Islamic Studies

This article deals with the migration of a group of Muslims united by a legend of origin from a Central Asian saint Mir ‘Ali Baba as well as by a shared status of “sacred family”. This group, known in sources as the “Shikhov family” moved from “Arabistan” to Central Asia, then to southern regions of Western Siberia and later also partly to Central Turkey. These migrations were accompanied by the establishment of transnational religious contacts and by the transmission of knowledge about the common origin through the reproduction of genealogical documents. This article constitutes a part of a larger project devoted to the history of Muslim sacred families in Western Siberia

This article is a publication of facsimiles and annotated English
translations of two versions of a biographical dictionary of Siberian Islamic
scholars. The work written by ‘Abd al-Rashd Ibrhm deserves serious attention
from scholars because it opens up a world of intellectual life among the Muslims
in Western Siberia almost unknown so far. The sources provides us information on
local scholars who lived between the 18th and late 19th centuries, their interests,
education, networks and theological debates. All of this allows us to claim that an
elaborated Islamic discourse existed at that time in Siberia.

Orientalism – the idea that the standpoint of Western writers on the East greatly affected what they wrote about the East, the "Other" – applied also in Russia and the Soviet Union, where the study of the many exotic peoples incorporated into the Russian Empire, often in quite late imperial times, became a major academic industry, where, as in the West, the standpoint of writers greatly affected what they wrote. Russian/Soviet orientalism had a particularly important impact in Central Asia, where in early Soviet times new republics, later states, were created, often based on the distorted perceptions of scholars in St Petersburg and Moscow, and often cutting across previously existing political and cultural boundaries. The book explores how the Soviet orientalism academic industry influenced the creation of Central Asian nations. It discusses the content of oriental sources and discourses, considers the differences between scholars working in St Petersburg and Moscow and those working more locally in Central Asia, providing a rich picture of academic politics, and shows how academic cultural classification cemented political boundaries, often in unhelpful ways.

Sufism, the mystical/esoteric Islamic path of soul purification, is spreading widely in Western societies. The Internet is one of the most important vehicles of this diffusion. After a brief introduction about Western Sufism and Religion and the Internet, I will describe the use of the Internet in four Sufi orders, underlining how the Internet it is: 1) an instrument of promotion, information and knowledge about Islam and Sufism; 2) it reduces the distance between disciples and Masters; 3) it is a digital place where are reaffirmed religious experiences and shared knowledge. However I will focus on the Naqshbandi Haqqani case, which it is completely different from the other orders studied. For some Naqshbandi disciples, the Internet it is also a place in which to practice religion: rituals, prayer requests, initiation and religious experiences. This peculiar use of the Internet will allow us to explore the transformation of Western Sufism in the frame of post-modern religiosity.

Pemikiran keagamaan di Indonesia dapat dibagi menjadi 4 tipologi berdasarkan doktrin dan kultur dakwahnya. Tipologi tersebut di antaranya: Tradisionalis, Modernis, Fundamentalis dan Liberal. Tipologi ini diadopsi dari RAND corporation. Tipologi ini jauh lebih sederhana dari versi Abuddin Nata.  Tipologi tidak dimaksudkan untuk mengkotak-kotak Umat Islam, melainkan untuk memudahkan mahasiswa dalam mengkaji berbagai warna pemikiran dalam Islam.

The edition of the one-page document which is archived as XVIII G 199 in the National Library in Prague. The document syncretizes magic squares, sufi texts and symbols and Islamic elements, and it was created probably in the Ottoman cultural area. The text and symbols are transcribed, reconstructed and interpreted.

CОДЕРЖАНИЕ
От автора
Введение
1. Cовременные концепции и проблемы формирования нового мирового порядка
2. Предпосылки становления исламского фактора во внешней политике США
3. Концептуализация мусульманской общины США
4. Основные подходы Вашингтона к борьбе с религиозным экстремизмом в мусульманском мире
5. Конструирование мусульманской фрагментации на Ближнем и Среднем Востоке сквозь призму геостратегических проектов США
6. Дискуссии в американской внешней политике о реформировании ислама и демократизации стран мусульманского мира
Заключение
Литература

The label ‘Muslim’ is increasingly replacing others such as ‘Gastarbeiter’, ‘migrant’, ‘foreigner’ and ‘Turk’ that were used to exclude migrants and non-ethnic Germans from German society.  Although this process began after 2000 when Germany’s citizenship laws changed from jus sanguinis to incorporate an element of jus soli and minority subjects could no longer be ‘othered’ by their passports, it intensified shortly afterwards due to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Spielhaus 2006). Specifically within the German context, the discovery that Mohamed Atta, one of the perpetrators of 9/11, had lived and studied in Hamburg, the foiled bomb plots of 2006 and 2007, and the 2011 Frankfurt Airport shooting all served to buttress this paradigmatic shift from national/ethnic difference to religious.  Yet, rather than responding in kind to this identitarian entrenchment, the work of Zafer Şenocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu and Navid Kermani (all minority writers of varying Muslim backgrounds) are suggesting new ways of thinking about community, identity and religiosity that are fluid, non-foundational and open to an undecided future, which can all be illuminated by Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of the ‘inoperative community’ (2000 and 1991) and the deconstruction of monotheism (2008).
For Nancy, the traditional understanding of community as the fusion of immanent individuals with a common identity must be resisted, as this disguises our actual ontological interrelatedness as ‘singular beings’ who are radically open to one another.  This non-foundational approach regards the spacing of interconnected singular beings (their ‘being-in-common) as the sense of the world, rejecting universalising ideologies that seek to confer sense upon the world from the outside, since these act to close down meaning and divide us up into polarised communities that militate against our interrelatedness.  Whether these ideologies be political or religious, they are both defined by the monotheistic paradigm that operates through a separate ideal world that acts as our world’s guiding principle.  This is why Nancy himself rejects the term cosmopolitanism, as its philosophy roots in the metaphysics of the Enlightenment stem from the ideal world of pure reason.
Nevertheless, just as the inoperative community can be understood as a non-ideological route to cosmopolitan solidarities, the deconstruction of monotheism too leaves space for a non-ideological religiosity.  Nancy proposes, borrowing from mysticism, a God not as ‘the “other world” [...], but the other of the world’ (2008, p. 10), that is to say, a religiosity that does not position God as the subject of the world and its organizing principle, but concerns itself instead with glimpsing the divine in the alterity in our world, which results from the very nothingness of its origins.  These arguments at the forefront of the debate surrounding cosmopolitanism and religion can shed light on the literary writing of Şenocak, SAID, Zaimoglu and Kermani, who draw upon the immanentist tradition within Islam mysticism in order to intimate a non-foundational religiosity that figures in the alterity of the world and leaves open all possibilities for the future.

As part of a wider project looking at the influence dynamics between Islam and the European Far Right, my current research focuses on the reconfigurations of Muslim identity in response to these socio-political confrontations. I have had to consider a number of critical issues in designing my research model such as: the power relations between myself and my participants as well as some ethical and pragmatic factors influencing the study’s validity and reliability. These considerations led me towards adopting Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a foundational framework. Having conducted preliminary fieldwork in Edinburgh, I came to realize another tension besides the insider-outsider dialectic in engaging with the Muslim community.  It regards the way that participants view the researcher as being “one of them”, and yet at the same time creates a sort of tension when they question what is in it for them.
This paper presents one of the strategies I have adopted in addressing this issue. It is through the fostering of present stakeholdership in the research project. The rationale follows PAR’s democratic commitment to break the barriers on who owns research and for whom it is conducted insofar as involving the participants in the research process and making them present stakeholders has the potential to generate data which the more conventional approaches would not. The paper presents the potentials, but also challenges in adopting this as a research strategy through a case presentation of one of my research participants’ portfolio. The paper presents how I have incorporated PAR in a 4-dimensional social change research model to mitigate the collateral tensions arising from the positioning and power relations dynamics between researcher and participant.