Islam at its worst...and best

Qualitative Sociology, 2011

In 2009 a French national commission was created to issue recommendations against "the burqa" and raise the possibility of a ban on the practice in certain public settings. This paper explores the different normative stakes of politicizing the burqa and the form of Islamic Revival with which it is associated. Recent scholarship has sought to overturn orientalist depictions of Islamic movements but has insisted that bodily ethical practices, such as Muslim women's veiling, constitute forms of politics. Based on ethnographic research in a women's mosque community in a poor suburb of Lyon, France, I argue that these women are not engaged in a form of politics but rather, antipolitics, a movement originally conceptualized in the 1970s and 80s as a rejection of politics and a valorization of private life. Three components define their antipolitics: a reconfiguration of the private sphere against an intrusive state, a retreat into a moral community, and emphasis on spiritual conditions and achievement of serenity. In interrogating different meanings of politics and antipolitics, this paper suggests a rethinking of the relationship between "political Islam" and piety movements.

Mariam Magsi: Imagining the Possibilities of a Hot Red Burqa

The purpose of this article is to study the humanistic aspects in Silas Marner by the English novelist, George Eliot. In fact, George Eliot, in this novel is convinced of the great value of the human kindness, affection, and sympathy. She highlights the principles of kindness and sympathy through many characters. The theme of humanism is also seen through religious aspects. As far as law is concerned, many texts are written in order to protect human being especially women. The authoress focuses her effort on the welfare of human beings. She also adds to that concern the social environment in which the members of community is linked together through traditional values, which are presented as an incomparable reservoir of values to uphold the harmonious development of society.

This project focuses on The Taqwacores (2003), a novel by Muslim American author Michael Muhammad Knight. Due to its contents and manner of presentation, Muslims consider the novel blasphemous. To gain an understanding of the novel’s alleged blasphemy, the project is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the author’s religious belief that is not common among Muslims. I argue that this uncommon religious belief results from the fusion two elements, that is, Islam and punk. From his experience as a Muslim convert, the author found some aspects of Islam that he considered problematic, that is, the lack of pluralism, corruption of tawhid, gender inequality and the presence of authority in Islam. He found the solutions to these problems in a number of prominent punk values, that is, iconoclasm, cacophony, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic. These punk values influences the author’s understanding of Islam in such a way that they result in the uncommon religious belief. The second part of this project discusses important parts of the novel where the alleged blasphemies are found. In this part, I argue that the novel tends to desacralize or reveal the non-divine origin of certain elements in Islam that most Muslims consider divine. The desacralizations are found in three areas in The Taqwacores, that is, the corruption of tawhid, the presence of orthodoxy in Islam, and gender inequality. From the discussion of the three areas, I conclude that instead of merely blaspheming Islamic elements, what the novel does is revealing the human nature of certain Islamic aspects that most Muslims consider divine.