While the Yemen seems to be stumbling from one disaster into the next, it is good to see how some of the best experts in Yemeni studies continue their work in ways that will be useful in the country’s future. The present volume is not only bound to become recognized soon as the magnum opus by Brinkley Messick, professor of anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading experts in Yemeni studies today. More importantly still, Sharī‘a Scripts features all the qualities required for a true academic milestone in Yemen-related scholarship for decades to come, with potential ramifications for the historical and legal anthropology of the Middle East at large. This volume is based on half a lifetime of analytical and comparative studies that began during the author’s first fieldwork period in the central and southern highlands of northern Yemen during the 1970s. Messick meticulously examines the structures of jurisprudence (the “library” in his terms) with the methodologies and techniques of textual scholarship, while relating it to the “archive” of records concerning everyday interactions in legal life as embedded within the practical interplay of fields between orality and scriptural statements.
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Any attempt to explore the relationship between representations of Muslims and public advocacy in modern Western societies must at some point situate both processes in relation to the broader crises of liberal citizenship currently afflicting Western democracies. Calls heard in the 1990s for multicultural citizenship and pluralist “recognition” have long since given way to demands for the exclusion of new immigrants and the coercive assimilation of those – especially Muslims -- long since arrived. This essay examines French Catholic and Muslim perspectives on secularism and citizenship in contemporary France. It highlights disagreements among progressive secularists as well as mainline Catholics and Muslims over how to engage the secular state as well as one’s fellow citizens. It explores the ways in which Catholic advocacy for and with Muslim citizens has been challenged by conservative trends in French Catholicism, as well as the perceived rise of Salafism and, most important, growing support for far-right and Islamophobic movements. The example shows that real-and-existing public spheres look less like the genteelly deliberative public spaces Jurgen Habermas described a generation ago. They are landscapes reshaped by movements, social media, and political entrepreneurs making use of reductionist arguments and media caricature (“fake news”) as much as or even more than deliberative reasoning. These realities present serious challenges to those who hope to use education and dialogue in public advocacy with and for Muslim citizens.

The present book is based on the author’s doctoral research (duly modified) on contract law in Malaysia. It is primarily concerned with the dialectical tension between contractual justice and freedom of contract and the resultant “plethora of battles” (hence the plural ‘wars’ in the title) fought on the “doctrinal/theoretical fronts over a jurisprudential landscape.” The book engages the notion of contractual justice in the context of Malaysian contract law, its role in the adjudication of contract cases, and its realization vis-à-vis the freedom of contract and the legislative grounds Malaysian courts have in such situations.

In Sufis, Salafis, and Islamists: The Contested Ground of British Islamic Activism, Sadek Hamid provides a rich history of nearly four decades of Muslim organizing in Britain. Replete with careful typologies and periodizations, the work reflects the author’s intimate grounding in the world of British Islam, and provides a unique insight into the challenges and successes of four trends he describes as the “reformist Islamist Young Muslims UK (YM), the Salafi-oriented JIMAS (Jamiyyah Ihya’ Minhaj as Sunnah)...the radical pan-Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the neo-Sufi Traditional Islam Network”.

This volume, one of the most important and timely publications of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), represents the latest effort by scholars associated with the organization to formulate an educational program for Muslims. Ziauddin Sardar and Jeremy Henzell-Thomas revise and update the attempts by Ismail Faruqi and fellow founders of IIIT in the 1980s to address the crisis of education faced then by Muslim societies.That is appropriate, for the crisis has not disappeared with the passage of time. If anything, it has become greater and now encompasses Muslims worldwide—not just those in Muslim societies. And, as the authors of this volume note repeatedly, it has captured the attention of educators in the US, UK, and most other European nations.Now, eschewing the older Islamization of knowledge approach, Sardar and Henzell-Thomas propose the integration of knowledge. They set aside the old paradigm while offering minimal comments about the shortcomings that warrant such a change, perhaps so as to avoid giving rise to unnecessary quarrels. Major attention must be accorded, therefore, what the authors understand integration of knowledge to be and how it might address the needs of their specific audience—Muslim societies. One must wonder, all the same, why the audience is so defined. After all, the crisis of education affects people everywhere, Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim societies as well as non-Muslims living in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. How do differences in political and economic problems faced by these various groups affect the educational goals to be achieved and who is affected by them?Another preliminary objection concerns the way both the earlier IIIT reformers and those involved in the new project ignore or neglect the critique of shortcomings in educational approaches launched in the US early in the twentieth century by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a critique that culminated in the Great Books movement. It, or, more accurately, offshoots of it, have given rise to attempts at general or liberal education in numerous American and European institutions. Especially pertinent for the integration of knowledge project is how these offshoots of the Great Books movement, ostensibly centered on Western writings at the outset, have gradually come to incorporate fundamental texts from the Golden Age of the Arabic and Islamic tradition. Today more than ever, it is essential to promote the cultural phenomena common to all. Only greater awareness of the extent to which we are one people will allow us to counter those who seek to divide us and thereby fuel enmity.Finally, no attention is accorded here to how the issues identified with the crisis of education are addressed in other faith traditions or to the way members of those traditions attempt to integrate the teachings of revealed texts with ones arising from simple human reasoning. Such a broader focus would have permitted the authors to propose an approach that might resonate with the general malaise expressed by many educators and suggest a way forward that all, not just Muslims, could embrace.Still, these preliminary objections are just that, preliminary. To assess their merit, it is essential to consider carefully what is actually proposed in the volume under review. It consists of a Foreword setting forth the basic principles of the revised project and four chapters. The first, “Mapping the Terrain,” is by Sardar, as is the second, “From Islamization to Integration of Knowledge.” Henzell-Thomas is the author of the third and fourth chapters, “The Integration We Seek” and “Towards a Language of Integration.”

The theme of this editorial is inspired by the passing of a dear friend, Sulayman Nyang, whose life epitomized the nexus between scholarship and social engagement. Dr. Nyang’s life and career follows a long-held Islamic tradition stretching over a millennium. I would like to begin my reflections by citing the tradition of social engagement and social responsibility within Islamic scholarship, and then briefly examine how that tradition was upheld by Dr. Nyang and offer a synopsis of his thoughts and actions.

Turkey has been characterized as a nation that exhibits an amalgam of Eastern and Western cultural values. For a lengthy period of time, Turkey had prohibited Muslim women’s wearing of the veil in many public venues. Yet, the vast majority of this nation’s citizens are highly devout Muslims. Our study uses these paradoxes as a springboard for investigating early twenty-first century religious influences on Turkish Muslim women’s attitudes toward gender inequality. We introduce the theoretical construct of diversified institutional contexts, arguing that gender is not simply a singular institutional form but rather ebbs and flows with women’s mobility across variegated institutional settings. We hypothesize that religious devotion among Muslim women in Turkey circa the year 2000 will be associated with greater support for gender inequality across several institutional domains, namely, family, education, the workplace, and politics. In addition, we anticipate that as women move across these institutional contexts, they will encounter distinctive gender norms that shape their social opportunities. The public secularism and privatized religious climate of Turkey will yield the most pronounced religious support for gender inequality in family life when compared with other institutional contexts. These hypotheses are proposed for Turkey at the turn of the twenty-first century, prior to the rise of the current ruling party, and are supported with data analyzed from the 2001 wave of the World Values Survey. We conclude by specifying implications of these findings and promising directions for future research, including the continued monitoring of recent developments in this politically changing nation.

AJIS is a bi-annual, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world: anthropology, economics, education, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, and law.

This article investigates medieval Muslim literature on the study of non-Islamic religions through the writings of al-Biruni and al-Shahrastani in their dealing with Hind (India) and the nomenclature of world religions. I focus on their perceptions of monotheism and polytheism. My findings show that they used different approaches, categories, and classification models of world religious traditions in general, and of Hind’s religious traditions in particular. Al-Biruni classifies Indian religions according to the religious outlooks found in Hindu texts or sayings of Hindu philosophers/theologians and in the attitudes of ordinary people in a popular context. Al-Shahrastani categorizes the divisions and subdivisions of Hindu beliefs and practices according to types of “idol worshippers.” This article points out that they dealt with some conceptual issues in their presentations, such as “religious representation,” “intermediaries,” and “anthropomorphism.”