This book tackles the most significant issues facing Muslims today. Sachedina argues that we must reopen the doors of religious interpretation--to correct false interpretations, replace outdated laws, and formulate new doctrines. His book critically analyzes Muslim teachings on such issues as pluralism, civil society, war and peace, and violence and self-sacrifice.

This text is tackling the most significant issues facing Muslims today. As Islam and Muslims enter the 21st century it is necessary to re-open the doors of religious interpretation to re-examine and correct false interpretation.

This book brings together international scholars of Islamic philosophy, theology and politics to examine these current major questions: What is the place of pluralism in the Islamic founding texts? How have sacred and prophetic texts been interpreted throughout major Islamic intellectual history by the Sunnis and Shi‘a? How does contemporary Islamic thought treat religious and political diversity in modern nation states and in societies in transition? How is pluralism dealt with in modern major and minor Islamic contexts? How does modern political Islam deal with pluralism in the public sphere? And what are the major internal and external challenges to pluralism in Islamic contexts? These questions that have become of paramount relevance in religious studies especially during the last three-four decades are answered as critically highlighted in Islamic founding sources, the formative classical sources and how it has been lived and practiced in past and present Islamic majority societies and communities around the world. Case studies cover Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand, besides various internal references to other contexts.

Twelve essays examine the social origins of civil-democratic Islam, its long term prospects, implications for the West, & its lessons for our understanding of religion & politics in modern times.

The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts of extraordinary exclusionary violence. Today, nearly a century later, the claims of minority communities and the politics of pluralism continue to ignite explosive debate. The Reckoning of Pluralism centers on the case of Turkey's Alevi community, a sizeable Muslim minority in a Sunni majority state. Alevis have seen their loyalty to the state questioned and experienced sectarian hostility, and yet their community is also championed by state ideologues as bearers of the nation's folkloric heritage. Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.

Based on Islamist writings, political tracts, and interviews with Islamists, this book examines Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt from the perspective of Islamic conceptions of citizenship, and provides non-Muslim responses to those views.

Many Muslim intellectuals and political activists have begun to move beyond classical political Islam to embrace a more pluralistic, democratic order by developing the concept of "Muslim democracy." Perhaps the most prominent example is the Tunisian Ennahda Party, which declared itself to no longer be "Islamist" but a "Muslim Democratic" party in 2016. While there has been some scholarship on the phenomenon of "Muslim democracy," this book represents the first volume in English to offer a translation of primary source texts elaborating its ideological contours. The head of the Ennahda Party, and an internationally prominent Muslim political thinker and intellectual, Rached Ghannouchi is known around the world as the preeminent theorist of a reconciliation between modern Islamic political thought and democratic theory. On Muslim Democracy gathers a number of Ghannouchi's most important essays, making them available in English for the first time. The book also includes a lengthy philosophical-theological dialogue between Ghannouchi and American political theorist Andrew March. In the dialogues, March and Ghannouchi discuss the influences on and evolution of Ghannouchi's thought, and the meaning of concepts like democracy, pluralism, justice, and law across Islamic and Western philosophical traditions. This volume presents a well-rounded view into the influential work of Rached Ghannouchi, further supported by previously unpublished, illuminating conversations on critical topics in Muslim politics.