Mara A. Leichtman offers an in-depth study of Shi'i Islam in two very different communities in Senegal: the well-established Lebanese diaspora and Senegalese "converts" from Sunni to Shi'i Islam of recent decades. Sharing a minority religious status in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country, each group is cosmopolitan in its own way. Leichtman provides new insights into the everyday lives of Shi'i Muslims in Africa and the dynamics of local and global Islam. She explores the influence of Hizbullah and Islamic reformist movements, and offers a corrective to prevailing views of Sunni-Shi'i hostility, demonstrating that religious coexistence is possible in a context such as Senegal.

Global migration flows in the 20th century have seen the emergence of Muslim diaspora and minority communities in Europe, North America and other parts of the world. This book offers a set of new comparative perspectives on the experiences of Shi'a Muslim minorities outside the so-called Muslim heartland (Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia). It looks at Shiʻa minority communities in Europe, North and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and discusses the particular challenges these communities face as "a minority within a minority"--

This book addresses the discourses, agendas and actions of Muslim faith-based organizations and activists to empower Muslim communities in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The individual chapters discuss how traditional Muslim welfare and charity institutions, zakat (obligatory or mandatory almsgiving), sadaqa (voluntary almsgiving and donations) and waqf (pious endowments), are used to improve social welfare, focusing on instrumentalization and institutionalization in the collection and distribution of zakat. The book includes case studies from West Africa (Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Senegal), the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), highlighting the role and interplay of local, national and international Sunni, Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslim faith-based organizations and NGOs. Chapters "Muslim NGOs, Zakat and the Provision of Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Introduction" and "Discourses on Zakat and Its Implementation in Contemporary Ghana" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

"Bringing together a wide diversity of authors based on three continents and from different disciplinary backgrounds, this book offers analyses of a wide range of factors that characterize and that are shaping the future of the African Sahel. In forty chapters, organized in nine sections, the book examines this complex and rapidly changing region on multiple dimensions. Collectively, the book attempts to offer an understanding of the specificity of the Sahel, and to examine its core characteristics as shaped by the geographic, cultural, and political parameters that define it. Following a series of chapters focused on the shaping of the Sahelian space as a region, six chapters explore the distinct national trajectories of the countries of the political Sahel: Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Chad. The extraordinary combination of environmental, economic and political challenges, and the ways in which Sahelian states and societies have responded, are the primary focus of the three subsequent sections, while the various parameters of the lived realities of these societies in motion are explored in the four final sections of the book. Transversally throughout, the chapters aim to offer an interdisciplinary and holistic view of the challenges and the dynamics that are shaping a region at an historical crossroads, and an understanding of the many factors that feed and perpetuate its vulnerabilities and fragilities, as well as its sources of resilience"--

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa presents to a broad readership an accessible, comprehensive, up to date, and topical comparative analysis of sociological thinking in Africa. Sociological discourse about African societies has been challenging and difficult, due to a lack of both comprehensive analyses and holistic sociological evidence that covers Africa from past to present times. This Handbook brings together latest analyses of sociological phenomena from the best scholars working on numerous thematic areas. It provides contributions that locates African sociological thinking in historical context and takes a critical look at its current manifestations across the continent. This collection builds upon an existing body of literature which has demonstrated that while the analysis of African societies has long been an item on the agenda of sociologists worldwide, advances of the decolonial critique made notably by African scholars in Africa enhances the scholarship of the sociology of Africa. Thus, the collection is premised upon the understanding that in order to understand the sociology of Africa as significant intervention, the participation and representation of African ways of knowing and doing is a critical starting point. This Handbook comprises a series of scholarly and interdisciplinary perspectives on current debates over how best to unpack sociological imaginations in African context. The scholarly contributions, therefore, are based on both perspectives illustrating the importance of specificity in sociological phenomenon. The Handbook is arranged in seven parts: Context and Perspectives; Race, Ethnicity, and Religion; Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality; Medical Sociology: Political Economy and Development; Crime and Violence; and The Family and Education. Premised on the importance of African ways of knowing and doing, these chapters offer sociologists, researchers, and students an invaluable starting point for a fuller understanding of African sociology.

This wide-ranging volume presents the most complete appraisal of modern African history to date. It assembles dozens of new and established scholars to tackle the questions and subjects that define the field, ranging from the economy, the two world wars, nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics to religion, development, sexuality, and the African youth experience. Contributors are drawn from numerous fields in African studies, including art, music, literature, education, and anthropology. The themes they cover illustrate the depth of modern African history and the diversity and originality of lenses available for examining it. Older themes in the field have been treated to an engaging re-assessment, while new and emerging themes are situated as the book’s core strength. The result is a comprehensive, vital picture of where the field of modern African history stands today.

The book deals with President Hassan Rouhani’s conceptual approach to foreign policy. It discusses the main pillars of thinking underpinning Rouhani’s administration and the school of thought associated with it, with a focus on issues pertaining to development as well as international relations. The signature of the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” in 2015 showed the Iranian commitment towards the international requests on guarantees and transparency on its nuclear enrichment program. The book analyses the actual impact of the nuclear deal on the Gulf regional politics, with especial emphasis on the Iran-Saudi Arabia balance of power and the internal implications at political and economic level. It will assess the success or failure of the nuclear deal JCPOA as a foreign policy tool and it impact for Iran and the region. The book also analyses Iran’s relations with other gulf Arab states, Latin America, Africa and its ‘war on terror’ along with its allies Syria and Iraq.

When Guinean Muslims leave their homeland, they encounter radically new versions of Islam and new approaches to religion more generally. In Remaking Islam in African Portugal, Michelle C. Johnson explores the religious lives of these migrants in the context of diaspora. Since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago, Muslims in this region have long conflated ethnicity and Islam, such that to be Mandinga or Fula is also to be Muslim. But as they increasingly encounter Muslims not from Africa, as well as other ways of being Muslim, they must question and revise their understanding of "proper" Muslim belief and practice. Many men, in particular, begin to separate African custom from global Islam. Johnson maintains that this cultural intersection is highly gendered as she shows how Guinean Muslim men in Lisbon—especially those who can read Arabic, have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and attend Friday prayer at Lisbon's central mosque—aspire to be cosmopolitan Muslims. By contrast, Guinean women—many of whom never studied the Qur'an, do not read Arabic, and feel excluded from the mosque—remain more comfortably rooted in African custom. In response, these women have created a "culture club" as an alternative Muslim space where they can celebrate life course rituals and Muslim holidays on their own terms. Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion.

Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries. Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange. The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.

Examines how learning and teaching morality in Tanzania's faith-oriented schools is inextricably interwoven with the complex power relations of an interconnected world.