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The Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party) in Turkey has been blamed for Islamizing Turkish society. Its conservative policies spring from ideas similar to those expressed in Islamic writings. However, the AKP government has maintained that it abides by Turkish laicism. This paper analyses the extent the leaders' rhetoric has changed over the years. This is done to find out whether the party truly intends to Islamize Turkey as part of a strategy to win votes. The paper highlights how the changes are related to the current national mood and issues, and concludes that the AKP cannot be said to have always intended to turn Turkey into a religious country. During the past 13 years the leaders' rhetoric has shifted to reflect the support the Party receives either from conservative Turks or allies abroad. The leaders have yet to be consistent in its rhetoric to subvert the secular establishment for the implementation of Islamic laws. Key Words: Turkey, Islam, Rhetoric, Discourse, Communication, Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, The rhetoric of a party's top leadership does not necessarily have to conform to the strategy that has been discussed and agreed upon by the greater membership of the party. [...]

Turkey is achieved a viable combination of Islam, democracy and development. After prolonged periods of political instability and interruptions in democratic rule, the Islamic-leaning AK Party government overcame the hurdles preventing it from reaching power in the early 2000s. It achieved a significant degree of democratization and economic growth without oil or foreign aid and repeatedly won elections ever since. As such, the party's success offers important lessons for Islamists in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. The lessons of the Turkish experience are especially relevant in dealing with the opposition and democratization, as well as achieving stability and growth., Two years after the fall of dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, both countries are struggling with political instability and socio-economic problems. Egypt's experience with democracy ended with a violent coup [...]

The Middle East since the early twentieth century has been plagued by competing messianic ideologies, be they secular ideas of Arab unity or religious oriented concepts, both revolving around a [...]

THE PERIOD FROM AL-FARABI to Ibn Rush'd is arguably the time of the greatest philosophical debate, ff not achievement, within Islamic thought. Whether Islamic reflection on revealed law can accept [...]

PUTTING THINGS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE THE UNITED STATES AND ITS FOREIGN policy in the Middle East, including its nearly carte blanche backing for the state of Israel, did not create [...]

FROM A PURELY PERSONAL VIEWPOINT, based on religious and logical principles, I did not subscribe to the view that a 'war of cultures' between Islam and the West is inevitable. [...]

Islamism and nationalism are presented as sister ideologies with the argument that modernism's linking of the state and the community is parallel with Islam's association between the caliphate (state) and the 'umma' (community). This argument is discussed in relation to Islamic and nationalist situations in Iran, Egypt and Turkey.

Schaerbeek (a borough of Brussels) is an ideal case-study of how the presence of a Muslim population is managed in Belgium. The relational model that prevailed until 1994, when the [...]

Bruce Lincoln begins his short book--perhaps collection of essays would be a better description--with a discussion of some definitions of religion. (1) Lincoln is professor of religions at the University [...]

Two great challenges for reform of education have to be addressed if Muslim society is to respond meaningfully to the threat of terrorism. Most Muslims are strongly opposed to acts [...]

'Go in search of knowledge even if it is in China' (saying attributed to Mohammed) The East has been upsetting and sometimes even revolutionizing Europeans' modes of thought, feeling and [...]

FOR well over a generation, the public sphere of Islam has been an arena of contest in which activists and militants brought forth challenges to traditional interpretative practices and authority [...]

MY aim in this paper is to privilege the realm of the personal and the emotional subcontinent of Islamic collective identity formation and the ways in which Islamic identity occurs [...]

This article looks at the radicalization of the political discourse and strategies of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) from the early 1980s to the present. It argues that the radicalization of the discourse of PAS has to be understood in the context of the realities of Malaysian politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and how PAS was forced on the defensive thanks to the Malaysian state's own aggressive Islamization policy as well as variable factors from abroad such as the Iranian revolution. This article therefore examines how and why PAS made the transition from being a moderate Islamist-nationalist party in the 1960s and 1970s to the more radical and fundamentalist party that it is today. It concludes that the development of PAS then was very much part of a greater global current that was sweeping the Muslim world as a whole., How Islamist politics in Malaysia leapt to a different register Kemenangan Islam tidak akan datang dengan sendirinya. Allah telah menentukan bahawa kejayaan dalam kehidupan dunia adalah hasil jihad yang berterusan. [...]

Islamic revivalism and the activities of those who are its real or perceived proponents have monopolized the discourse on Islam. This article explores how this focus has totally ignored an overwhelming majority of Muslims. Social scientists have failed to liberate Islamic studies from pro- and anti-Orientalism cliches. Islam is still imagined as inferior (to Jewish and Christian traditions), unchanging, and militant by the West; and superior, dynamic, and peace loving by Muslims. The article out-lines a need to study Islam as an epistemological project. It argues for a new ijtihad for Muslim as well as non-Muslim scholars to initiate a process of new thinking on Islam with tools such as history of thought rather than political events or fixed parameters; to make unthinkable notions--a historical rather than a religious postulate--thinkable; and to relate secularism, religion, and culture to contemporary challenges rather than substituting one for the other. Keywords: Orientalism; rationalism; epistemology; historicity; deconstruction

There is some reason to worry that Samuel Huntington's messianic vision of a 'clash of civilizations,' even though it seemed to many of his commentators to be based on a [...]

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. GROUNDWORK A. The New Sovereignty B. The New Enlightenment II. TRANSITION A. Law's "Past" B. Law's "Other" C. Constructing and Obstructing D. Cases in Point 1. CEDAW [...], Human rights law has a problem with religion. In a postmodern world in which the nation-state has been deconstructed and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of unmediated national sovereignty have been properly put to rest, religion--and its attendant category, culture--represent the New Sovereignty. September 11th crystallized this fact. The infamous Taliban regime in Afghanistan assumed power in 1996 and immediately began stripping women of fundamental human rights. But war, not law, defeated what was perhaps the world's most ruthless fundamentalist regime. This Article argues that religion qua religion is less the problem than is law's construction of this category. Premised on Enlightenment theory, law has a fundamentalist view of religion as law's 'other.' Confident that freedom in the public sphere is freedom itself, law posits and, indeed, preserves religion as an extralegal sphere that is static, irrational, and imposed. Individuals may exit religion but not reform it. Increasingly, fundamentalists are taking advantage of this legal tradition. Because law does not recognize religious communities as contested and subject to change, legal norms such as the 'freedom of religion' and the 'right to culture' defer to the claims of patriarchal elites. The result is that, in case after case in both national and international law, law is siding with fundamentalists over modernizers. But on the ground, human rights activists working in Muslim communities are piercing the veil of religious sovereignty. In the work of these activists, this Article hears the rumblings of the New Enlightenment: Today, individuals demand democracy, reason, and rights within religious and cultural communities, not just without them. Examining the campaigns of reformers in Muslim communities through the overlooked efforts of transnational human rights 'networks' and archives of women's human rights education manuals--illuminated by interviews with leading activists from around the globe--this Article identifies an emergent, conceptually coherent framework for operationalizing modernity and freedom within a context of culture and community. This New Enlightenment upsets the foundation of the legal understanding of the 'right to religion,' which has deferred to leaders' views over those of members. While feminists have challenged the absolute sovereignty of the private sphere, particularly on the issue of violence, women's right to contest and create normative community--that is, to make cultural and religious meanings--has been far less theorized This Article suggests that women's human rights law must go beyond freedom from violence to freedom to make the world.

"Even as Western societies worry about the `rise of Islamic fundamentalism,' the international community's ill-conceived policies for Kosovo's rural Muslim population may prove to be directly responsible for the production of Europe's own Taliban."

"Significant differences exist between the Islamic revivalist movements looking to cultural and spiritual renewal that have swept Southeast Asia in recent years and transnational terrorist networks. Straddling these two extremes are political parties and groups seeking greater autonomy or secession of predominantly Islamic regions."

It is undeniable that during the three decades of Sultan Qabus's role Oman has made tremendous progress. The fortuitous coincidence of rising oil revenues and a successful military campaign in [...]

An overview is presented on the social, cultural, religious, economic and political aspects of the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks of 2001. Discussion focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of establishing a world government versus strengthening the state as a political entity to counteract and/or prevent terrorism.

The history of the Middle East has been one of a struggle for the independence of Arab states from western influence. The struggle from independence from colonial governments, the battle between nationalism and a pan-Arab government and the build up of Islamic fundamentalism are discussed.

An analysis is presented of the strife between the two dominant Islamic clerical factions in Iran, focusing on the struggle's impact on Iranian cultural identity and its worldwide public image. It is posited that the conflict is preventing Iranians from attaining higher political and social goals, and achieving respect and influence in international relations.