Aesthetics of Muslim-ness: Art and the Formation of Muslim Identity Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-203
Author(s):  
Ala Rabiha Alhourani
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Social Drama ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Anthropology Of Islam ◽  
Internal Contradiction ◽  
Discursive Traditions

AbstractThe paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a ‘social drama’ of a lived experience of Muslims’ ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad’s idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions.

Sekolah Islam (Islamic Schools) as Symbols of Indonesia's Urban Muslim Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Yanwar Pribadi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Islamic Schools ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract This article discusses the relationship between Sekolah Islam (Salafism-influenced Islamic schools) and urban middle-class Muslims. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the City of Serang (Kota Serang), near Jakarta, this paper argues that these conservative and puritan Muslims demonstrate their Islamic identity politics through their engagement with Sekolah Islam. The analysis of in-depth interviews with and close observations of parents of students and school custodians (preachers or occasionally spiritual trainers) at several Sekolah Islam reveals that they have attempted to pursue ‘true’ Islamic identity and have claimed recognition of their identity as the most appropriate. The pursuit of a ‘true’ Islamic identity has infused Islamic identity politics, and there is an oppositional relationship between local Islamic traditions and Salafism, as seen in Sekolah Islam. The relationship between Islam and identity politics becomes intricate when it is transformed into public symbols, discourses, and practices at many Sekolah Islam. This paper shows that through their understanding and activities at Sekolah Islam, these Muslims are avid actors in the contemporary landscape of Islamic identity politics in Indonesia. By taking examples from Sekolah Islam in Indonesia, this article unveils social transformations that may also take place in the larger Muslim world.

Richard Wright’s Mission

2018 ◽  
pp. 86-104
Author(s):  
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
South Side ◽  
Native Son ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Human Need

Some readers of Wright’s work have criticized him for failing to portray healthy human connection or solidarity. In her chapter, Marilyn Nissim-Sabbat maintains that Wright was deeply aware that people could only live as human beings through meaningful relations with one another. Wright understood both that the human need for solidarity runs deep and that the ability to forge it can be damaged. Without such solidarity, alienation from oneself and others will crush “Bigger” and Bigger-like characters on the South Side of Chicago and globally. Wright therefore championed the healing made possible by qualitatively enlarging our lived-experience of and with one another. Essential to articulating and acting on this need is a critical theory of transcendence that is implicit in Wright’s work. Such a theory emerges in this essay through a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s views on identity politics and cross-group identity in The Second Sex as contrasted with parallel discussions by Wright in Native Son.

Social Policy, Cultural Integration and Faith: A Muslim Reflection

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dilwar Hussain
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
British Society ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Big Society ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Uk

This article is a reflection on some of the discussions around faith and public life, within the context of Muslim communities and their interaction with public policy. It looks at the gap between popular debates on Muslims and the actual lived socio-economic reality of most people of Muslim background, and then goes on to look at aspects of identity formation and Muslim identity politics in the UK. It also considers the idea of integration and looks briefly at emerging Islamic discourses that are grappling with some of the challenges presented by modern British society. Finally, the article explores the role of faith in the public sphere and if it can help to build social capital and play a role in ideas such as the Big Society. The article concludes by emphasising the need to move beyond identity politics and communitarianism and asks where the real divides in society are – between religious and ideological groups or within them?

Affect

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Liljeström
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Affect Studies ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Way

During the last few decades, feminist affect studies have enunciated challenging epistemological and ontological questions based on numerous discussions and readings of affect as emotive intensities, intuitive reactions, and life forces. Affect has created a space for rethinking theoretical issues that range from the dualisms between body and mind to the critique of identity politics and critical reading. This theorizing has underlined the sensual qualities of being and the capacity to experience and understand the world in profoundly relational and productive ways. This chapter presents examples of the wide spectrum of contemporary feminist affect studies. It discusses the notion of “affective turn,” concentrating on the way it has been seen as a reaction and a challenge to alleged limitations of poststructuralism and deconstruction; describes definitions of affect; explores understandings of the linkages between epistemology and ontology, and offers some reflections on the feminist politics of affects.

scholarly journals Ethno-religious socialisation, national culture and the social construction of British Muslim identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riyaz Timol
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Social Construction Of Reality ◽  
Peter Berger ◽  
The Social ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
Recent Government

AbstractThis paper interfaces a specific theory of socialisation, derived from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential book The Social Construction of Reality, with the empirical story of Muslim settlement in Britain. It makes a key distinction between the primary socialisation experiences of immigrants, which unfolded in their countries of origin, and that of their diaspora-born offspring whose identity is forged between an inherited ethno-religious culture and the wider British collective conscience. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Islamic revivalist movement Tablighi Jama’at, the paper explores the cultural embodiments of religion as it evolves over generations through an examination of identity markers such as language, dress and food. The analysis triangulates Berger and Luckmann’s concepts of primary and secondary socialisation with a tripartite model of British Muslim identity developed by Ron Geaves. It further argues, in light of Kwame Gyekye’s theory of nation-building, that recent government efforts to promulgate a set of fundamental British values in schools represent an essentially Durkheimian attempt to supply the ‘social glue’ that binds citizens together. While the article acknowledges the increasing salience of religion for many British-born Muslims, it argues for the ongoing influence of ethnicity and nationality in determining their lived experience.

Luis Cernuda’s “Historial de un libro”: A Travelogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Christina Karageorgou-Bastea
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
New World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Spatial Point ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The essay offers a reading of Luis Cernuda's intellectual biography, "Historial de un libro" (Chronicle of a Book), a travelogue where the author traces the routes through which his poetry was generated. In the chronicle life and poetry unfold in tandem and refract under mutual illumination. Cernuda's response to the voices with which he meets on his way from Spain to the New World forges a poetics of crossings, while it extends bridges between physical, metaphorical, and discursive territories. From a temporal and spatial point of view beyond the end of the journey, life and art form a horizon towards which the traveler is headed and on which, at the end, the poet inscribes his diaspora across countries and continents as translation and interpretation of a poetic continuum made of lived experience, literary depiction, and critical reading.

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