor to religious life. They are rather shared universal quandaries. A focused empirical lens on the career of a religion, Lifeworlds of Islam contributes to the larger literature and provides insight into the nature of global citizenship, the philosophical needs of individuals, and the ethical values that foster social participation.

In this edited collection, the authors pick up the communities of practice (CoP) approach of sharing practice in their reflection on the experience of taking their CoP vision from a dream to reality. Their stories articulate the vision, the passion and the challenge of working within and/or changing existing institutional culture and practice. The book discusses strategies that worked and considers the lessons learnt to inspire future dreamers and schemers. The multiple perspectives provided in the case studies will assist higher education leaders, as well as academic and professional staff, in establishing or assessing CoPs. The book offers insights into implementation strategies, practical guidelines and ideas on how CoP theoretical underpinnings can be tailored to the higher education context.