Critique Of The 's And Mahmood 's Influential Ethnographies, A Great Deal Of Attention

Islam, a religion of people submitting to one God, seeking peace and a way of life without sin, is always misunderstood throughout the world. What some consider act of bigotry, others believe it to be the lack of education and wrong portrayal of events in media; however, one cannot not justify the so little knowledge that America and Americans have about Islam and Muslims. Historically there are have been myths, many attacks on Islam and much confusion between Islam as a religion and Middle Easter culture that is always associated with it. This paper is meant to dispel, or rather educate about the big issues that plague people’s minds with false ideas and this will only be touching the surface.

Thesis: In his book, No god but God, Reza Aslan recounts the history and teachings of Islam in order to deconstruct the barriers within interreligious comprehension.

This is my first time that I come to New York, so I am curious about many things in this new place, such as the famous resorts, and the people here. As we know, the Times Square is very famous in New York. When I was in China, I hope I can visit Times Square, because I saw Times Square was very great in some of the opening of American series. Now, I am in New York, and I have enough chances to visit Times Square whenever I want. In there, it gives me a new horizon to understand the culture that is different from China.

A living jazz legend once exclaimed “jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.” Herbie Hancock makes it clear that jazz has been an evolving form of art. And just as simple as the notion that music can change the world, music changes in itself. Jazz once evolved into something we call swing. Back in the roaring twenties people got up and danced to this kind of music. However, these simple and playful melodies that everyone were accustomed to transformed into intricate music with a different basis. When jazz was over everyone’s head and people stopped dancing, we call this period bop. Inevitably, new ideas emerged and jazz musicians decided to take a

In my second visit to the Islamic Center of San Antonio my aim was to hone in on the most deeply fixed aspects of Islam in an effort to trace them back through Berger’s three stages of world-building. For instance, one of the most striking aspects of members of the Islamic Center of San Antonio is their strict commitment to prayer. The members I spoke with emphasized the importance of sticking to the Salah (daily prayers plus the Friday prayer) times.

Confucianism and Islam are the two religions that contrast with each other in many aspects. In this respect, Reid’s “Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us about Living in the West” (2000) and Eteraz’s “Children of Dust: A Portrait of a Muslim as a Young Man” (2009) show what differences Confucianism and Islam have and what effects those differences produce on people’s lives. In more details, Eteraz’s book consists of the author’s memories about his childhood in Pakistan and his studying in higher school and then at college in America. Ali Eteraz is a Muslim whose religious worldview suffered changes after his migration to the United States.

We are in love with throwback pictures and can never have enough of them. Filmmaker and choreographer Farah Khan shared an throwback picture on her Instagram account that took us down the memory lane.

Although he has been critiqued for disparaging Reformist variants of Islam, these critiques, in my opinion, fail to see his particular utilization of the embodiment of Qur’anic knowledge. For instance, Adeline Masquelier in her essay “Qur'an Schooling and the Production of Mindful Bodies in West Africa” is correct to critique Ware’s final polemic against Reformist Islam as lacking a fair insight about its historical circumstances and relationship with the other Islamic discursive traditions; however, her comparison of Saba Mahmood’s embodiment of piety exhibited in her book Politics of Piety and Ware’s conceptualization of the term undercuts Ware’s unique approach and paints embodiment with the same brush (Masquelier 189-190). Failing to acknowledge the epistemological project that comes with embodying the Qur’an in Reformist Islam’s particular way, such as the adoption of specific subjectivities and modes of piety, reduces the differences the West African epistemology possesses, for “The Walking Qur’an is not only the Qur’an embodied but also the Qur’an in action” [his italics] (Ware, WQ 14). Overall, whether through the embodiment of the memorization and dispositions or the becoming of the literal walking, talking, and living Qur’an, these two conceptualizations of embodiment prove the important point that the Qur’an is intricately tied to the Muslim’s corporeal interactions in this physical existence, for in every motion, the Qur’an is

First, conceptually, scholars of Islam should stay away from understanding zuhd as asceticism. While asceticism as a category may seem unproblematic for scholars of Early Christianity, Islamic Studies scholars are studying different religious contexts and worldviews that should be analyzed without the weight and baggage of the English and Christian term asceticism. Many of the concepts associated with asceticism that were mentioned above do not integrate neatly into the Islamic worldview nor they embody the practices of zuhd. I contend that thinking of zuhd generally as renunciation instead of asceticism allows for much greater malleability within the various traditions of Islamic renunciation that do not conform to the ascetic (Christian) standard. Second, I argue that renunciation as zuhd has not had one particular meaning or one specific mode of praxis throughout Islamic history and that the clash of zuhd archetypes has been a hallmark of Sufism since its nascent days in the desert until its most recent struggles in the modern era. The Islamic renunciant can be both the wandering outcast, who prays to God in solitude away from society, and the active socialite, who maintains an occupation and possesses a family. Overall, I hope this essay helps other readers and scholars of Sufism overcome the same mental roadblock I possessed in regards to asceticism, renunciation, and

A simple interpretive controversy of a verse from the Holy Book of Islam, “O you who believe, obey God and obey the Messenger and the holders of authority from among you” (The Quran, Al-Nisa 4.59), led to the most well known Sunni/Shia split in Islamic history, leading to several different Islamic cultures across the globe today. The “holders of authority” part of the verse is quite contested; in the Shi’ite interpretation, the Imam is the current holder of authority (Fischer & Abedi, 1990: 131). In the Shi’ite perspective, there is a literal ancestry that can be linked from the Imam directly back to Prophet Muhammad. Thus, religious authority, as obtained through the Shi’ite perspective is indicative of a similar concept to the “Politics of Pious Respectability.” The contestation of the verse, in tandem with the Black Muslims use of dandyism, provides evidence that “culture is contested, temporal and emergent” (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Here, we see a movement away from the traditional Islamic and/or culturally significant Hip-Hop outfit towards a new style and thus a new culture and identity emerges. Individuals like Abd al-Karim use dandyism as a form of resistance “to signify on Arab and South Asian US American Muslim hegemonies and declare themselves to be firm Muslims, even if they are urbanized, working class Black

Over time, religious roles have been shifting for many years which mold religious movements by the influence of other concepts and traditions. Chapter 3 of Torkel Brekke’s text, Fundamentalism: Prophecy and Protest in an age of Globalization, provides a greater insight on the shift of religious authorities. The chapter begins to introduce the meaning of religious authority and prophecy. The author expands on the three important types of religious specialists, the magicians, the prophets, and the priests (66), as well as the two types of prophetic roles, the ethical and the exemplary prophet (67). After giving a background on religious authority and prophecy, Brekke then goes into depth of the religious authority in the Muslim world and their changes in religious authority caused by secular movements which stirred reactions and change of views (72).

By this, they show the conflicts of their time, as outcomes of an advancing strain in Western society itself. The occurrence is a simple challenge between the cultivation, but to his faith, the author doesn’t throw in his fate totally behind one team. Preferably, he accepts how the 'Enlightenment' has came to a sound bite in itself, empty its archetype as it gets nothing more that a extend to strike belief with. 'To see religion, or even religious orthodoxy, as the main enemy of Enlightenment values is misleading,' he says, instead appreciating both pitches as a league point for people's wish to be general. In this setting, belief gets a device for stripling of Muslims to manage their distance from Dutch society. The congress with child Muslims in Amsterdam proves the sharpened sense of stigma that launch the research for accordance. The sacred wear he watches is a statement of their conflict rather than commitment, letting them more like Dutch people than anyone

The region of the Middle East and its inhabitants have always been a wonder to the Europeans, dating back to the years before the advent of Islam and the years following the Arab conquest. Today, the Islamic world spreads from the corners of the Philippines to the far edges of Spain and Central Africa. Various cultures have adopted the Islamic faith, and this blending of many different cultures has strengthened the universal Islamic culture. The religion of Islam has provided a new meaning to the lives of many people around the world. In the Islamic world, the religion defines and enriches culture and as a result the culture gives meaning to the individual. Islam is not only a religion, it is in its own way a culture. It may be this very

of a Malay Muslim. I will then go on to discuss how the Western world

Some argue, as Jonathan Rauch does in his article, “Islam Has Been Hijacked…,” that since religion was brought to the forefront, in the