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Little is known about the effectiveness of couple relationship education through mHealth in Muslim populations. We compared an intervention group (n = 127) of newlywed women who received online education with a non-intervention group (n = 135), in Iran. The curriculum was focused on raising awareness about communication and conflict resolution in marital life. Educational messages were sent twice a week over two years. The two groups did not differ in the divorce rate and marital quality ratings. The findings may suggest that marriage education programs need to be tailored to address deep cultural issues such as sacrifice and forgiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on faith healing and spirit-possession often overlookssignificant influence of caste and its diverse expressions.Through ethnographic study, we explore how Muslim faith healers in Kerala's Malabar region integrate caste notions into healing practices, and also normalizing them as an effective strategy for healing. Caste's role in healing rituals and at faith healing sites is located within the context of lived Islam, lacking ritual legitimacy from institutional religion. This prompts us to consider how caste ideology extends beyond human material conditions into the spiritual realm, notably on sites of healing, with long-term implications on the political Islam in the region. It further explores how the caste has been altered temporarily on healing sites in terms of categories of spirits, types of healers, social categories of possessed people and how political Islam have approached caste and faith healing in the context of reformist and revivalist movement in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-9/11 and 7/7 era in Britain, Muslim subjects have been racially labelled as non-white, equated with a security threat. Similarly, within Turkey's secular public sphere, Muslims are portrayed as anti-modern and illiberal. This prompts some British Turkish Muslims, descendants of immigrant Turks, to strategically embrace white, European identities. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, this article reveals how 'whiteness' is a privileged category that certain Turkish Muslims adopt or align with to counter Islamophobia. Following Hall's racism framework and Gramsci's ideas, the paper underscores how British Turks sustain and propagate 'whiteness' to assimilate into society and evade racialisation challenges faced by other Muslims. Importantly, the article interprets the adoption of hegemonic white identities not just as a response to British Islamophobia but also as a manifestation of a secular Turkish Orientalism, depicting Islam as a backward, illiberal, and irrational religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage offers one of the few routes for Senegalese migrants to enter Europe and settle there legally, and it is often assumed that migrants marry just for a residence permit. "Marriage migration" is highly scrutinized by state actors, whose admission practices and their consequences have been the focus of much research. Less, however, is known about the perspectives of migrants who left Europe in response to these practices. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, we show how male Senegalese returnees and deportees challenge the idea that men want to marry a European resident at all costs. These men are spatially excluded from Europe but they discursively regain their dignity by returning to Senegal. Their return also challenges gendered and racialized European narratives about dangerous and hypersexual black Muslim males, and at the same time reinforces their positioning in moral hierarchies about love and marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Islamophobia, while pervasive in the West, has now escalated in societies as distinct as China, India, Myanmar, and Israel in the post-9/11 era. Yet, Islamophobia is not something new, with roots from the centuries after Islam's founding. This study argues that a global-historical framework is necessary to fully understand Islamophobia's origins and impact. It extends previous global critical race and racism frameworks and their focus on whiteness to include an emphasis on the epistemological and structural foundations of global Islamophobia. Within these foundations, two key elements are forwarded as the basis for a guiding ontology of whiteness: (1) the Enlightenment-era epistemological transition from religious ways of knowing to knowledge based on controlled and controlling rationality; and (2) the institutions built by European conquest. Using this conceptual framework, the study traces a genealogy of Islamophobia to identify five key moments in its development and resurgence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]