Religion and Literature, Identity and Individual: Resetting the Muslim-Christian Encounter (original) (raw)
Related papers
Writing Muslim Identity. Continuum, 2011
This study probes recent and contemporary writing that touches on Muslim subjects. Authors discussed include V S Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Don Delillo, Monica Ali and Naguib Mahfouz If a tiny minority of militants are to be believed their religion, Islam, is todayat war with most of the powerful nations of the world, pre-eminently the United States of America, Russia and western Europe. Whether or not we take the militants’ words at face value, the overwhelming majority of their fellow religionists would refuse to endorse their sentiments – they do not wish to be involved in such a war. Yet willy nilly, Muslims the world over have become objects of suspicion and more insidiously, a war of words and images has been unleashed against them. Especially where they live as a minoritywith the status of quondam migrants, they feel themselves vulnerable to what might be called a Kulturkampf – a ‘cultural struggle’ that takes its cue from Bismarck’s policies directed in the name of secularism against the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1870s
Istanbul University Press, 2024
The increase in terrorist attacks at the verge of the 21st century and the politics of associating Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorists have brought the subject of Islam and Muslims under serious investigation among scholars of the humanities and social sciences. New vocabulary words such as jihad [struggle], Sharia [Islamic law], Dar alHarb [house of war], Dar al-Islam [house of Islam], hijab [headscarf], al-Qaeda, mujaheddin [jihadist], Taliban, and kafir [disbeliever] were introduced into political and intellectual debates along with new phraseologies such as Islamic terrorism, Islamic extremism, Islamization, Talibanization, Islamic fascism, Islamic jihad, the Green Terror, and Islamic bomb into the daily lexicon to malign the image of Islam and Muslims and to strengthen biased arguments. This chapter aims to analyze the literary response of Muslim writers regarding diaspora and the negative projection of the Muslim identity and stereotypes, especially after the 9/11 incident. The questions are addressed through select literary texts on topics such as how the Muslim identity and hijab identity came under the spotlight of racial and cultural discrimination in Western societies. The study discusses texts such as the Pakastani-Brit H.M. Naqvi’s (2009) Home Boy, PakistaniAmerican-Brit Mohsin Hamid’s (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Lebanese-American Laila Halaby’s (2007) Once in a Promised Land, Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Randa Abdel-Fattah’s (2005) Does My Head Look Big in This?, Indian-British Shelina Zahra Jan Mohamed’s (2009) Love in a Headscarf, and Bangladeshi-British Monica Ali’s (2003) Brick Lane. The chapter argues that, despite the ongoing international propaganda campaign against Muslims, they have revisited and reclaimed their identities and resisted and exposed the biases in the contemporary discourses against Islam and Muslims.
Muslim World, 2020
Few, even are the contributions of authors from Middle Eastern Fundamentalist-Evangelical Protestantism that touch upon the relation with other faiths except from a missiological, evangelizing-proselytizing perspective. Recently, a Lebanese theologian from this community changed this habitus and produced a monograph on Christianity and Islam from an evangelical attention to the idea of "dialogue" and interreligious interaction. In 2019, Martin Accad, the Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut, published a book titled, Sacred Misinterpretation, on the subject of Christian-Muslim dialogue. While Accad personally reflects a very tolerant, embracive and open-minded appreciation of his growth and life as Christian with Muslims in Lebanon (something the writer of this review has also experienced in a similar way in his birth-land, Syria), Accad concedes fully the, rather, globally realized conviction that religions and their relations are core-components of conflict. Nevertheless, Accad also construes the primary motivation and belief of his book's discourse on Christian-Muslim dialogue are "the idea that religious discourse can also contribute significantly in working toward peaceful relations between populations with rival ideologies" (p. 6). How can religions become part of the remedy prescription instead of one of the conflict ingredients? The transformation of the role of religious interrelations and communication in our living context, Accad suggests, lies in reviewing the Christians' and Muslims' theological reasoning about each other: "Our theologies have been fundamental to our understanding of one another, and our murky relational history seems to indicate that our mutual perceptions have been largely negative" (p. 7). It is this essential role of theologization in the history of interreligious relation between Christianity and Islam that makes theology "a foundation of dialogue", Accad believes, so that the premise of his argument becomes: "Your view of Islam affects your attitude to Muslims; your attitude, in turn, influences your approach to Christian-Muslim interaction, and that approach affects the ultimate outcome of your presence as a witness among Muslims" (p. 7). Accad's discussion and analysis all over the book become, then, pieces assembled together, on the basis of the above-mentioned premise, to create what he calls "the SEKAP spectrum of Christian-Muslim interaction". SEKAP stands for "syncretistic, existential, kerygmatic, apologetic and polemical" (p. 8). From all these trends of interaction between Christians and Muslims, Accad leaves all those who resonate to interrelationality and focuses on the one that centers around theology: He opts for the "kerygamtic interaction" option, deeming it the most fruitful and peaceful position between the two extreme options of syncretism and polemics. According to him, this option more than any other enables the exploration and finding of the most 'Christ-like' symptoms in Islam and the Muslims. For Accad, this
Pluralising Islam: doing Muslim identities differently
Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2020
This paper challenges the stereotypical homogenisation of Islam often circulated in global discourses. We do this by focusing on the different ways youth across four national case studies constructed their religious identities. The analysis is informed by our understanding that local, national and global discourses are significant to the interpellation of subjects and the production of identities. These on-going processes produce plurality and diversity within and across particular historical contexts. We begin by highlighting the commonalities in youth's representations of Islam. These included proclamations of values such as universal peace and harmony as intrinsic to Islam and the global Ummah. The suturing together of discourses of religion with those of national belonging led us to explore the different socio-historical conjunctures of youth’s respective postcolonial nations. This connection of the local with the national illuminated plurality as the historical and political contours in each nation produced different internal/external others against whom Muslim youth identity narratives were established and re-iterated. Finally, we turn to consider the intersections of these diverse identity narratives with global discursive flows around Islam and the responses these provoked for Muslim youth participants. In this multi-layered exploration of the complex intersections of religion with other identity narratives within four distinct historic and political contexts, we have illuminated the multiplicities and hybridities of youth's religious identities within and across the cases. Through this discussion, we challenge stereotypical tropes evident in the contemporary circulation of global discourses, which too often conflate professions of Islamic faith with religious fundamentalism.
Chapter 4. Territory at Stake! In Defence of ‘Religion’ and ‘Islam’
What is Islamic Studies?
In the nineteenth century, scholars like Max Müller (d. 1900) and William James (d. 1910) presented ideas on the origin of religion and discussed how to study what they perceived as religion and the religious experience; see, for example, their respective Gifford Lectures. For a contemporary example of a discussion of the question 'What is Religion?', see Bergunder 2014. 3 Fitzgerald 1999. 7 Asad 2009: 16. 8 Nongbri 2013: 4. Scholars in other disciplines have not focused on 'religion', but more on the 'modern'. Eickelman and Piscatori state that the contemporary times involve intellectual challenges and questions about Islam. The answers to these questions have produced a view on religion as an abstract and self-contained system that can be compared and distinguished from other belief systems. The construction of the self-contained system emanates from a supposedly authentic version of the 'religion'. They described this as an objectification of Islam; see Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 38ff.