Young Muslims in Britain are increasingly required to navigate an unsettled social, religious and cultural landscape. These complex dynamics encompass a range of factors: from sectarianism and the global marketplace of Islamic knowledge, through to the influence of diverse ethnic communities, the ubiquity of popular culture, and late-modern discourses relating to spirituality and religion. Religious practice, identity formation and social/cultural relationships are therefore a continual process of (re)negotiation, with young Muslims often adopting highly reflexive and pragmatic approaches to this uncertainty. Emerging from this turbulent context is a vibrant Muslim music culture. This thesis provides an ethnographic account of this music culture – through engagement with both musicians and fans – whilst furthermore analysing the deeper significance of Muslim cultural production in contemporary Britain. The observations and arguments throughout are based on extensive fieldwork that took place over a period of approximately two years. A number of methodological strategies were employed: these included interviewing, participant observation and various online research methodologies (including an online survey). While the ethnographic account provided in this thesis is an original and timely contribution to the study of Muslims in Britain, there are broader theoretical implications to emerge. In particular, the original concepts of ‘Islamic Music’ and ‘Islamicallyconscious music’ are developed to better understand how Muslim musicians varyingly emphasise both their individual subjectivity and a more collectivist sense of religious belonging. By examining the development of a distinct British Muslim public sphere, it will therefore be claimed that Muslim musicians are using cultural production as a vehicle to simultaneously contest, negotiate and develop ideas of Muslim practice and collectivity in contemporary Britain.

This work aims to look into the question of authenticity and inauthenticity within the Muslim discourse. How muslim can Muslims really be? Within the Muslim world the concept of authenticity is usually coupled with questions of adherence to the canonical and historical. Despite the fact that the Qur’an addresses the individual in a very direct manner, little emphasis seems to be focused on personal authenticity within contemporary Muslim circles. Muslim societies are understood to be communally based with less emphasis on the individual (Lewis : 2007) and yet inner searching has been very much a part of Muslim culture though this may now have shifted significantly in engaging with, what is argued here, as the increasing mundanization (Drane : 2000) and rationalist approaches to religion generally and specifically to Islam. This work sets out to explore what, if any, inauthenticities have arisen within the Muslim discourse that might have given rise to this. In attempting to think through these questions, various contemporary manifestations of global management culture are explored, the development of rationality within Muslim intellectual history and contemporary theological positions within Islam are brought up for examination. Throughout these enquiries any resulting connection with inauthenticity and rationalism is sought out. Has this management paradigm reached the religious sphere? Has there been a McDonaldization of Islam? How can these be effectively countered? Much of the analysis and discussion that takes place is through a dialectical perspective between classical Islamic and existentialist thought. One of main aims of this research is to demonstrate ways of thinking through to potential personal authenticity despite the obstacles mentioned.

This study seeks to contribute to a growing discussion about Islamic intellectual endeavours in the Middle Periods, providing new evidence from the genre of anti-innovation tracts (anti-bid‘a tracts) that has hitherto received relatively little modern scholarly attention. Specifically, this thesis examines tradition and innovation in Islam during the Mamluk period (648/1250 – 922/1517) through the lens of two jurists and their anti-innovation tracts. Ibn al-Ḥājj (d. 737/1336) was a Mālikī from North Africa who wrote Madkhal al-shar‘ al-sharīf. Ibn al-Naḥḥās (d. 814/1411), by contrast, was a Shāfi‘ī (and former Ḥanafī) from Damascus, who wrote a tract contained within his Tanbīh al-ghāfilīn, a work concerned with the duty of commanding right and forbidding wrong, and with naming and briefly discussing various sins and innovations. Ibn al-Ḥājj’s and Ibn al-Naḥḥās’ anti-innovation tracts are studied here for the first time in their own right, together with English translations of representative passages of their work that allow the reader to gain a direct impression of them. In addition to this, this thesis makes three unique arguments. First, anti-innovation tracts should be read as prescriptive yet flexible examples of furū‘. Second, the authors of the tracts investigated here, Ibn al-Ḥājj and Ibn al-Naḥḥās, were both ‘outsiders’ to Mamluk Egypt, who used this genre to define and regulate correct Muslim practices, in less formal ways that were both new and continuous with earlier thinking. Ibn al-Ḥājj’s programme - urging fledgling scholars, in almost encyclopaedic fashion, to know about and teach against innovative practices - was more important for him than addressing the topics of intention and innovation that feature in the full title of his work. Ibn al-Naḥḥās is an interestingly obscure figure. In an abbreviated and direct style, he urged non-specialists in Mamluk lands to censure innovations, and even to prevent them. Third, Ibn al-Ḥājj and Ibn al-Naḥḥās conceived of loyalty to their legal school in ways that require us to expand the terms of modern scholarly debates about such loyalty. This study contributes to the relatively recent, and fast-growing, literature on the Mamluk period in general, and its legal literature in particular. It supports a recent perspective on the Mamluk period, by illustrating the continuity and evolution of legal thinking during this period, which is both predicated upon, and differs substantially from, earlier periods of Islamic history. and deserves study in its own right.

This thesis examines in depth the thought and ideas of the Egyptian intellectual Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd as a representative of modernist Isalmic thought. In unpacking and analysingAbu Zayd’s ideas, this thesis focuses on five major issues: shari‘a, Islam and politics, the Arab-Islamic heritage, history, and the issue of women’s rights. This thesis argues that Abu Zayd’s thought suffers from some of the same weaknesses he attacked in traditional and Islamist thought. By focusing on Abu Zayd I not only contribute to understanding a major intellectual in contemporary Islamic thought but also shed light on his wider intellectual family.

This thesis conceptualises Islamist radicalisation in Europe as a process of occupational choice. It follows the approach to individual radicalisation as incremental development (process) with the consideration of multi-level factors and dynamics. The analysis leading to this multi-phase process is grounded in data, comparative and comprehensive since it adopts a perspective of individual life-stories. It conceptualises radicalisation phases and the whole process not as something specific but as a concrete variation of a more general process. It further accounts for gradual change in time instead of sudden and radical points of change from ‘normality’ to radicalism, at the same time clearly defining the phases of involvement and the main categories and conditions impacting on the Islamist occupational choice. The theoretical framework integrates rational choice and framing theory elements within a general approach to the phenomenon of interest as social process. The methodology used is grounded theory and the data sources are in the majority primary data from fieldwork in Austria, France and Germany, along with secondary data and literature as directed by theoretical sampling. The structure of the thesis develops as follows: a discussion and clarification of the radicalism and ‘radicalisation’ concepts; a review and critique of the main contributions in the literature on Islamist radicalisation in Europe; the outline, rationale and application of the methodology; the emergence and dynamics of the Islamist radical occupational choice process; the analysis of occupational choice categories; and the emergence and impact of interpretative frameworks in shaping occupational choice categories.

No description available.

Le paradis constitue un des aspects essentiels de chacune des deux religions. Imaginé comme un lieu de bonheur et de perfection, il est décrit à partir des réalités terrestres. C’est un lieu dont les textes bibliques et coraniques, les écrits des Pères de l’Église, les hadîths et la littérature ont fourni différentes présentations. Un lieu dont les visionnaires ont donné de surprenantes descriptions. Un lieu de beauté que les artistes n’ont cessé d’illustrer pendant des siècles. Le faire découvrir, comprendre ses multiples éléments a nécessité non seulement de l’insérer dans un contexte historique mais aussi de le situer dans un cadre eschatologique, en examinant les autres lieux de l’au-delà. Notre recherche a tenté une étude comparative de ces textes scripturaires dans le christianisme et dans l’islam. Il s’agit de confronter les données exégétiques, dogmatiques et iconographiques dans l’espoir de découvrir les approches respectives et les principales différences entre les visions du paradis et du monde de l’au-delà dans le christianisme et dans l’islam. À travers cette réflexion, il apparaît que l’imaginaire du paradis dans ces deux religions dépend dans une large mesure de la manière de concevoir les textes de référence et de les interpréter. Mais il reste toujours la question de savoir comment ce terme est utilisé aujourd’hui, surtout dans le monde islamique. L’aspect militant de cette thèse est une mise en question, voire une réfutation des promesses paradisiaques faites aux musulmans exerçant de nouvelles formes de violence qui suscitent une foule de candidats au meurtre. / Paradise is an essential aspect of both religions, for which earthly realities have been used to imagine a place of happiness and perfection. Its concepts are to be found in the Bible as well as the Quran, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, the hadiths and more general literature. Visionaries have reported stunning descriptions of it, and its beauties have never ceased to be illustrated by artists over the centuries. In order to discover, know, understand its multiple aspects, it has been necessary, not only to insert it into the context of history, but also to situate it in the realm of eschatology and to examine the other places of the great Beyond. Our research attempts to elaborate a comparative study between the Holy Scriptures of Christianity and Islam. We have confronted exegetic, dogmatic and iconographic data so as to find out the coherence inherent to each religion, hoping thereby to discover their specific approaches and the main differences between their own visions of Paradise and afterlife. Our reflection has led us to conclude that the images of Paradise in Christianity and Islam are derived from the way the texts are considered and interpreted. But the remaining question is the use of the word nowadays, particularly in the context of Islam. This dissertation thus questions, even refutes the promises of Paradise made to Muslims under the guise of new forms of violence calling forth crowds of candidates to murder.

The aim of this thesis is to expound and compare the theological aspect of the thought of al-Juwaynī and al-G̲h̲azālī; we shall seek to discover similarities and differences between them in their methods and in their opinions on identical problems. There are indeed several aspects from which the thought of these two men may be studied - the philosophical, the juristic, and the theological aspects. And their contribution to theology is an extremely important page in the history of the As̲h̲ʻarīyah school.