Today, a growing number of French Jews embrace the far-right French Front National party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism – how did we get here? How is it that Jews turn to the French authorities for protection against so-called Muslim anti-Semitic violence? How is it that we see a similar pattern across Europe: in Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain? This essay addresses these questions by calling attention to the role played by the absent-present Christian West in creating and aggravating tensions between Jews and Muslims while seemingly fulfilling the role of mediation between the two. The essay suggests that current popular images of Jews and Muslims circulating in Western media ironically echo nineteenth-century European depictions of Semites – both Jews and Muslims as devoted monotheistic fanatics controlled by zeal and despotism and in need of external salvation. The bulk of the essay thus focuses on “Semitism” and examines the role of nineteenth-century European philology in disseminating Western perceptions of Jewish and Muslim inferiority. Finally, the essay advocates a re-appropriation of Semitism as an alternative memory, or rather a re-memory which as such is also a re-membering of Jews and Muslims along their shared historical position as radical Others within the hegemonic, Western, Euro-Christian epistemological order.

This article examines the active roles played by Muslim activists in agitating for the expansion of the functions of Sharia (Muslim legal and ethical code) within a given country's constitution and in society at large. Using the Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) – the largest Muslim youth movement in Malaysia – as an illustrative case study, the article examines a process which I term as “demarginalizing the Sharia” by Muslim activists, which connotes an endeavour to reformulate and reassert the position of the Sharia to cover all aspects of the country's laws. Building upon recent works on Islamic activism and drawing from various strands of social movement theory, this essay attempts to conceptualize and explain the various tactics which Muslim movements such as ABIM had adopted to make the case for the Sharia to wield a wider influence in the public domain. Among the tactics which will be discussed are institutional subversion, ideological collaboration and dramatic contention, all of which have been utilized by Muslim activists since the advent of global Islamic resurgence in the 1970s.

In 1934, Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) wrote “Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims” in which he made the case that Ahmadis ought to declare themselves a separate community from Indian Muslims. One year later, Nehru responded to Iqbal through a series of pieces in the Modern Review of Calcutta, calling into question Iqbal's presuppositions about religion. Iqbal thereafter responded with “Islam and Ahmadism” in 1935, in which he formulated an extensive position about religious orthodoxy and to which the denouncement of Ahmadis as heretics of Islam was central. This essay explores Iqbal's positions on Muslim unity, religious orthodoxy, and the question of Muslim leadership. In particular, it focuses on how minority Muslim communities (Ahmadis and Ismailis) are fundamental to the arguments through which Iqbal defends his position on religious orthodoxy.

Middle English eschaungen < Anglo-French eschaungier < Vulgar Latin *excambiāre; late 15c., from Old French eschangier "exchange, barter," from Vulgar Latin *excambiare n. (noun) Middle English eschaunge < Anglo-French (Old French eschange), derivative of eschaungier; late 14c., "act of reciprocal giving and receiving," from Anglo-French eschaunge, Old French eschange (Modern French échange), from Late Latin excambium, from excambiare, from Latin ex-"out" + cambire "barter".Practice of merchants or lenders meeting to exchange bills of debt led to meaning "building for mercantile business" (1580s).