This book engages the diverse meanings and interpretations of Islamic and Western law which have affected people and societies across the globe, past and present, in correlation to the epistemological groundings of those meanings and interpretations. The volume takes a distinctively comparative approach, advancing dialogue on crucial transnational and global debates over the history of Western and Islamic approaches to law, politics and society and their relevance for today. It discusses how fundamental concepts are understood and even translated from one historical or political context or one semantic domain to another. The book provides focused studies of key figures and theories in a manageable, accessible format useful for specialized academic courses and research as well as general audiences.

This book engages the diverse meanings and interpretations of Islamic and Western law which have affected people and societies across the globe, past and present, in correlation to the epistemological groundings of those meanings and interpretations. The volume takes a distinctively comparative approach, advancing dialogue on crucial transnational and global debates over the history of Western and Islamic approaches to law, politics and society and their relevance for today. It discusses how fundamental concepts are understood and even translated from one historical or political context or one semantic domain to another. The book provides focused studies of key figures and theories in a manageable, accessible format useful for specialized academic courses and research as well as general audiences. These analyses will prove beneficial to scholars and students of religious studies, interreligious, intercultural, and international relations, political science, history, sociology, and related fields both within and beyond the Western and Islamic worlds, as well as generally educated readers who take interest in these issues and their ramifications.

Women‘s movements in Islamic countries have had a long and arduous journey in their quest for the realization of human rights and genuine equality. The author examines whether discriminatory laws against women do in fact originate from Islam and, ultimately, if there is any interpretation of Islam compatible with gender equality. She investigates women’s rights in Iran since the 1979 Revolution from the perspectives of the main currents of Islamic thought, fundamentalists, reformists, and seculars, using a sociological explanation.

Islam in International Relations: Politics and Paradigms analyses the interaction between Islam and IR. It shows how Islam is a conceptualization of ideas that affect people’s thinking and behaviour in their capacity to relate with IR as both discipline and practice. This approach challenges Western-based and defined epistemological and ontological foundations of the discipline, and by doing so contributes to worlding IR as a field of study and practice by presenting and discussing a broad range of standpoints from within Islamic civilization. The volume opens with the presentation and discussion of the international thought of a major Muslim leader, followed by a chapter that addresses the ethical practice of IR, from traditional pacifism to modern Arab political philosophy. It then switches to applying constructivism as a tool to understand Islam in world affairs and proceeds to address the issue of how the ethnocentric approach of Western academia has hindered our understanding of world affairs. The volume moves on to address the ISIS phenomenon, a current urgent issue in world affairs, and closes with a look at Islamic geopolitics. This comprehensive collection will be of great interest to students, scholars and policy-makers with a focus on the Muslim world.

The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural ‘survivals’ from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic ‘degenerationists’ and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the ‘dual faith’ tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways. Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on ‘syncretism’ and ‘conversion’, definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over ‘pre-Islamic Survivals’ among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian ‘cultural turn’ within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.

In recent decades, new paradigms have radically altered the historical understanding of the Qur'ān and Early Islam, causing much debate and controversy. This volume gathers select proceedings from the first conference of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar. These studies explore the history of the Qur'ān and of formative Islam, with the methodological tools set forth in Biblical, New Testament and Apocryphal studies, as well as the approaches used in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Christian and Rabbinic origins. It thereby contributes to the interdisciplinary study of formative Islam as part and parcel of the religious landscape of Late Antiquity.