The book highlights issues related to the construction of gender in Africa and African identity politics. It explores the limitations of the constructed category of “African Muslim woman” in West Yorkshire. Amina Alrasheed Nayel uses Black feminist epistemology along with postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theory to examine the multiple identities that Sudanese women negotiate in the UK. The diverse settings of Islam and Islamic culture, circumscribed around issues of performativity of Islam and identity construction in the diasporic space are unpacked in this volume. In addition, this work analyzes specific practices and performances, starting with the multifaceted nature of Islam and the problematic concepts of “Sunni/Sufi,” “Muslim woman,” “race,” and “blackness.” The book reveals that exile, nostalgia, and racial/ethnic differences within Islam and the wider UK community underpin the performativity of Muslimness of the Sudanese women living in West Yorkshire, and reiterates the importance of moving beyond the homogeneity of the idea of “Muslim woman” towards investigating the complexities of this group.

Since 9/11 and the global War on Terror, practitioners of Islam in Europe and beyond have been scrutinised and surveyed under suspicion of disloyalty and as potential disrupters of national social cohesion. Seemingly benign, altruistic practices, such as charity, are viewed as potential threats to national security and have increasingly become subject to counter-terrorism policies. This work seeks to critically assess the assumptions behind the lesser-known financial War on Terror, through exploration of the effects of current policies on Muslim charitable practices in the UK. The consequences of current policies are multi-faceted – from the stigmatization and suspicion of Muslim charities and communities, individual loss of status and financial standing, to a decrease of living standards and/or loss of lives. Engaging with the everyday socio-political activities of Muslim individuals, this book gives voice to the motivations, apprehensions and challenges faced by Muslim charitable practitioners. A must read for anyone wanting to challenge policy assumptions behind increased surveillance of charities and individual donors, whilst outlining the repercussions of current policies on Muslim individuals and charities.

Drinking, Fasting, and Tattoos reveals the problematics of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies via Lived Religion (LR) by using qualitative and collaborative methodologies. It offers LR as a potential recovery for the tensions across different disciplines of gender and women’s studies, theology, migration studies, and religious studies. It also problematizes major assumptions about Islam that have led to the current scholarship, such as churchification of Islam in Europe. It breaks a tripled silence around women, refugees, and unaffiliated Muslims. It draws attention to permeable boundaries between academic disciplines, secular and religious, researcher and researched divides while challenging current paradigms in academia, particularly the ones that still validate Euro-American frameworks. More specifically, Syrian women refugees whose representations can be expanded to Muslim women migrants in the Global North, present firsthand accounts regarding their faith-based practices and interpretations of Islam. The accounts reveal empowerment, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, and thus agency in unlikely places.

Elaborating with the concepts of culture and religious literacy, this volume examines theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of the practice and study of religion and non-religion, culture, spirituality and worldviews within healthcare. In modern multi-cultural and multi-religious societies, a host of new issues have arisen concerning culture, religion and spirituality within healthcare, especially when people face serious and life-limiting illness. Healthcare professionals are faced with challenges addressing and handling patients’ cultural expressions of religiosity, spirituality and existential concerns. The variety needs to be met without essentializing the concepts of culture and religion, and with an ability to include the non-religious as well as new types of spiritualities. This collection reflects on the tension between cultural, religious and spiritual dimensions of care in a secularized healthcare institution and describes implications of this tension for healthcare professionals and patients. The book engages with an ongoing scholarly discussion about religious literacy in healthcare, and contributes perspectives, experiences and empirical examples from the Nordic countries, especially Sweden. It gives suggestions for practical application of research to healthcare practice, highlighting challenges and ideas for how to integrate religious, non-religious, and spiritual dimensions in care. This is an important contribution to the literature on religious literacy and provides a vital reference for students, scholars and healthcare professionals with an interest in the complex relationship between culture, spirituality, and religion in healthcare. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This book examines Muslim women's creative strategies of deploying religious concepts such as ummah, or community, to solve problems of domestic and communal violence, polygamous abuse, sterility, and heteronormativity. By closely reading and examining examples of ummah-building strategies in interfaith dialogues, exchanges, and encounters between Muslim and non-Muslim women in a selection of African and Southeast Asian fictions and essays, this book highlights women's assertive activisms to redefine transnationalism, understood as relationships across national boundaries, as transgeography. Ummah-building strategies shift the space of, or respatialize, transnational relationships, focusing on connections between communities, groups, and affiliations within the same nation. Such a respatialization also enables a more equitable and inclusive remediation of the citizenship of gendered and religious citizens to the nation-state and the transnational sphere of relationships.

By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities—from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts—enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria—Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development—growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Middle East Studies after September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony and Academia will show the long-term implications of current approaches to Middle East scholarship on the internal transformation of Middle Eastern societies. It describes the complex relationship between American academia and state government: a relationship which has influenced and restructured the state, society and politics in the Middle East as well as in the United States. It engages the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, History and International Studies, while maintaining the epistemological, methodological, and ontological insights of a sociological approach to the Middle East. Contributors are: Beyazit H. Akman, Mahmoud Arghavan, Dunya D. Cakir, Emanuela C. Del Re, Babak Elahi, Manuela E. B. Giolfo, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Merve Kavakci, Tugrul Keskin, Seyed Mohammd Marandi, Ameena Al-Rasheed Nayel, Staci Gem Scheiwiller, Francesco L. Sinatora, Zeinab Ghasemi Tari