This thesis explores Jewish-Muslim mixed marriages with a particular focus on the mixed couples&rsquo / and their children&rsquo / s self-identifications regarding religion and their experiences in a predominantly Muslim country, Turkey. By adopting a qualitative research design, in-depth interviews were conducted with 9 Jewish-Muslim mixed couples and 3 children in Istanbul and in Izmir. In addition, an official from the Turkish Jewish Community and an active member of the community were interviewed to determine the general perception of the Turkish Jewish Community regarding mixed marriage. The Jewish-Muslim mixed couples&rsquo / self-identifications with their Jewish and Muslim cultures and heritages reveal the importance of understanding individuals&rsquo / self-perceptions about their own identities since their self-perceptions cannot be understood by primordial ascriptions. The children of these mixed couples&rsquo / self-identifications provide important insights into the issue of the relative attractiveness of Jewish and Muslim identities in Turkey. The Jewish-Muslim mixed couples&rsquo / and their children&rsquo / s experiences in the private and public spheres reveal significant aspects of being Jewish, being mixed-married and being a child of a mixed marriage in a predominantly Muslim country, Turkey.

This thesis will examine Ali Bula&ccedil / &rsquo / s distinctive ideas and approach to modernity and democracy as two significant aspects of the Western Question within the framework of Muslim-West relations, with the aim of judging his contribution to the Western Question of Muslim. The West and Muslim world have been in contact with each other since the appearance of Islam on the global scene. The nature of this contact has changed throughout this 1400 year long interaction as peace or conflict reigned. In the past two centuries, the dominance of the West over the Muslim world increased dramatically. Consequently, the West transformed into a subtle question for the Muslims. The Western Question has become more complex as Western influence over the Muslim world increased with colonization, modernization and democratization policies pursued by the West. Conflicts have prevailed in Muslim-West relations in the past two centuries. Muslims have not remained indifferent to the rising dominance of the West in their society. They began to seek an appropriate response to the Western Question / but failed to devise a common one thus far, and proposed many different alternative solutions, including the one elaborated in this thesis, to deal with the Western Question.

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the relationship between the Hashemite regime and the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood from 1946 to 2007. Reformist and pragmatic rhetoric of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood distinct from the most of other Muslim Brotherhood branches operating in different countries in the Middle East enabled it to set up relatively harmonious relations with the Hashemite regime without being declared as illegal even in crisis periods. While focusing on this interesting case, this study reveals that the relationship between the Hashemite regime and the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood is mostly affected and shaped by two variables: regime survival concern and the regional context. In this regard, it maintains that the relations between the two parties have evolved around the policies of coexistence, cooperation, control and repression as well as containment with respect to the change in regime&rsquo / s survival concern and regional developments related to the Palestinian issue. This thesis argues that the period from 1946, when the Muslim Brotherhood was legalized as a charitable organization in Jordan, to the end of 1980s is generally marked with a coherent and cooperative relations between the two parties since their interests overlapped. However, since the beginning of 1990s the relationship began to deteriorate due to a shift in the interests of both parties as a result of developments in the regional context, namely Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of political Islam globally.

This study intends to discuss the problematical relation between Europe and Muslim immigrants in the light of the issues of secularism, religion and racism. Over the three decades, there has been a large body of literature in both theoretical and empirical fields about the peculiar European identity, the implications of secularism for European society and its distance from religion particularly in public sphere. Besides, 1980 onwards, the focus of the theories of racism shifted from biological explanations to culturally designated accounts. European manner of production of knowledge about race has started to concentrate on the incompatible cultural character of Muslim immigrants. Simultaneously, multicultural discourse has been put forward as an evidence for anti-racist and tolerant approach towards these guest citizens. By taking into consideration these theoretical analyses about Europe, the main goal of this study is to point out how specific discursive sphere is produced-reproduced and the representations of Muslim immigrants are shaped by certain Eurocentric definitions and recurrent notions. This attempt contains two interrelated theoretical layers. On the one hand, it is aimed to uncover the stereotyped and racist representations of Muslim immigrants in both public and political discussions. On the other hand, the inherent contradictions of Europe as both sovereign political subjectivity and hegemonic discursive sphere are highlighted.

This thesis examined how Turkish perception of insecurity, which was based on its suspicions about Greek and Bulgarian intentions and politics towards its territorial integrity and stability of its regime, shaped its view of Turkish/Muslim minorities living in these two states in the early Republican period. Using a wealth of archival material and newspapers, it questioned to what extent these physical and ideological concerns of the Turkish Republic played a role in its approach to these minorities in the period between 1923 and 1938. Turkey perceived the Greek and Bulgarian maltreatment of these minorities as a part of these states&rsquo / hostile intentions regarding the new Turkish state. Thus, what this thesis argued is that Turkey responded to pressure on Turkish/Muslim minorities in these two states not only because of humanitarian concerns but according to its security concern, which became an important factor to determine Turkish interventionist approach to the minority issues in Greece and Bulgaria in this period.

This thesis starts from Anderson¡¦s theory of ¡§Imagined Community¡¨, through the angle of ¡§Nationalism¡¨ and the ¡§Historical State Approach¡¨, to study the development of ethnic politics in Indonesia. In the analysis of historic events, this research hopes to represent the phenomenon of ethnic politics in Indonesia. According to the development of Indonesian Nationalism, this dissertation divides the political history in Indonesia into four stages, ¡§the independent stage¡¨, ¡§the national integration stage¡¨, ¡§the national cooperation stage¡§ and ¡§the democratic transformation stage¡¨, also there are two factors----¡§the state dominate¡¨ and ¡§the ethnic group politic mobilization¡¨ ---- being cross-compared their relations within the four historic stages. This thesis concludes: Indonesia as an ¡§imagined community¡¨, which leads the cleavage in the Indonesian national society. Lack of efficient institution for national integration at the beginning of the national independence, the cooperation politics in the New Order stage, both tended to build the inequality between different ethnic groups, which is the main reason for racial conflict after the democratization, and also the general factor affecting the ethnic politics in Indonesia. Individual factors affecting the ethnic politics in Indonesia include elements of the culture in religion, of the economy in region and the history in international politics, of the racial immigration and economy¡Kwhich form the ethnic consciousness and ethnic identity. Under the effects of the general and individual levels, nowadays the Indonesian ethnic politics presents itself as¡GA. Religion: Muslim parties contestation, the religious demonstration outside the institution, and the regional conflicts in religion. B. Region: secessionism, islanders demanding for regional autonomy or for federalism. C. Race: race violence against Indonesian Chinese, regional racial murders caused by the interior immigration policy. This dissertation concludes with elements of the above three levels, which show the phenomenon of contemporary ethnic politics in Indonesia.

In a Swedish classroom today there will be students with different ethnicities, world views and religious beliefs.  The students will be taught religion through a non-denominational education, where as a teacher you are meant to be objective, open-minded and fair in the representation of different traditions. This representation is colored by the outsider-perspective and the students then learn about religion from a party which is not involved in the religion being taught. This essay discusses how to balance the outsider-perspective in religious education in the Swedish school with insider-voices. More specific, the use of Muslim websites when teaching about Islam. The material this essay studies are three Muslim websites: al-islam.se, islaminfo.se and islamguiden.se. In order to make a didactic analysis of the websites, they are compared to a standard Swedish textbook. The method being used to do the analysis is a text analysis with a didactic point of view. The essay focuses on questions of the websites presentation of Islam, claim of truth and discussion on the negative image of Islam by the West. The essay shows that websites is a good alternative method in the process of balancing the outsider-perspective but requires conscious didactic choices and the need to teach the students about source criticism. The websites, because of their insider-voices, will need to be analyzed and explained to the students to keep the classroom environment non-denominational.

This study investigates how hate crimes in general and anti-Arab hate crimes in particular were distributed across different regions of the United States during the 2001-2002 period. The study explores how a historical event the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on September 11, 2001 and county population demographics affect the rates of hate crime against Arabs, Muslims or Middle Easterners. It was hypothesized that anti-Arab or anti-Muslim hate crimes displaced other forms of hate crime and were characterized by open acts of violence. According to the contact hypothesis, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes would be more likely to occur in counties with relatively high levels of poverty and economic inequality. The research materials were obtained from publicly available data. The hate crime data were obtained from the national hate crime incidents reported to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) program.

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The Muslim headscarf conceals the hair and other external features of a face. For this reason it may have implications for the recognition of such faces. The experiments reported in this thesis aimed to investigate anecdotal reports, which suggested that headscarf wearing females are more difficult to recognise. This was done by employing a series of experiments which involved a yes/no recognition task. The stimuli that were used were images of South Asian females who were photographed wearing a Muslim headscarf (HS), with their own hair visible (H), and a third set of stimuli were produced in which their external features were cropped (CR). Most importantly, participants either took part in the condition in which the state of the external features remained the same between the learning and test stage (Same) or the condition in which they were switched between the two stages (Switch). In one experiment participants completed a Social Contact Questionnaire. Surprisingly, in the Same condition, there was no difference in the recognition rates of faces that were presented with hair, with headscarf, or cropped faces. However, participants in the Switch condition performed significantly worse than those in the Same condition. It was also found that there was no difference in the % of fixations to the external features between the Same and Switch condition, which implied that the drop in performance between the two conditions was not mediated by eye-movements. These results suggest that the internal and external features of a face are processed interactively and, although the external features were not fixated on, a manipulation to them caused a drop in performance. This was confirmed in a separate experiment in which participants were unable to ignore the external features when they were asked to judge the similarity of the internal features of pairs of faces. Pairs of headscarf faces were rated as being more similar compared to pairs of faces with hair. Finally, for one group of participants it was found that contact with headscarf-wearing females was positively correlated with the recognition of headscarf-wearing faces. It was concluded that the headscarf per se did not impair face recognition and that there is enough information in the internal features of a face for optimal recognition, however, performance was disrupted when the presence or absence of the headscarf was manipulated.