As a result of immigration from Asia in the wake of the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the fastest-growing religions in America--faster than all Christian groups combined--are Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. In this remarkable book, a leading scholar of religion asks how these new faiths have changed or have been changed by the pluralist face of American civil society. How have these new religious minorities been affected by the deep-rooted American ambivalence toward foreign traditions? Bruce Lawrence casts a comparativist eye on the American religious scene and...
As a result of immigration from Asia in the wake of the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the fastest-growing religions in America--fas...
As a result of immigration from Asia in the wake of the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the fastest-growing religions in America--faster than all Christian groups combined--are Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. In this remarkable book, a leading scholar of religion asks how these new faiths have changed or have been changed by the pluralist face of American civil society. How have these new religious minorities been affected by the deep-rooted American ambivalence toward foreign traditions? Bruce Lawrence casts a comparativist eye on the American religious scene and...
As a result of immigration from Asia in the wake of the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the fastest-growing religions in America--fas...
Islam is often portrayed, especially in Western media, as an alien, violent, hostile, and monolithic religion, whose adherents are intent upon battling nonbelievers throughout the world. Shattering the Myth demonstrates that these conceptions more accurately reflect the bias of Western reporters than they do the realities of contemporary Islam. Westerners are barraged by images of violence that usually originate from armed confrontations in one small corner of the world. Islam, Bruce Lawrence argues, is a complex, international religious system that cannot be reduced to stereotypes....
Islam is often portrayed, especially in Western media, as an alien, violent, hostile, and monolithic religion, whose adherents are intent upon batt...
Crucial to understanding Islam is a recognition of the role of Muslim networks. The earliest networks were Mediterranean trade routes that quickly expanded into transregional paths for pilgrimage, scholarship, and conversion, each network complementing and reinforcing the others. This volume selects major moments and key players from the seventh century to the twenty-first that have defined Muslim networks as the building blocks for Islamic identity and social cohesion.
Although neglected in scholarship, Muslim networks have been invoked in the media to portray post-9/11 terrorist...
Crucial to understanding Islam is a recognition of the role of Muslim networks. The earliest networks were Mediterranean trade routes that quickly exp...
" Sets] the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. . . . The volume breaks free from the polemics of present-day politics and historicist distortions that have seeped into most standard texts."--David Lelyveld, Cornell UniversityThis collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other. Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic...
" Sets] the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. . . . The v...
This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and...
This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activist...
Sufism is a religion which emphasizes direct knowledge of the divine within each person, and meditation, music, song, and dance are seen as crucial spiritual strides toward attaining unity with God. Sufi paths of mysticism and devotion, motivated by Islamic ideals, are still chosen by men and women in countries from Morocco to China, and there are nearly one hundred orders around the world, eighty of which are present and thriving in the United States. The Chishti Sufi order has been the most widespread and popular of all Sufi traditions since the twelfth-century. Sufi Martyrs of Love offers...
Sufism is a religion which emphasizes direct knowledge of the divine within each person, and meditation, music, song, and dance are seen as crucial sp...
Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.
Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate co...
Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section, the contributors reexamine...
Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads towa...