Challenge Of Islam Research Articles

The Islamic Challenge in Europe * By RAPHAEL ISRAELI

The Islamic Challenge in Europe * By RAPHAEL ISRAELI

Bullets over ballots: Islamist groups, the state and electoral violence in Egypt and Morocco

This article is concerned with state-sponsored electoral violence in liberalized autocracies. The first section of the paper identifies a number of variables that can help explain the decision calculus of authoritarian incumbents to deploy force against strong electoral challengers. The second section then examines these propositions with reference to Egypt and Morocco. Drawing on recent parliamentary elections in both countries the article questions why, despite facing the challenge of political Islam, the two regimes differed so markedly in their willingness to manipulate the polls by recourse to violence. Whilst the Egyptian authorities decided to abrogate all pretence of peaceful elections in favour of violent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood candidates and sympathizers, no such tactics were deployed by the ruling elite in Morocco. We suggest that three principal factors influenced the regimes’ response to this electoral challenge: (1) the centrality of the elected institution to authoritarian survival; (2) the availability of alternative electioneering tools; and (3) the anticipated response of the international community. The article concludes by suggesting that in order to understand better when and how states deploy violence in elections, we need to focus on a more complex set of factors rather than simply on the electoral potency of key opposition challengers or the authoritarian nature of the state.

Passive revolution: absorbing the Islamic challenge to capitalism

Over the last decade, pious Muslims all over the world have gone through contradictory transformations. Though public attention commonly rests on the turn toward violence, this book's stories of transformation to moderate Islam in a previously radical district in Istanbul exemplify another experience. In a shift away from distrust of the state to partial secularization, Islamists in Turkey transitioned through a process of absorption into existing power structures. With rich descriptions of life in the district of Sultanbeyli, this unique work investigates how religious activists organized, how authorities defeated them, and how the emergent pro-state Justice and Development Party incorporated them. As Tugal reveals, the absorption of a radical movement was not simply the foregone conclusion of an inevitable world-historical trend but an outcome of contingent struggles. With a closing comparative look at Egypt and Iran, the book situates the Turkish case in a broad historical context and discusses why Islamic politics have not been similarly integrated into secular capitalism elsewhere.

Passive Revolution: Absorbing The Islamic Challenge to Capitalism

Passive Revolution: Absorbing The Islamic Challenge to Capitalism

Identity Politics in the Middle East: Liberal Thought and Islamic Challenge in Egypt. By Meir Hatina. London: Tauris, 2007. x + 264 pp. $80.95 cloth

Identity Politics in the Middle East: Liberal Thought and Islamic Challenge in Egypt. By Meir Hatina. London: Tauris, 2007. x + 264 pp. $80.95 cloth

Europe's New Security Dilemma

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, governments throughout the world rushed to improve their counterterrorism policies. Several countries tightened legislation, increased resources available to ...

Review: Colin Chapman Cross and Crescent: Responding to the challenges of Islam (Second Edition)

Review: Colin Chapman Cross and Crescent: Responding to the challenges of Islam (Second Edition)

The Islamic challenge: politics and religion in Western Europe

The Islamic challenge: politics and religion in Western Europe

Europe and Islam: Internalizing the External ‘Threat’

This article will first characterize the nature of the Islamic ‘threat’ facing modern day Europe, by arguing that such ‘threats’ are fed by the forces of internalization. By specifically focusing on case studies found in Jytte Klausen’s “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe”, this article will take as its departure point the basis that “Europeans tend to ignore the fact that their established norms and policies are not necessarily secular, but reflects long-standing practices that were instituted in order to appease national churches”. Three facets of European society will be examined; national laws, media coverage, and politicians and their actions.

Europe and Islam: Internalizing the External ‘Threat’


 This article will first characterize the nature of the Islamic ‘threat’ facing modern day Europe, by arguing that such ‘threats’ are fed by the forces of internalization. By specifically focusing on case studies found in Jytte Klausen’s “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe”, this article will take as its departure point the basis that “Europeans tend to ignore the fact that their established norms and policies are not necessarily secular, but reflects long-standing practices that were instituted in order to appease national churches”. Three facets of European society will be examined; national laws, media coverage, and politicians and their actions.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v4i2.196
 
 
 

Changing Federalism and the Islamic Challenge in Tatarstan

Tatarstan-an autonomous ethnic republic within the Russian Federation dominated by traditionally Muslim Tatars-was at the forefront of nationalist mobilization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From 1990 to 1993, against a background of political rivalries in Moscow (first between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, then between Yeltsin and the parliament), the republic's leadership enjoyed virtual independence and consolidated its position vis-a-vis the federal government to win extraordinary concessions in a power-sharing treaty between the republic and Russia's central government. The republic's leadership insisted on being an equal partner with Moscow; retained a substantial share of federal taxes for the local budget; and enacted local laws that sometimes contradicted federal law.1 Tatar ethnicity and (especially) proficiency in the Tatar language were essential for advancing in many types of careers in the republic. Until recently, three-quarters of the Tatarstani legislature's (Gossovet) members were ethnic Tatars, even though Tatars barely constituted a majority of the population. During his tenure, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin slowly eroded Tatarstan's independence. Putin rescinded all Tatarstani laws found to contradict federal law and enforced fiscal discipline, and the Moscow headquarters of the ruling United Russia Party demanded its Tatarstani representatives revise the Gossovet's ethnic composition.2Although the Russian federal leadership's reasons for making these changes are clear, their methods of doing so without encountering substantial resistance from the republic's leadership or the Tatarstani nationalist movement's popular leaders are not. I use the example of Tatarstan to examine the ease with which the cental government regained the ground lost to some ethnic republics during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin conflict and Yeltsin's first term as president. Because Tatar nationalism and Islamic tradition were so instrumental to Tatarstan after 1991, I also examine the history of the Volga republic's Islamic renaissance, and the prospects of politicized Islam.Stage One: A Game of NationalismIn the late 1980s, as the Soviet grip on free speech and political organization loosened, nationalistic Tatarstanis mobilized to improve the status of the republic and their native culture. After Russia declared sovereignty on June 12, 1990, Tatarstan sought to elevate its status from an autonomous region within the Russian Federation to a union republic within the Soviet Union. Tatarstan and other autonomous regions, such as Chechnya, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia, profited greatly from Gorbachev and Yeltsin's 1989-91 rivalry. In the context of this power struggle, Yeltsin suggested in 1990 that the leaders of Tatarstan take as much independence as you can-warning if they seceded, the decision will be final.3 However, even after the Soviet Union's collapse and Gorbachev's fall from power, Yeltsin did not focus on reining in autonmous Russian regions, instead wrestling with the parliament over constitutional powers and economic reforms.Meanwhile, before concluding a power-sharing treaty with Moscow on February 15, 1994, Tatarstan enjoyed virtual independence. The republic's government, under the leadership of the experienced Communist bureaucrat Mintimer Shaymiev, artfully employed this independence to consolidate its position vis-a-vis Moscow.4 Within Tatarstan, President Shaymiev played a subtle game with the popular nationalist movement. Although he used the movement as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Moscow to win more concessions by presenting himself as a nationalist leader, Shaymiev carefully engaged the movement to avoid the same fate as Communist elites in Chechnya, who were ousted by the nationalist movement. 5 Shaymiev proceeded to subdue and marginalize the nationalist movement, securing his grip on political power. At the same time, the republic's status began to resemble that of a union republic within the former Soviet Union. …

The church in the shadow of the mosque: Christians and Muslims in the world of Islam

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix PREFACE xi Introduction 1 CHAPTER I: People of the Gospel, People of the Book: C Hristians and Christianity in the World of Islam 6 CHAPTER II: Apocalypse and the Arabs: The First Christian Responses to the Challenge of Islam 23 CHAPTER III: Christian Theology in Arabic: A New Development in Church Life 45 CHAPTER IV: The Shape of Christian Theology in Arabic: The Genres and Strategies of Christian Discourse in the World of Islam 75 CHAPTER VP: Christian Philosophy in Baghdad and Beyond: A Major Partner in the Development of Classical Islamic Intellectual Culture 106 CHAPTER VI: What Has Baghdad to Do with Constantinople or Rome?: Oriental Christian Self-Definition in the World of Islam 129 CHAPTER VII: Between the Crescent and the Cross: Convivencia, the Clash of Theologies, and Interreligious Dialogue 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 INDEX 213

The Islamic Challenge. Politics and Religion in Western Europe. By Jytte Klausen

The Islamic Challenge. Politics and Religion in Western Europe. By Jytte Klausen

‘Can’t We Discuss This?’ Liberalism and the Challenge of Islam in the Netherlands

The Netherlands, which has seen the political murders of the populist Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and film director Theo van Gogh in 2004, faces particular challenges in meeting Europe's “Islamic problem.” Not just a welfare state like all European countries, the Netherlands also has its own peculiar “pillarization” social structure, which developed in order to permit all groups to be different but equal. For decades, the differences were among various groups of Christians and secularized Christians. But after the 1968 protest movement, and with an influx of immigrants, parallel societies emerged in which Muslims could build up their own institutions and values. While the system has clearly failed, the responses of the Dutch political class to date seem inadequate. This article outlines an approach to the challenge of European Islam that could restore political life to the right priorities.

Book Reviews

Jytte Klausen, The Islamic Challenge. Politics and Religion in Western Europe (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).Reviewed by Joyce MushabenDavid Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Reviewed by Antonis EllinasMichael Bernhard, Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the 20th Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005))Reviewed by John BendixBrian Rathbun, Partisan Interventions: European Party Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).Reviewed by Charles KingJudd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany (New York: Berg, 2005).Reviewed by Catherine PlumCindy Skach, Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).Reviewed by Michael Bernhard

The Islamic challenge: politics and religion in Western Europe

The Islamic challenge: politics and religion in Western Europe

The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe

Introduction: Islam in Europe 1. Europe's New Muslim Political Elite 2. How do Muslim Leaders see the Problems? 3. Belief and Politics 4. From Conflict to Culture War 5. Christian and Muslim Europe 6. Sexual Politics and Multiculturalism Conclusion: Liberal Muslims and the Emergence of European Islam Methodological Appendix Bibliography

Introduction

Introduction

Samuel Zwemer and the Challenge of Islam: From Polemic to a Hint of Dialogue

Samuel Zwemer and the Challenge of Islam: From Polemic to a Hint of Dialogue

The challenge of militant Islam and terrorism in Indonesia

Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack in the United States, authorities in Southeast Asia began to take notice of a clandestine terrorist network operating in the region. The Bali bomb b...