The sociology of religion has often missed the mark with Islam and Muslims, by forcing external frameworks that are not fit for purpose, by neglecting already-existing constitutive theories that more authentically explain the Muslim experience, and by devoting comparatively fewer studies to Islam and Muslims. This paper offers a small contribution to redress these issues, by...
This paper explores the process of meaning-making in an Islamic site—The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI)—where the cultivation of a plural religious space is pursued as an Islamic, rather than a secular, virtue. The study highlights the discourse, spatiality, and praxis of the Friday prayers at IMI, revealing a distinctive non-hierarchical symbolic spatiality, plural...
While the practice of child marriage pre-dates the Syrian civil war, it is one of several social and humanitarian crises that have been exacerbated by that conflict. This study identifies the reasons behind child marriage among displaced Syrians residing in Turkey and the effects that these marriages have on girls and their families. The primary objective of this study is to...
Most academic scholars of the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamist organisations seem to agree that these groups have come to accept the nation state and the rules of the democratic game over the past few decades. At the same time, several scholars have shown in their work that reforms and developments among Islamists with regard to the state and democracy have not been...
This paper analyzes the role of Sufi edep/adab (spiritual manners) in the ethical self-cultivation among a Naqshbandi Sufi Muslim group in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. It considers how an ethnographic focus on edeb/adab can help us understand Sufi spirituality as a form of everyday sociality on one hand and as a form of religious virtue and piety on the other. The ethnography...
Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly “proper Turkish citizens” have been experiencing after being targeted by the Turkish State. This existential crisis, as argued in this paper, is significantly informative in understanding how...
The aim of this study is to investigate factors associated with the applications of child marriage dispensation submitted to the Religious Courts during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, particularly in 2019–2021. The number of child marriage dispensation cases was analyzed together with other socioeconomic variables, including poverty and jobless rates, junior and senior high...
My contribution to this special issue is non-orthodox. Far from Islamic Feminism's hermeneutics, and bearing in mind the limitations of anthropological works and representative paradigms in Orientalist critique, I take cues from postcolonial scholar Edouard Glissant’s (1990) seminal work, Poetics of Relations, notably his notions of détour, retour, and érrance, and draw on my...
Scholarship on political Islam has often addressed settings where Islamist movements and political parties operate as anti-colonial and oppositional entities. On the other hand, this article focuses on a less explored aspect of Islamist governmentalities in a case when Islamism becomes a part of the governing canon and rules over its Muslim others. I investigate situations where...
From the 1980s, revisionist Sunni Islamist thinkers have engaged in a hermeneutical effort to argue for the full acceptance of non-Muslims as equal political participants and citizens in an Islamic polity. A key text in their argument is the so-called Constitution of Medina, regulating the interaction between the newly arrived followers of Muhammad and the existing tribes in...
This paper examines why the MB was cautious in its revision of views on women under Anwar Sadat when it was, at the same time, changing the way it dealt with politics and the issue of revolutionary violence, by looking at the movement’s view on women as expressed in its own writings. I argue that the MB’s view on women was in line with the Islamic revival Egypt experienced. Given...
Some proponents of new atheism, including Dawkins, claim that religion, especially Islam, is the cause of the war because it encourages divisiveness and labeling. In this article, in the first step, I will show that Islam is not the cause of war, but rather it is a misconception of Islam that is the cause of divisiveness and eventually war. Then, I will demonstrate that the COVID...
Filling a significant gap in prisons research, this paper articulates the experiences and perspectives of a group of Muslim prison officers interviewed as part of an international study examining Islam in prison. These Muslim prison officers occupied a precarious occupational cultural space between Us (prison officers) and Them (Muslim prisoners) which presented both risks of...
This article contributes to the wider historicity of female Sufi spiritual guides by engaging Indonesian examples about which very little have been written. While women can and do hold different levels of rank and leadership in Indonesian Sufi orders (tariqah), usually among all-female congregations, this article examines a very rare example of a woman in a public leadership...
The post-2013 crackdown on Islamist-affiliated businesses in Egypt offers a unique glimpse at the Islamists’ economic assets and activities. How could affiliates of the Islamist movement in Egypt accumulate so many assets and become significant market actors since the 1970s despite periodic state hostility and weak property rights protection? I argue that belonging to the...
The inexplicable link between the Malay language and Islam has been well-documented in Malaysia. In Brunei, however, this association has not been made explicit and could only be inferred through the state’s stance of utilising only the Malay language for Islamic-related matters, most conspicuously in the Islamic education curriculum. While this practice has been in place since...
This article focuses on contemporary Salafism in the European context and how it speaks to the categories Wiktorowicz put forth in his seminal 2006 article. Specifically, it examines how we can identify, describe, and classify the main forms of Salafist religiosity in the context of Western European countries. Furthermore, by examining the relationship to politics, preaching, and...
In this study, I offer a categorization of Salafism based on the concept of vanguardism. Vanguardism suggests how Salafis inhabit the political domain, by posing as the vanguard of a privileged group endowed with a historical mission. Relatedly, I summon the Gramscian concept of “philosophy of praxis.” With this, I intend to reconfigure Wiktorowicz’s classificatory scheme...
This is an interdisciplinary study that explores the impact of listening to the Qur'an on the physiological and psychological statuses of an average Egyptian Muslim. It is a transcendental phenomenological study that intersects with theories and concepts from different disciplines including reception studies, media, and popular culture analysis. The study uses two tools that are...