1,720,958 research outputs found
Parution : Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi, When Only God can See. The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners, Pluto Press, 2024
No full text When Only God Can SeeThe Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners by Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi When Only God Can See delves into the extraordinary experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under US custody at Guantanamo Bay. This groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs, practices of ritual purity, prayer, and modes of resistance in the face of adversity. Highlighting the experiences of these prisoners, faith is revea..
Neo-traditionalism in the West: navigating modernity, tradition, and politics
No full textThe present thesis studies the emergence of neo-traditionalism, its public pedagogues and their students (seekers of sacred knowledge), in the West. These pedagogues, many of whom Western-born converts, emerged in the 1990âs after having culminated their studies in the âtraditional centresâ of knowledge in the Muslim world. They came back with the intent of transmitting the âtraditionalâ knowledge they attained to the wider Muslim community. Of these, this research focuses primarily on Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. To their community of followers and students â known as âseekers of sacred knowledgeâ, they represented a connection to an authentic religious tradition marginalised by modernist voices. Their religious discourse was both highly intellectual and deeply spiritual; at a time when there was a seeming decline in both intellect and spirituality. The shuyÅ«kh disseminate their traditional knowledge in religious retreats. These retreats â oftenâ are isolated from the modern world and imbued with traditional symbolism. In these spaces, the shuyÅ«kh provide the desirable orientations to the sacred world in Islam, and a rejection of the modern world around them. That is, the retreat provides both 'ways of seeing' as well as 'what is to be seen' as part of Islam within modernity. The central thrust of the sites of the transaction of sacred knowledge is to 'school' the learners into different narratives of the spiritual decline under modern condition. In the Muslim specific context, this led to the rise of different modernist post-colonial movements and activist tendencies. Such trends obscured Muslim metaphysical outlook. The shuyÅ«khâs critiques of modernity and discourses on the side lining of metaphysics interpret these in terms of the wider political and social principles. This research shows, on the one hand, how the neo-traditionalist shuyÅ«kh conceive of modernity, tradition, and how that impacts their political discourse on issues such as dissent, race, belonging, and gender. The research highlights how the critique of âmodernityâ is interlinked and reaffirms notions of authority and stability. On the other hand, it shows, through field interviews with seekers who attended their religious retreats, how young Muslims negotiate and navigate these discourses on modernity, tradition, and politics.</p
Neo-traditionalist retreats interviews
No full textThese are the interviews I conducted with people who participated in Neo-traditionalist retreat
Locating ‘Praxis’ in Islamic liberation theology:God, scripture, and the problem of suffering in Egyptian prisons
Full text linkThe paper examines the tenability of a project for Islamic liberation theology by exploring the religious lives of Egyptian prisoners—with an emphasis on their encounters with the Qur’an, devotional and contentious contemplation, and theodicy. It employs an ethnographic approach to the study of Islam in Egyptian prisons by interviewing former political prisoners incarcerated after the 2013 military coup. By examining the work of key liberation theologians Farid Esack (b. 1959), Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951), and Asghar Ali Engineer (b. 1939), I ask: can a justice-oriented hermeneutics, concerned with pluralism and breaking down binaries, be a meaningful starting point to those struggling under oppression? I posit that the concern with developing hermeneutics can potentially limit the praxis whereby the faithful struggle with the text in the very moment of suffering. It shows how Egyptian prisoners’ devotional (and contentious) contemplation (taddabur) of the Qur’an—rather than reading liberation into the Qur’an—allowed for emancipatory embodiments of scripture. Furthermore, I show how prisoners stripped of their agentic power come to understand human action and divine action in history and how the metaphysical responses to human suffering inevitably shaped how they view both structures of inequality and domination as well as their potential liberation from it
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Walaa Quisay (2023). Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Full text linkThere has been a lot of interest in studying how Muslims of Europe adapt to modernity in Western countries. In the last two decades, most of the research focused on Islamist movements, political Islam, Salafi movements, and reformist Islam in the West. However, Walaa Quisay's work goes beyond this to explore the rise of neo-traditionalism, often understudied, as an emerging alternative Islamic authority in the West. The work aims to explain how neo-traditionalism has emerged, established its authority, and engaged with modernity. It also focuses on its appeal, internal contradictions and socio-political implications. Through studying the life and discourses of three charismatic neo-traditionalist sheiks, white converts such as Hamza Yousuf, Abdul Hakim Muradand Umar Faruq Abdullah, the author mainly shows how they collectively presented Islamic traditionalism not only as the voice of pure Islam through otherising religious discourses of Salafism and reformist Islam as the products of post-colonial complexities, but also as a paradigmatic critique of modernity. Despite such grand claims, the author highlights that neo-traditionalism has ultimately ended up serving the very power structure of modernity, particularly nation-states. Neo-traditionalism in Islam inthe West is a result of an ethnographic study. The author spends years of participating, experiencing and interviewing the neo-traditionalist sheiks and followers in their spiritual sites. The chapters of the book broadly cover the emergence of neo-traditionalism, its key discourses and implications on the Muslim societies in the West and Muslim world
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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