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Since the end of apartheid, issues pertaining to South African identity construction have attracted increased scholarly attention. This is reflected in a growing body of literature in several disciplines that analyze identities in post-apartheid South Africa. At the same time, a number of factors led to an equally increasing interest in Islamic and Muslim politics. However, the interest remains to a great extent concerned with the history of Islam in Africa, with very little attention paid to contemporary Muslim politics in its broader sense or indeed what this means in the South African context. This thesis, about Muslims’ identities in South Africa, aims to merge these two fields of identities in-formation and Muslim politics. In an attempt to unpack identity discourses within the Muslim community in South Africa, the study will address three main questions: How are Muslims’ identities formulated? How do they relate to each other? And how do they develop in different contexts? In order to answer the aforementioned questions the thesis will focus on how religious identities intersect with other levels of identification mainly national, ethnic and political identities. By answering the broader questions about identity construction processes, the thesis is able to address several other more specific questions. For example, what kind of interplay exists between the different identities such as those that are religious, ethnic, socio-economic or political? What does this interplay suggest in terms of the hierarchy of identities in different contexts? Instead of using identity as an analytical category, the thesis adopts the term ‘identification’, which reflects both the processes according to which identities are formulated as well as the context contingent nature of identities. After analyzing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of identity construction, the rest of the thesis discusses the extent to which Islam has informed Muslims’ identities at three separate, yet intersected and connected, levels. At the political identity level, I argue that religious identity has relatively little bearing on the articulation of Muslims’ political identities in post-apartheid South Africa, by comparison with the apartheid era when political activism of Muslims was heavily charged by Islamic ethos and principles. I also argue that the stance adopted by Islamic religious bodies in the anti-apartheid struggle undermined their influence within the Muslim community to a great extent as far as political identities are concerned. In other contexts however, religious bodies enjoy a more prominent role; that is particularly evident in negotiating Muslims’ rights regarding Muslim Personal Law, which is highlighted as a case in point to show how citizenship, and thus national identity, is intertwined with religious identity. At a third and final level, ethnic identities within the Muslim community are examined through the inter-community relations, which reveal that racial and ethnic identification is best understood through both cultural as well as structural approaches.

The aim of the study is to examine how religion legitimates outrages and it what ways we can regard religion as politics. The study uses the theory that Eickelman and Piscatori present in their book Muslim politics. They use the term ‘Muslim politics’ to describe the relation between Islam and politics. Eickelman and Piscatori divide Muslim politics in five elements that the essay uses to structure the analysis. By studying IS´s own published documents, two issues of the newspaper Dabiq Magazine, from a discourse analytical approach, this essay aims to consolidate the discourse behind the texts and find how the Muslim politics of IS is constructed. IS is an organization that has proclaimed a caliphate that includes Iraq and Syria. IS claims that the core of Islam has been lost and it needs to be rediscovered to avoid the punishment from Allah. IS claim to be the trustees of the will of Allah on earth and call on people to rally behind their interpretation of “true Islam”. The vision of IS is to re-establish a caliphate which is part of the ongoing objectification process.

Stemming from U.S.'s ongoing war in the Middle East, this report details the foreign policy of three non-democratic states: Pakistan, Iran and Syria. Foreign policy is affected by many factors within the borders of a state, some of which include: power of the ruler, religion, extent of civil liberties, economy and the state's history. All of these factors, along with a number of others aid in understanding how non-democratic states form their foreign policy. Moreover, a detailed analysis of past conflicts is provided in order to represent how the antagonism came about, the reasons for warfare, the methods used and any attempts at reconciliation. This research has shown that at least in the cases of Pakistan, Iran and Syria, the political and religious leaders have had enormous influence in choosing battles. Although a similar conclusion cannot and should not be made about other states in the Middle East and South Asia, this methodology can be used in assessing foreign policy of other non-democratic states in the area as well. Thus, based on the findings in this thesis, one can infer that non-democratic states have been involved in much warfare due mostly to their rulers. There have been little or no attempts at diplomacy, and these states have almost always resorted to violence. Also, the power of the extremists in these countries is incomparable to the power of any given group around the world. This analysis may be used in efforts to better understand the region, which would aid U.S. in better cooperating with it.