This dissertation asks how it came to be that Amina Lawal, a peasant woman from Northern Nigeria, was sentenced to death by stoning in 2002 for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, three years after full Islamic sharīah penal law began to be implemented there by way of massive grassroots demand. Each chapter examines a factor I deem necessary to explore this question. Drawing on ethnographic evidence gathered during fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, I first examine "sharīah as social text," concluding that sharīah is thought to offer the radical societal ordering and historical and cultural legitimacy necessary to combat the corruption and poverty associated with the Federal State structure. However, the integration of the stoning punishment into the formative period of Islamic law (1st-3rd AH/ 7th-10 CE centuries), taken up in Chapter two, reveals stoning to have presented theological problems, challenging its reception in contemporary Nigeria as a symbol of stability. Chapter three traces the slow integration of Hausaland into a legalistic milieu identified with an eastward Arab-Islamic epistemic tradition by the eighteenth century, culminating in the Sokoto Caliphate's (r. 1809 - 1903) identification with the Mālikī school of Islamic law. The British arrival in the late nineteenth century ended the Caliphate, changed Islamic penal law, and promulgated the "Native Courts Proclamation," which outlawed the stoning punishment despite its absence during the Sokoto Caliphate. This history is often recalled in contemporary Northern Nigeria, but only recently, as the State weakens and the Muslim north loses political power. Chapter four analyzes Lawal's trial as the stage where the boundaries and mandates of post-1999 sharī'ah are delineated. I call several features of legal argumentation endemic of "post-modern Islamic law": legal reductionism, reliance mainly on primary texts, combining Islamic and constitutional arguments, and eschewing the jurisprudential tradition. These factors combine to make it easier (relative to Islamic history) to mete out stoning. Finally, I examine gender and the Western reaction to the case, arguing that these discourses collude to ironically elide the voice of Amina Lawal, Nigerian women more generally, and the stoning punishment per se.

This thesis focuses on how Muslim Millennials in Canada and the United States navigate religious identities and research religious matters online. Their attendance and participation at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) convention - an annual conference in Toronto - illustrates their desire to meet in person even though they also engage in religious learning and activities online. Through qualitative interviews, I discover that these young Muslims find conducting Islamic research online to be convenient, however, their community needs are not fulfilled in the online Islamic world. Reviving the Islamic Spirit fulfills this need for in-person engagement by creating a suitable environment allowing Muslims to interact with religious authority figures from online spaces. Reviving the Islamic Spirit also allows Muslims to feel a sense of belonging and community in an offline space. All the participants in this study turned to the online Islamic world in search of religious authority. For many Muslim communities, religious authority plays a large role in their everyday lives. Unlike other Muslim minority communities, Sunni Muslims cannot agree on central religious authority. They do not have a central authority figure who they can rely on for inquiring about religious matters. These needs of religious authority and community bring together Muslims at Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention. I argue in this thesis that Reviving the Islamic Spirit creates a "convergent space." In this space, characteristics are highlighted from the online and offline worlds without erasing any of the original elements. Reviving the Islamic Spirit provides space that brings the online religious world into the present offline world, and this in turn influences religious behaviours and lived religious experiences. The research questions guiding this study were: 1) What attracts young Muslims to RIS? 2) Does participation at RIS influence online and offline religious behaviours? 3) How are digital elements of online religion (such as virtual religious practices and religious forum discussions) brought into offline spaces like RIS? and 4) What happens when the two physical and virtual religious spaces come together such as at the intersection at RIS? Participants were recruited from Reviving the Islamic Spirit where I was able to speak with attendees and set up a booth in the marketplace portion where people could approach me with interest about this study. The methodology included conducting 50 in-depth interviews and participant observation of attendees at RIS. The results indicate that Muslim Millennials were fascinated by "celebrity imams" such as Yasir Qadhi, Mufti Menk, Omar Suleiman, and Sohaib Webb. The results also verify that a 'convergence space' exists at Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention.

This thesis analyzes contemporary interpretations of Islamic religious ethics regarding the environment and its problems. The first part introduces a theoretical perspective in which the analyzed problem is viewed as historico-sociological problem of interaction between the modern phenomena of environmentalism and the traditional framework of religious ethics. The object of the second part is a close analysis and summary of those parts of the religious textual tradition which are included in the contemporary ethico-religious interpretations of environmental problems. In the third part, three separate discourses of contemporary Islamic environmental ethics and two other perspectives are distinguished and analysed using texts which represent them, published on this topic in English and Arabic. On this material common features of Islamic ethical attitude towards the nature and environmental problems are demonstrated as well as notable differences between the interpretations of jurists, layman activists, institutions and other actors. Attentions is paid to various possible relations between modern environmental concepts and notions and traditional ethico- religious Islamic tenets including their possible political and social implications.

Despite the long history of Muslims in Russia, most scholarly and political literatures on Russia’s Islam still narrowly interpret Muslim-Slavs relations in an ethnic-religious oppositional framework. In my work, I examine Russia’s discourse on Islam to argue that, in fact, the role of Islam in post-Soviet Russia is complex. Drawing from direct sources from academic, state, journalistic, and underground circles, often neglected by Western commentators, I identify ideational patterns in conceptualizations of Islam and reconstruct relational networks among authors. To explain complex intertextual relations within specific contexts, I utilize an analytically eclectic method that appropriately combines theories from different paradigms and/or disciplines. Thanks to my multi-dimensional approach, I show that, contrary to traditional views, Russia’s Muslims participate in processes of post-Soviet Russia’s identity formation. Starting from textual contents, avoiding pre-formed analytical frames, I argue that many Muslims in Russia perceive themselves as part of Russian civilization – even when they challenge the status-quo. Building on my initial findings, I state that a key element in Russia’s conceptualization of Islam is the definition, elaborated in the 1990s, of traditional Islam as part of Russian civilizational history, as opposed to extremist Islam as extraneous, hostile phenomenon. The differentiation creates an unprecedently safe, if confined, space for Islamic propositions, of which Muslims are taking advantage. Embedded in debates on Russian civilization, conceptualizations of Islam, then, influence Russia’s (geo)political self-perceptions and, consequently, its domestic and international policies. In particular, Russian so-far neglected Islamic doctrine supports views of Islamic terrorism as a political and not religious phenomenon. Hence, Russia interprets both terrorism and counterterrorism within its own historical tradition, causing its strategy to be at odds with Western views. Less apparently, these divergences affect Russian-U.S. broader relations. Finally, in revealing the civilizational value of Russia’s Islam, I expose intellectual relations among influential subjects who share the aim to devise a new civilizational model that should combine Slavic and non-Slavic, Orthodox and Islamic, Western, and Asian components. In this old Russian dilemma, the novelty is Muslims’ participation.