Expanding Insights
The Call for a Liberal Islam: Between Reformers and Dissenters View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anouar El Younssi
The Trump administration’s “travel ban” imposed on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, coupled with the former POTUS’s openly anti-Muslim, xenophobic rhetoric, has added much urgency to a critical question that now confronts both Muslims and non-Muslims: How should we talk about Islam today? This question has immediate bearing on a subject that gained prominence lately, political correctness. A number of prominent Muslim and ex-Muslim intellectuals and activists have been calling for an open and responsible conversation about Islam, particularly the sensitive subject regarding links between Islamic/Islamist doctrines and violence or human rights abuses. These voices stress that this conversation is long overdue, and should not be suppressed—notwithstanding the rise of white supremacy and Trumpism and their anti-Muslim rhetoric. They underscore that avoiding this conversation is detrimental, in the long run, to Muslims themselves because it hampers a much-needed debate about religious reform in Islam (broadly conceived), while exacerbating the state of crisis besetting several majority-Muslim societies, which in turn affects the Muslim diaspora. This paper surveys various voices, individuals and groups, that have attempted to wrestle with the debate over religiously-inspired violence and the state of perceived civilizational crisis in the Muslim world today. What all these voices seem to agree on is the conviction that the way out of this crisis is an acceptance of democracy and secular politics and institutions in the Muslim world—despite their dissimilar stances on whether Islam, or its myriad interpretations, is compatible with the notions of democracy and secularity.
Piety, History, and Nostalgia: Neo-Ottomanism in Islamist Women's Journals and Magazines in Turkey View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Petek Onur
Neo-Ottomanism as a political ideology has been a major component of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, particularly since 2007. It is based on the aim to revitalize the glory of the Ottoman Empire in contemporary Turkey with a nationalist and Islamic reinterpretation of history, which is also predominantly patriarchal. Cultural reflections of the ideology have also been widely seen in daily life, popular culture, and media, primarily in TV series and Islamist news media, newspapers, and magazines. This paper is based on a research project which studies how this ideology is reproduced in different Islamist women’s journals and magazines. The research aims to understand and emphasize the creative agencies of the women editors and authors of the publications in reproducing, aestheticizing, and popularizing neo-Ottomanism. The first set of data is obtained from the archive research covering the period 2007-2021 of five journals representing different Islamic groups, communities, and life-styles. The second set of data is based on interviews with the editors and authors of these publications. In addition to offering a comparative textual and visual analysis of this media, the paper argues that this discourse of nostalgia for the Ottoman history offers a spiritual shelter, a vision for future, and means of building and expressing a nationalist-Islamist identity for women in the unstable and spiritually perplexing nature of the contemporary Turkish society.
Religion and Spirituality in the Cascadia Bio-Region : Secularity, Nationalism, and Nature Religion in New Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Bramadat
Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest (UBC Press 2022) is the first research-driven book to address this complex transnational region. I was the Principal Investigator of this project. In this paper, I provide an account of: a) a pervasive default orientation we might call “reverential naturalism”; b) the decline of Christian denominations, and; c) counter-intuitive examples of spiritual and religious innovation, especially in putatively secular urban spaces. Second, I reach beyond the project data to address: a) the ways the much-celebrated spiritual openness associated with the region is related to neoliberal political and economic dynamics, and; b) the impact on the region of distinctive national norms evident in the different ways Canadian and US societies manage health care, political discourse, and racial politics. While previous work suggested that the region is an outlier, Religion at the Edge provides a compelling case that the region helps us understand other regions of North America and in fact other modern liberal democracies in which religion and spirituality are changing rapidly.
Religious Extremists’ Use of Islamic Concepts: Jāhiliyya and Hākimiyya in ISIS’s Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mohammed Alruwaili
In this paper, I present the concepts of jāhiliyya (age of ignorance) and ḥākimiyya (divine sovereignty) in ISIS’s literature. This is done by analysing the groups’s English-language magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah and its Arabic weekly newspaper al-Naba. While ISIS does not cite Ibn Taymiyya directly in the case of jāhiliyya and ḥākimiyya, analysis shows that the group translated Sayyid Qutb’s vision regarding the two concepts on the ground, which has evolved through a series of scholars in different historical periods stemming from the 14th-century jurist, Ibn Taymiyya.
