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Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. It is known to have an abundant and very rich amount of knowledge found in the Qur'an and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, and as such, this religion has tremendously contributed not only to Muslim societies but also to the West. One aspect of this contribution explicated in this thesis is its contribution to the field of Conflict Resolution. The primary purpose of this study is to unearth the tradition of peace and conflict resolution that comes out of the religion of Islam, which is unknown to many Muslims today. In this study, existing literature in the field is examined, and a qualitative exploration is carried out, in order to formulate a better understanding of the dynamics of the Qur'an, hadith and other documents of Islam, as they relate to peace and conflict resolution. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, data collected for this study came from two sources: the existing literature regarding Islam and conflict resolution and the participants (Imams and religious scholars of Islam) interviewed through a questionnaire. To begin with, the thesis introduces the fundamentals of Islam and major concepts of the faith. It proceeds with Qur'anic and hadith injunctions on peace and conflict, and how those divine revelations as believed by Muslims, were applied by Prophet Muhammad and his early followers. This work is concluded with the opinions and interpretations of the scholars regarding the original question of this study and the matters discussed in the literature review. The thesis deals with the teachings of the Qur'an and only investigates and analyzes historical events from the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad and the early caliphate of Islam. In the process, to further explore the concept of conflict resolution in Islam, interpretations of Muslim scholars and imams are included in this document review of the sacred texts of Islam. Some questions addressed in this research are, how might this knowledge be valuable to Muslims today in these times of great turmoil involving the Muslim world after September 11? Where do the primary sources of Islam, the Quran and the hadith, stand as far as peace and conflict are concerned? And most importantly, what does Islam have to teach about conflict resolution?

The World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 fundamentally transformed the context of reception for Muslim immigrants in the U.S., shifting it from neutral to negative while also brightening previously blurred boundaries between established residents and the Muslim minority. This study explores how second-generation Muslim immigrants have experienced and reacted to post-9/11 contexts of reception. It is based on an analysis of ten semi-structured in-depth interviews that were conducted throughout the Portland Metropolitan Area from January to April of 2016. It finds experiences of discrimination to be primarily affected by two factors: public institutions and gender. It also finds, furthermore, that research participants react to negative post-9/11 contexts of reception by redrawing bright boundaries to include themselves within the American mainstream. Because Islam itself has become politicized within post-9/11 contexts of reception, this study also explores how second-generation Muslim immigrants construct and maintain religious meaning as a form of political identity. It finds that research participants unilaterally construct a Localized Islam that is dynamic and variable in its response to familial and social pressures. The thesis concludes by putting forward a typology outlining its four primary forms of localization within contemporary social and political environments.

This dissertation examines the early modern representation of the Ottoman sultan as merciless murderer of his own family in dramas depicting Islam that are also revenge tragedies or history plays set in empires. This representation arose in part from historical events: the civil wars that erupted periodically from the reign of Sultan Murad I (1362-1389) to that of Sultan Mehmed III (1595-1603) in which the sultan killed family members who were rivals to the throne. Drawing on these events, theological and historical texts by John Foxe, Samuel Purchas, and Richard Knolles offered a distorted image of the Ottoman sultan as devoid of pity for anyone, but most importantly family, an image which seeped into early modern drama. Early modern English playwrights repeatedly staged scenes in the dramas that depict Islam in which one member of a family implores another for pity and to remain alive. However, family killing became diffuse and was not the sole province of the Ottoman sultan or other Muslim character: the Spanish, Romans, and the Scythians also kill their kin. Additionally, they kill members of their own religious, ethnic, and national groups as family killing expands to encompass a more general self destruction, self sacrifice, and self consumption. The presence of the Muslim character, Turk or Moor, serves to underscore the political and religious significance of other characters' family killing. Part of the interest of English playwrights in the Ottoman history of family killing is that England had suffered its own share of family killing or the specter of it during the Wars of the Roses, the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth's life, and the martyrdom of many English during the Protestant Reformation. Through an analysis of such plays as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy , William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus , and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine I and II , among others, I argue that English playwrights represented family killing to contend with England's past of civil war, its Protestant Reformation present, and its political future. The dramas that depict Islam portray rulers who elevate empire building above kinship bonds and who feel no pity for those in their own kinship, national, or religious groups. The plays illustrate that the emotion, pity, leads a ruler to the just action of extending mercy and that the converse, lack of pity, leads a kingdom or empire to injustice and destruction. The plays ultimately declare empire building unjust because it is pitiless, creating an argument against empire for English audiences.

Scholarship on the modern history of the Middle East has undergone profound revision in the previous three decades or so. Many earlier perceptions, largely based on modernization theory, have been either contested or modified. However, the perception of the Egyptian ulama (the traditionally-educated, religious Muslim scholars) in academic scholarship remains largely affected by the legacy of hypotheses of the modernization theory. Old assumptions that the Egyptian ulama were submissive to political power and passive players incapable of accommodating, let alone of fathoming, conditions of the modern world, and who chose or were forced to retreat from this world, losing much, if not all, of their relevance and significance, still infuse the scholarly literature. Making use of materials obtained from the Egyptian National Archives, this study offers an examination of modern legal reform in Egypt from the nineteenth century through the first part of the twentieth century with the ulama and their legal institutions in mind. As the findings of this study effectively illustrate, the Egyptian ulama were by no means submissive. Rather, they were patient. Far from being passive agents of the past, the Egyptian ulama were active participants who played a critical role in the building of modern Egypt. The ulama had at their disposal sustained social and moral influence, a long-standing position as community leaders, a reputation as defenders and representatives of Islam, the power to validate or invalidate the political establishment by means of public and doctrinal legitimization, and the final authority over laws of family and personal status. Through these strengths, the ulama were able to influence the direction of change and to impact its scope and nature during transitional period that witnessed the making and remaking of modern Egypt. Considering the nature of changes that they allowed to be introduced to the shari-based justice system and the ones they resisted, as well as their stance regarding social matters, the Egyptian ulama comprehended and recognized modernity as useful. Advanced techniques had to be embraced to strengthen state institutions. However, the ulama thwarted massive and sudden adoption of modernity's cultural elements, so that Egypt would not become a chaotic country and go astray. On the weight of their position as the ultimate authority over family law, the Egyptian ulama blocked rapid social change imposed from the top. Alterations to family law and the social structure were undertaken gradually and with a great deal of delicacy. Therefore, the long-standing social order was not suddenly destroyed and replaced with a new one. Instead, changes to the long-standing social structure were allowed to evolve slowly, while the core was largely preserved. The ulama's far-reaching plan, which was realized in the long run, was to maintain Islam's position in modern Egypt as a guide and as the main source of legitimacy. As will be shown in this study, the history of the Egyptian ulama reveals not passivity, detachment, or submission but careful, and deliberate action.

Née d’un questionnement épistémologique sur la manière dont les concepts véhiculés par la recherche découpent le réel et sur la place de la subjectivité en sciences des religions, cette thèse analyse la vision de la mystique musulmane selon Louis Massignon (1883-1962). Elle met en lumière la posture herméneutique de ce chercheur qui, après avoir démontré l’origine qur’ānique du soufisme, fait de la figure d’al-Ḥallāj (m. 309/922), le paradigme de la sainteté en islām. L’analyse montre que sa vision de la réalité étudiée est tributaire de sa propre spiritualité : il perçoit la mystique authentique comme une voie d’ascèse, de purification par la souffrance. Au cœur de l’union mystique, le mystique devient le témoin de Dieu. A cette voie, il oppose celle d’Ibn ʿArabī (m. 638/1240) et perçoit l’influence du néoplatonisme comme une altération de la pureté ascétique primitive. La voie la plus pure est une mystique de l’annihilation (fanā’) au sein de laquelle l’être humain serait indigne d’endosser les attributs divins et de connaître l’état de subsistance (baqā’). Sa quête, mue par des questionnements existentiels, illustre la difficile conciliation entre la quête du vrai et la quête de la Vérité. Cette étude montre combien la subjectivité du ou de la chercheur.e sert la recherche et l’entrave à la fois. Elle suggère, afin de construire les conditions du comprendre qu’il importe de prendre conscience de la particularité de sa posture herméneutique, d’énoncer son intention, d’interroger ses catégories conceptuelles, de maintenir une distance critique à son sujet, de réfléchir sur sa pratique, afin que la subjectivité ne déforme pas le réel, mais l’éclaire et le révèle. / Born from epistemological questions about the way in which the concepts conveyed by research cut out the real and about the place of subjectivity in the academic study of religion, this thesis analyzes Louis Massignon’s (1883-1962) vision of Muslim mysticism and provides the following key results: In a context in which mysticism is attracting increasing interest and in which the study of religion and of Islam more specifically are becoming institutionalized, this orientalist thinker, contemporary of both French and British colonial expansion, experimented with various tensions between scholarly and political logics, between academism and civilizing mission. Biographical sources make it possible to trace an itinerary that originated in Paris, continued in Cairo, and led him to Baghdad, the city where Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, to whom Massignon dedicated his doctoral dissertation, had died in 309/922. Interesting himself particularly in the lexical dimension of Sufism, he demonstrated, by means of an interiorist method of reading texts, its Qur’anic origin and its fundamentally Islamic character. These contextual and biographical analyses shed light on the specificity of Massignon’s hermeneutic posture vis-à-vis Muslim mysticism. It is as an interpreter inspired by a Christian vision of holiness that he approaches the figure of al-Ḥallāj and makes the latter the paradigm of holiness in Islām. This research brings to light how this Christian scholar’s spirituality influenced his vision of his field of study. The ḥallājian mystic - the purest in his eyes - is conceived as on a path of asceticism, of purification through suffering. At the heart of the transforming and personalizing union, this mystic becomes the witness of God. The mystic can only join with God in atonement, love, and sacrifice. Massignon’s vision thus opposes that of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), which he reproaches for suppressing the radicality of transcendence. The Islām of theophanies is, in his eyes, pantheism; he refuses all mediation and perceives the influence of Neoplatonism as an alteration of primitive ascetic purity. If authentic mysticism is, in according to him, a mystique of aridity, of annihilation (fanā’) , it is because in his eyes, the absolute smallness of the human being is matched only by divine omnipotence: the inconsistency of the human being makes them unworthy to endorse the divine attributes and to know the state of subsistence (baqā’ ). This study analyzes, finally, how Massignon’s existential questions affect the way he looks at the reality he is studying. His effort illustrates the difficult reconciliation between the (scientific) quest for the true and the (metaphysical) quest for the Truth. Through this case study, this research demonstrates how the subjectivity of the researcher supports research and hinders it at the same time. The study ultimately establishes why it is important to become aware of the peculiarity of one’s hermeneutical situation, to state one’s intention, to question one’s conceptual categories, to maintain a critical distance from one’s work, and to wonder about one’s practice in a reflexive way: these precautions help build the condition of a more just understanding, so that subjectivity no longer deforms reality, but illuminates and reveals it.

Une étude architecturale à travers quatre monographies des forts du Deccan (Inde), Naldurg, Torgal, Firozabad et Bellary dans le contexte des échanges interculturels (Orient-Occident) au sein de la culture technique de la guerre (fortification, artillerie, rôle des défenses, gestion de l’eau) dans la société médiévale et moderne indienne.Finalement, cette thèse cherche à définir les spécificités de l’architecture militaire du Deccan du 14ème au 18ème siècle, comme l’aboutissement technique de la défense médiévale et moderne en Inde. / Architectural studies of four forts of Deccan (India): Naldurg, Torgal, Firozabad and Bellary in the context of intercultural exchange (between East-West) in the technical culture of war (fortification, artillery, defenses role, water management) in the medieval and modern Indian society.Finally, this study seek to define specificities of the military architecture of Deccan from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, as the technical outcome of medieval and modern defense in India.

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