Cosmopolitanism, as an intellectual and political project, has failed. The portrayal of human rights, especially European, as evidence of cosmopolitanism in practice is misguided. Cosmopolitan theorists point to the rise of claims-making to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) among Europe’s Muslims to protect their right to religious freedom, mainly concerning the hijab, as evidence of cosmopolitan justice. However, the outcomes of such claims-making show that far from signifying a cosmopolitan moment, European human rights law has failed Europe’s Muslims. Human Rights, Islam and the Failure of Cosmopolitanism provides an empirical examination of claims-making and government policy in Western Europe focusing mainly on developments in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. A consideration of public debates and European law of conduct in the public sphere shows that cosmopolitan optimism has misjudged the magnitude of the impact claims-making among Europe’s Muslims. To overcome this cul-de-sac, European Muslims should turn to a new ‘politics of rights’ to pursue their right to religious expression. This book is a theoretically challenging re-evaluation of cosmopolitan arguments through a rigorous discussion of rights-making claims by Europe's Muslims to the European Court of Human Rights. It combines sociological and legal case analysis which advances understanding of one of the most pressing topical issues of the day.

Cosmopolitan ideals and pluralist tendencies have been employed creatively and adapted carefully by Muslim individuals, societies and institutions in modern Southeast Asia to produce the necessary contexts for mutual tolerance and shared respect between and within different groups in society. Organised around six key themes that interweave the connected histories of three countries in Southeast Asia - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - this book shows the ways in which historical actors have promoted better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the region. Case studies from across these countries of the Malay world take in the rise of the network society in the region in the 1970s up until the early 21st century, providing a panoramic view of Muslim cosmopolitan practices, outlook and visions in the region.

Does Islam make people violent? Does Islam make people peaceful? In this book, A. Kevin Reinhart demonstrates that such questions are misleading, because they assume that Islam is a monolithic essence and that Muslims are made the way they are by this monolith. He argues that Islam, like all religions, is complex and thus best understood through analogy with language: Islam has dialects, a set of features shared with other versions of Islam. It also has cosmopolitan elites who prescribe how Islam ought to be, even though these experts, depending on where they practice the religion, unconsciously reflect their own local dialects. Reinhart defines the distinctive features of Islam and investigates how modernity has created new conditions for the religion. Analyzing the similarities and differences between modern and pre-modern Islam, he clarifies the new and old in the religion as it is lived in the contemporary world.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

This book explores the production of Muslim youth identities, with respect to nation, religion and gender in Pakistan, Senegal, Nigeria and Lebanon. As Muslim-majority, post-colonial states with significant youth populations, these countries offer critical case studies for the exploration of the different grammars of youth identities, and ‘trouble’ the perceived homogeneity of Muslims in local and global imaginaries. The authors offer rigorous and detailed accounts of the local, situated and contingent ways in which youth articulate their identities and sense of belonging, and the book reflects on the importance of affect, belonging and affiliation in the construction of youth narratives of identity as well as highlighting their political and contested nature. Troubling Muslim Youth Identities will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of development studies, social and cultural studies, gender, geography, education, and peace and conflict studies.

Global Citizenship Education explores key ideas and issues within local, national and global dimensions. Including examples and case studies from across the world, the authors draw on ideas, experiences and histories within and beyond 'the West' to contribute to multifaceted perspectives on global citizenship education. In concise chapters, the authors set out the key concepts and debates within the field. Global citizenship education is contextualized within key educational frameworks, including citizenship education, global education, development education and peace education. Edda Sant, Ian Davies, Karen Pashby and Lynette Shultz explore the different ways in which global citizenship can be taught, learned and assessed in formal and informal contexts. Including examples from a wide range of education institutions, chapters provide overviews of policy making and international practices borne out of different approaches to global citizenship education. With each chapter including a summary of key issues, an annotated list of key resources, an exercise for students and a further reading list, Global Citizenship Education will aid understanding of this complex and debated area of study.

While each chapter seizes the dialectic of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment at work in the global world, the volume insists on the moral, intellectual, structural, and historical resources that still make cosmopolitanism a real possibility even in these hard times.