Inaugural speech delivered at the University of Amsterdam on Dec. 11, 2008. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D)--Karachi University, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 969-1037)

Architectural historians have always seen the Islamic city and Islamic house as unsystematic in design and layout. In this work I show that there is a basic spatial symbolism predating, and then adopted by, Islam, based on three major concepts. The first is that there is a residual notion of center as something sacred; secondly that instead of dichotomies or binary oppositions space in Islamic architecture is a continuum and lastly that the center of the center, whether or not it has any visible symbolism, (fountain for example) is an axis mundi, or vertical axis to the heavens. These features are seen not just in urban and housing designs, but also in mosques, madrassas, and garden layouts.

This dissertation examines the ethnicization of Islam among a specific ethnic group in China, namely the Hui. It is based upon sixteen months of multi-sited fieldwork conducted in China's Henan Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region from 2010 to 2012. I argue that the particular ethno-imaginary of the Hui and their positioning vis-à-vis the Han majority - that they are both non-Han and more Han than the Han - are predicated upon a particular sexual economy. Islam is situated in an imagined dissymmetrical exchange of woman as that whose presumed truth can procure for the Hui the feminine "Han blood." The "nativization" of Islam among the Hui, i.e. its supposedly never complete "sinicization," occurs through the figure of the Han woman. In Part I of this dissertation, I trace the itinerary of this figure in both historiographical narratives of the Hui in the early twentieth century and the organizational variations of their contemporary life as Muslims in a swiftly-changing China. In Part II, I move to a more general level, and study two major institutions in the Chinese state's governance of ethnic difference, namely ethnic regional autonomy and ethnic cadre. I situate them within the socialist tradition and unpack their specificity in contrast to other political configurations in the governance of ethnic difference (e.g. liberal multiculturalism). I suggest that this socialist governance of difference is defined by a biopolitical logic, and argue that the link to sexuality that is intrinsic to the concept of biopolitics renders the Hui a particularly privileged site for exploring the complex relationship between the socialist politics of ethnicity and the socialist governance of sexuality.

The central theme of this study is the question of turath (cultural heritage) as perceived by contemporary Arab thinkers since the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967. The diverse understandings of turath have raised various questions with respect to it, yielding a plethora of opinions that make it difficult to come up with a common definition. This unstable view of the phenomenon has led to what may be called "the problematic of turath." This study asks whether turath has the roots of the problematic or whether it is mainly the positions on it that have led to its problematization. An attempt to explore the term reveals that the contemporary meaning assigned to turath is ideological in nature, such that it is perceived as a tool for either progress or decline. To understand how this ideologization operates, the study looks at two antithetical positions on turath: that of the Islamic-modernist, H&dotbelow;asan H&dotbelow;anafi (b.1935) and that of the secular-modernist, Adonis (b. 1930). Their positions are described in the light of their intellectual and ideological backgrounds, and analyzed in view of their primary texts. The study concludes that their "imagined" visions of turath reflect biased thinking, an understanding of turath that is adapted to their own ideological stance. As an Islamic phenomenologist, H&dotbelow;anafi perceives Islamic revelation as a phenomenon present to consciousness, regarding it as authoritative due to its presumed "uncorrupted" character. This makes it suitable to any place and time and renders it the only legitimate source for renewal and progress. However, the fact that he feels a rereading of turath is necessary to achieve this goal reflects a paradox in his discourse, whereby the same turath becomes simultaneously the chief problem and the chief solution for Arab-Muslim society. By contrast, Adonis, as a secular deconstructionist, looks at the inherited turath as a "text" with a static/dynamic dualism, and tries to show that the static elements of turath, which always appear stable, logical and capable of achieving progress, make it otherwise. For him, divine revelation --- which is responsible for the predominance of the static and hence an obstacle to human freedom, creativity and progress --- must be deconstructed. This paves the way for his own agenda of replacing the static, i.e., religious elements, with dynamic or secular elements, which alone can enable the reconstruction of a new civilization. But in the process, Adonis may only be replacing the religious with the secular and merely setting in place a new static dimension.

No description available.

This dissertation examines two educational piety projects competing for control over popular conceptualizations of piety and what it means to be a good Muslim, as presented by Al Azhar 31 Islamic Primary School and Luqman al Hakim Integrated Islamic Primary School in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Al Azhar 31 promotes an Indonesian Islam, pluralistic and inclusive of multi-tradition approaches to Islam that is flexible in regards to acceptable forms of worship. Luqman al Hakim SIT promotes a transnational Islam, inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and linked to the Indonesian Islamic political party, Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejatera, PKS). The school's purificationist approach pushes for the removal of local customs and traditions from mainstream Islam and promotes exacting observance of standardized practices. These two schools' disparate approaches to Islam are emblematic of the larger polarizing trends in approaching Islam in Indonesia today. This dissertation has particular significance for understanding the intersection of Islamic movements, Islamic education, and the religious middle class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, this dissertation demonstrates how schooling can be a tool for shaping socio-religious and political climates of a community and country. It adds to the growing literature on the educational spaces developing alongside Islamic piety movements throughout the Muslim world. Additionally, this dissertation provides a rare example of the influence on Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologies on education, rather than politics. It also illustrates how the schools' disparate approaches to Islam shape distinct religious subjectivities within their students. The documentation of the innovation of the extended-day Islamic school model and integrated Islam ideology employed by both schools adds to the rich history of Indonesia's Islamic schooling traditions. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates how middle class parents' classed aspirations and anxieties regarding education, wealth, morality, and corruption coalesce to create ready consumers for a particular type of Islamic school: one that provides a longer school day, strong academics, and a robust religious curriculum focused on Islamic morals and values.

"Afterlife of Empire" explores Ottoman cultural, social, and political continuities in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg administration (1878-1914). The research focuses on the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire - an influence perpetuated both by the efforts of the Ottoman imperial state, and by the former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina itself to explain the lingering aftereffects of the Ottoman Empire in the province. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that the Ottoman subjects and the former territories did not stop being Ottoman in any significant sense immediately after the separation from the empire, and that the break with the empire was not that of rupture, but characterized by enduring features of the empire that evolved to respond to diplomatic and strategic interests in the region. A shift from the common inclination to analyze the Habsburg period as the introduction of modernity, and a focus, not on the national/ethnic framework constructed around identity, but on the overlapping, multiple loyalties in this study convey a more accurate representation of the period and an assessment of what legitimacy and sovereignty meant in this region. By drawing on Ottoman and Bosnian archival sources in focusing on Bosnia's overlapping imperial, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering the Ottoman context after its formal departure, and the significance of incorporating Islamic intellectual history in understanding the past and present of Bosnia Herzegovina and Southeastern Europe in general.

This dissertation is a study of contemporary forms of Quranic learning among women in urban Pakistan. Over the last two decades, Quran study programs which promise an in-depth and personal knowledge of the text, have become immensely popular among educated women from all backgrounds in urban centers of Pakistan. Placing an emphasis on developing skills for reading and understanding the Quran, such programs of study have adopted an approach to textual engagement that departs significantly from previously dominant modes of recitation and memorization of the Quran in everyday practices of ritual devotion. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among women participants of Quranic study, this dissertation investigates these sites of learning to highlight the competencies, logics and modes of argumentation that are encouraged and cultivated among women readers of the Quran. It locates the shift from Quranic recitation to reading within a genealogy of the modernist exegetical tradition popularized by Syed Abul Ala Maududi in the mid-twentieth century in South Asia which made the `ordinary' reader its main focus rather than the scholarly world of the Ulama. It foregrounds this as the condition under which a popular hermeneutics of the Quran emerges in contemporary Pakistan and demonstrates how privileging a modality which illuminates the Quran's `true' meaning steers conceptions about the text and its role in defining ethical action for women readers. This study analyzes how contemporary practices of Quranic hermeneutics by `ordinary' women rely on the ethical cultivation of interpretive agency which is generated simultaneously by notions of the autonomous self and a normative understanding of Quranic injunctions. Through an analysis of women's experiences of reading, it shows that Quranic study in these sites occurs at the nexus of competing modalities of textual engagement in which women combine religious and secular capacities, skills and sensibilities for reflection on the Quran's meaning. It highlights the ways in which seemingly contradictory modes of reflection--one which is critical and another which is governed by devotional affect--are productively reconfigured together for discerning the ethical import of Quranic injunctions and their insertion into the idioms governing everyday life. This dissertation argues that such a mode of appreciation produces a unique register for reflecting on the Quran's pedagogical potential, thus imbuing the desire for `reading as understanding' with the promise of personal and collective social transformation. It also unravels assumptions about the discreteness of the spheres governed by religiosity and secularity in a post-colonial context and enables for a consideration of the ways in which the intersection between the two have been productive of new modalities of womanhood, sociality, and politics.

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