Article

Posing the Muslim Question in India: A Leftwing Perspective

September 2009
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Authors:

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta

Can we argue the Muslim question in India as a class question given the current situation of overall socio-economic and political marginalisation, deprivation and backwardness? Even within the progressive academia, the class issues, related to the social mobility of Indian Muslims have often been unheard. The articulation of class dimensions in addressing the Muslim question in India has been so far missing within academic circles. Largely, the Muslim question in India has been trapped into the questions of identity and security and less attention is paid on the aspect of equity by the dominant governmental discourse of policy making. While all the aspects of identity, security and equity of the Muslims are interlinked, the historical experience of the post-colonial Indian state has been that of addressing the Muslim question within the ambit of a binary opposition of secular/communal divide.

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Islam in Mali in the Neoliberal Era

September 2005 · African Affairs

Benjamin F Soares

If before 11 September 2001, many praised Mali as a model of democracy, secularism and toleration, many have now begun to express concern about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Mali. I consider a number of recent public debates in Mali over morality, so-called women’s issues, and the proposed changes in the Family Code and show how the perspectives of many Malians on these issues are not new ... [Show full abstract] but rather relate to longstanding and ongoing debates about Islam, secularism, politics, morality and law. What is new is the way in which some Muslim religious leaders have been articulating their complaints and criticisms. Since the guarantee of the freedom of expression and association in the early 1990s, there has been a proliferation of independent newspapers and private radio stations and new Islamic associations with a coterie of increasingly media-savvy activists. I explore how some Muslim activists have used such outlets to articulate the concerns of some ordinary Malians, who face the contradictions of living as modern Muslim citizens in a modernizing and secularizing state where, in this age of neoliberal governmentality, the allegedly un-Islamic seems to be always just around the corner.

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INCREASING FINANCIAL INCLUSION THROUGH ISLAMIC BANKING IN INDIA SANA BEG & NAUSHADUL HAQUE MULLICK

March 2016 · Global Business and Management Research: An International Journal

Sana Beg

Financial inclusion has been recently gaining popularity and interest by economists as it has been widely accepted that financial inclusion is critical for poverty reduction. Financial inclusion results in increased savings and entrepreneurial innovations, improved education and empowerment of women. Financial inclusion is critical to reduce income inequality and thus results in accelerated ... [Show full abstract] economic growth. Studies have revealed that sometimes financial services are available but still people do not use it. The reasons vary from high costs of usage of services to difficult paperwork to other legal hurdles or barrier like religion which prohibits usage of certain types of financial services. Fortunately, there is a growing recognition globally that the governments and/ or central regulators should make policies to reduce different types of barriers and increase financial inclusion in their countries. India is home to 21% of the world's unbanked population. In India, more than 50% of the financially excluded are the Muslims. The foremost priority of Islam and its teachings on economics is justice and equity. This paper focuses on the possibility of increasing financial inclusion through Islamic Banking.

Article

‘Faith in the system?’ State-funded faith schools in England and the contested parameters of communi...

April 2013 · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Within the wider context of interest in the relationships between faith and the state, this paper focuses on the case of state-funded faith schools in England and how opposition to them has been mobilised and negotiated. Discussion focuses specifically on the role of community cohesion policy – a policy adopted to combat social and ethnic division after 2001 – and the contested parameters of this ... [Show full abstract] policy when introduced to monitor schools. Analysis suggests that faith school providers were able to interpret the policy in ways that challenged government articulations and reworked dominant meanings, revealing the political and spatial instabilities of the policy. However, our analysis suggests that these challenges to state meanings were less successful in shaping mechanisms to monitor admissions practices in faith schools – producing some unanticipated entanglements of state and religious authority with implications for the shaping of communal religious life. These findings both add to the wider critical policy analysis of community cohesion policy and contribute to debates about the role of religion in the public sphere.

Article

Through a Freirean lens: professional learning, faith-based schooling and liberatory education

September 2013 · Professional Development In Education

This paper draws on a broader qualitative study of professional learning in schools of the Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews and Muslims) in post-colonial Australia, addressing the role that the growing number of Australian faith-based schools play in shaping a just and inclusive Australian society. By reviewing material in the public domain, we consider in their projection to the public the ... [Show full abstract] stated and implied commitment of six Australian faith-based schools of the Peoples of the Book to a transformative, liberatory education. Drawing on Habermas’ understanding of a religiously pluralistic democracy, we argue that faith-based schools should articulate their purpose and values to the wider secular society, recognizing that this task also calls upon the secular society to engage with the faith traditions, to strengthen mutual respect and tolerance. Although we find little consideration in the literature of the distinctive professional learning needs in faith-based schools, we examine Australian faith-based schooling through the thinking of Freire and the role of conscientization in transformative education. We argue that it is through the professional learning program of the school that critical awareness and indeed conscientization of teachers can be developed.

Article

Two Sides of the Same Coin? The Muslim Umma and the European Union

August 2014 · Politics Religion & Ideology

Faiz Sheikh

This article examines the normative aspirations of the umma in international relations (IR). It is not the intention of this article to provide the blueprint of a ‘Muslim EU’, rather, in comparing the articulation of the European Union (EU) and the umma in IR, the article shows the way in which the EU represents a (limited) ‘European umma’, and charts the difficulties faced by both assemblies in ... [Show full abstract] being analysed in IR, by virtue of their shared transnational character. However, the Muslim umma assembly is shown to face more problems than its erstwhile EU counterpart due to the religious nature of the umma. The article charts the use of constructivism in IR to explain the creation of norms and identity in the international system, accounting for the EU's supranational presence in international politics. The application of constructivism to the umma, however, is shown to be more problematic due to the secular bias in IR and, perhaps more importantly, the Islamic resurgence being insufficiently concerned with the constitutive elements within it.

Article

Critical Race Theory, policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain

November 2016 · Race Ethnicity and Education

Damian Breen

The expansion of state-funded Muslim schools in Britain since 1998 has developed against a backdrop of sustained public political rhetoric around the wider position of British Muslims in both political and educational contexts. This article explores the public policy rhetoric around Muslim schools under New Labour and the subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments and compares how these ... [Show full abstract] narratives align with outcomes in terms of numbers of, and types of, denominational Muslim faith schools in Britain. The article applies a Critical Race Theory approach based on the construction of counter-narrative through a critical analysis of policy and its outcomes. This analysis is contextualised through exploring the implications of counter-terror strategies such as Prevent for the political and educational equity of British Muslims as stakeholders in the state. Against this context the article explores the extent to which successive policy frameworks and political narratives around faith schooling have played out in terms of denominational state-funded Muslim schools. Whilst gains have been made under New Labour and the successive Coalition and Conservative governments, critical analysis reveals that public policy narratives allow for a misleading account of the extent to which Muslim communities have been enfranchised through state funding for Islamic schools.

Article

A Partition of Contingency? Public Discourse in Bengal 1946–1947

November 2009 · Modern Asian Studies

Haimanti Roy

The historiography on the Partition of Bengal has tended to see it as a culmination of long term trends Hindu and Muslim communalism within the province. This essay offers a counter narrative to the ‘inevitability’ of the Partition by focusing on Bengali public discourse in the months leading up to the Partition. The possibility of a division generated a large-scale debate amongst the educated in ... [Show full abstract] Bengal and they articulated their views by sending numerous letters to leading newspapers, district political and civic organizations and sometimes published pamphlets for local consumption. A critical examination of this public debate for and against Partition reveals the countdown to August 1947 as a period of multiple possibilities. Understanding the genesis provides the starting point and the necessary corrective to evaluate India’s path to post –colonial nationhood.

Article

Communal Harmony as Governmentality: Reciprocity, peace-keeping, state legitimacy, and citizenship i...

March 2014 · Modern Asian Studies

Nandagopal R. Menon

Debates about secularism in post-independence India have often revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. A sharp distinction is drawn between them by those who argue that the Gandhian model (or, what in common parlance and state discourses is called communal harmony) stems from Indian cultural and religious values, and lies beyond the ... [Show full abstract] realm of the state. The Nehruvian model, however, is a state project through and through. This article transcends this dichotomy to show that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these models does not necessarily mean that secularism and communal harmony faithfully reflect their ideas and, despite the differences in their aims and methods, both models are united in the discourses and practices of the state as strategies of ‘governmentality’. After redefining the core of communal harmony as reciprocity (rather than tolerance), I show how it is performed, how it supplements the state's efforts to keep the peace in a religiously plural society by the force of law, and shores up the state's legitimacy deficit. However, the state's simultaneous involvement in Nehruvian and Gandhian projects is not an innocuous fact because it undermines the state's constitutional and secular obligations to non-discriminatory citizenship in the Indian nation. The argument is that the state's endorsement of dargah-centred Islamic piety as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’ the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.

Article

Managing Affects and Sensibilities: The Case of Not-Handshaking and Not-Fasting

November 2009 · Social Anthropology

Nadia Fadil

This paper examines how a number of pious and non-practising Belgian Maghrebi women who do not shake hands with the opposite sex and do not fast manage the sensitivity and transgressive potential of these practices. Whereas all interlocutors were prone to adjust their conducts to avoid controversies, these adaptations were nevertheless assessed differently. Adopting a flexible stand in the case ... [Show full abstract] of not-handshaking was viewed as normal by the pious women, while the impossibility of eating in front of other Muslims was problematised by the non-practising women. I suggest that these different assessments display the unequal ethical importance attributed to conducts in a liberal-secular regime.

Chapter

Comparing Regimes of Secularity, Citizenships, and Fields of Muslimness

January 2016

Carolina Ivanescu

This chapter is based on the idea that the modern nation-state is founded on myths and concepts: citizenship involves translating between the level of imaginaries and the people as a collective. The nation-state is a collective structure based on the idea of the nation, an articulation of the “people” who belong to the nation and a positioning toward the nation-state through rights and duties. ... [Show full abstract] All these featuress are to be mirrored in the principle of citizenship and its different aspects: the ideal and utopian nation and its cultural and moral content, the pragmatic mechanism of inclusion and exclusion on which management of people is based, and citizenship as a governing tool that makes clear the connection between people and nation.

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Who We Are Is What We Believe? Religion and Collective Identity in Austrian and German Immigrant Int...

March 2017 · Social Inclusion

Astrid Mattes

Immigrant integration is a contested policy field in which boundaries of membership are drawn and re-negotiated whereby groups of immigrants are partially included and excluded. Building on the concept of collective identity and theories of boundary making, this paper illustrates how religion functions as a category to mark and fill notions of self and otherness. As several studies have shown, ... [Show full abstract] immigrants in Europe are increasingly addressed as Muslims, a development that also serves the promotion of a Christian ‘us’. Focusing on Austria and Germany, two countries where this is especially observable, the paper outlines the functioning of religion as symbolic boundary. The empirical study on national integration policies demonstrates how—within the relational process of boundary drawing against Muslims—a Christian identity narrative is established, how it functions as a marker of unity and how it relates to liberal and secular notions. Results from the qualitative content analysis of governmental policy programs from 2005 onwards show different patterns of boundary drawing on religion and the way they shape and limit the possibilities of inclusion. To understand this development, we have to look at Christian-democratic policy-makers, who currently dominate the political struggle for the power to define features of collective identity in immigrant integration policies.

Last Updated: 22 Oct 2024