{"title":"Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds","authors":"Jeanine Dağyeli, U. Freitag, Claudia Ghrawi","doi":"10.1515/9783110726534-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726534-001","url":null,"abstract":"The contributions to this volume examine different ways in which Muslims have laid claim to, and shaped their worlds in the 20 and 21 centuries. While the negotiation of identities and the ordering and reordering of societies is a common process, why do we choose ‘Muslims’ as a ‘field’ of enquiry? Would we ask similar questions about Christians or Buddhists? Thus, the very choice of the field of research raises a number of fundamental questions which arose in the very particular historical context of the first two decades of the 21 century, when the devastating and highly symbolic attacks on the World Trade Centre by the Islamist organisation al-Qaʿida in September 2001 triggered what was termed the ‘Global War on Terror’. Of course, the identification of Muslims as the Christian (and Western) ‘Other’ goes back almost to the inception of Islam. The long history of mutual relations and perceptions underwent many permutations, which need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that the Age of Imperialism, where this book takes its starting point, coincided with an often violent reconfiguration of these relations. While the 20 century itself witnessed multiple shifts, which we reflect on below, at the time of planning the research on which the book is based, mutual perceptions had taken another distinct turn for the worse. Since the end of the Cold War, some political scientists and area studies specialists have become adherents of a school of thought that promotes the notion of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. With the","PeriodicalId":151130,"journal":{"name":"Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122344071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representation and Ethics: The Making of the Islamic World from a Place of Exile","authors":"A. Tayob","doi":"10.1515/9783110726534-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726534-012","url":null,"abstract":": I use Edward Said’s metaphor of exile to identify an archive that offers an alternative discourse in the study of Islam. By drawing on Western and Muslim traditions, this archive occupies a place of exile that does more than constructing a representation of the Muslim world. Like Said’s work, it continues the critique of Orientalism. In addition, it includes a deliberation on ethics that has generally eluded the dominant discourse on the making and unmaking of the Islamic World. I contrast this archive with a post-Orientalist discourse that sometimes takes a deconstructivist approach to Islam, and sometimes one that emphasizes agency. The use of agency draws attention to Muslim imbrication in the social, political, and religious fields, but fails to account for political and economic hegemonies. Such strategies side-step the continuing dominance of Western political power games in Muslim societies and states. I therefore turn to scholars in exile and propose that their interest in critique and ethics offers a different way of imagining the Islamic world. Their questions and concern offer a different perspective to ‘post-Saidian’ Islamic Studies. locating and explaining, in historical-comparative, sociological terms, the type of break-through that allowed, through the shaping of notions of transcendence, for the emergence of a type of human reflexivity conventionally identified as the passage from the narrativity of mythos to the rationality of logos . 16","PeriodicalId":151130,"journal":{"name":"Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126355655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exile as Liminality: Tracing Muslim Migrants in Fascist Europe","authors":"Peter Wien","doi":"10.1515/9783110726534-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726534-004","url":null,"abstract":": The chapter is a case study of the success and failures of Muslim migrants to claim space for themselves in the Western world before and during the Second World War. Members of the Druze-Lebanese Hamada family tried to stabilise their lives under the precarious conditions of exile in light of their host societies’ projections of Muslim foreignness and Arab exoticism, which they tried to exploit for their own benefit taking on roles and enacting personae to satisfy expectations between France, the United States, Switzerland, and Italy. Mussolini’s pretentious showcasing as a “protector of Islam” opened up distinct possibilities for the Hamadas in an environment where tricksters and opportun-ists met attention seekers and careerists in the fascist system. In particular, this chapter shows how Nur Hamada went to great lengths to prove her authenticity as a representative of modern Muslim womanhood.","PeriodicalId":151130,"journal":{"name":"Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121537046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}