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Muslim Publics

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The article is a theoretical and historiographic overview of imperial citizenship, centered on the Ottoman case, with comparative dialogue with the Qajar, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg cases. Drawing on her own previous scholarship and an overview of recent scholarship in these fields, Campos argues that in these empires complex and multilayered projects of imperial citizenship had developed by the turn of the twentieth century that encompassed institutional reform, intellectual and civil society engagement in an imperial public sphere, and the development of notions and practices of imperial belonging, patriotism, and political participation.
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This article explores the contestation over the meaning and uses of shari’a (Islamic Law) in South Sulawesi Indonesia. Its purpose is to shed light upon the importance and limits of shari’a discursive argumentation in Muslim life, and to examine how shari’a is used in contemporary sociocultural and political processes. The escalation of shari’a formalisation after democratization in Indonesia has widely gained scholarly attention. While the existing literature largely focuses on shari’a politics and the shari’a of the elites, this article focuses on the anthropology of the shari’a politics and the varied usage of shari’a in sociocultural processes across different social assemblages. The research was conducted in Bulukumba, a district divided by the initiative for the formalisation of shari’a at district level. The study reveals that Muslims engage and imagine the shari’a in strikingly different ways, many of which are not at all discursive in a manner consistent with fiqh or scholarly legal commentaries. Discursive argumentation is not the only source of authority in Islamic community. It is a point in a vast network of relationships. The experiences of ordinary Muslims in South Sulawesi illuminate that discursive argumentation can be a less direct and less explicit tool than ritualisation to resist shari’ahisation.
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On 20 December 2005, 8 days after five Shiite ministers resigned from Fouad Siniora's cabinet, Sheikh Afif Naboulsi issued a fatwa forbidding the Shiite community from being represented by anyone other than Amal or Hezbollah members, the only two political parties that represent Shiites in both the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies and in the Cabinet. As a direct consequence, a national-civil lawsuit against Naboulsi was filed by eight Lebanese individuals, of which the majority were Shiite. This study, based on the author's personal communications with the main actors involved in the case, aims to shed light on the almost publicly neglected community sphere. On the other hand, it shows how Lebanese individuals must divide their identity into a sectarian and national one in order to extend the general Lebanese public sphere. By playing such a form of extended citizenship, the lawsuit filed by these Lebanese ‘communal individuals’ represents a step, a means of contrasting authorities that arise in a sphere that is difficult to hold accountable.
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This essay discusses changing images of island Southeast Asia and its Muslim populations in the modern Arabic press during the late colonial period. It commences by surveying the general informational letters sent to the largely pro-Ottoman papers of Beirut and Cairo during the 1890s by increasingly vocal local Arabs who were seeking to redress their situation as second-class colonial citizens. Thereafter, it considers the role played by Malays, Javanese, and other Southeast Asians in the globalizing Arabic media. In doing so, it demonstrates that although many Southeast Asians bought into and actively participated in the often Arabocentric program for Islamic reform in their homelands, they were by no means in agreement that their situations were any worse than those of other Muslims or that they could all be treated under one ethnic rubric.
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