Matching Items (8)
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The concept of Velayat-e Faqih as a type of Shi’ite Islamic government gained popularity three decades ago, after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The new constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was based on Velayat-e Fagih, proposed by the Imam Khomeini many consider him as the leader of the

The concept of Velayat-e Faqih as a type of Shi’ite Islamic government gained popularity three decades ago, after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The new constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was based on Velayat-e Fagih, proposed by the Imam Khomeini many consider him as the leader of the Islamic Revolution and the founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic. What is Velayat-e Faqih? Who can be the Vali Faqih? Why wasn't this idea proposed before Islamic Revolution in 1979? Did all the Shi’ite religious scholars endorse this idea or the Vali Faqih himself? All of these questions ultimately lead us to ask whether this concept has been drawn from Shi’ite Islamic discourses or it may perhaps be considered a novelty: a secularization of religion. These questions are increasingly discussed in academia and in the large public arena. Moreover, this discourse has divided Shi’ite Muslims into three groups: supporters of the Velayat-e Faqih, its opponents, and the silent group. It is important to analyze the position of all those groups including the silent group who did not publicly endorse or reject the theory. The theory of Velayat-e Faqih has emerged from the Imamate doctrine, which constitutes a cornerstone of Shi'ite sect of Islam. It is necessary to understand this political doctrine in relation to the context within which this concept of leadership had emerged. In order to overcome the ambiguities surrounding the relationship between Velayat-e Faqih and the position of Islamic jurist as a source of guidance and imitation (Marje Taqleed), it is necessary to discuss the various dimension of guardianship in the absence of the infallible Imam. Furthermore, the focus of this research is to review whether the concept of Velayat-e Faqih was innovated after the Islamic Revolution of Iran or existed within the Shi’ite tradition.
ContributorsRezai, Ali Siyar (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Historically, colonizers, immigrants, and enslaved Africans served as carriers of Islamic culture to Puerto Rico, and today, that Islamic element is often unassumingly intertwined with the Puerto Rican culture. Using Bourdieu's concept of habitus as the framework, this dissertation engages customs and mannerisms of Puerto Ricans to reveal the imprint

Historically, colonizers, immigrants, and enslaved Africans served as carriers of Islamic culture to Puerto Rico, and today, that Islamic element is often unassumingly intertwined with the Puerto Rican culture. Using Bourdieu's concept of habitus as the framework, this dissertation engages customs and mannerisms of Puerto Ricans to reveal the imprint and legacy of Muslim Spain and the Islamic heritage of West Africa in Puerto Rico. It makes a study of the Spanish language to include vocabulary, proverbs, songs, and games that carry vestiges of Arabic language and culture. Most importantly, it also addresses an inherited religious and cultural tradition rooted in the history and legacy of Islam and Christianity and the human experience of cultural and religious phenomena of conflicts within Medieval Spain. Of particular focus, Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza, Puerto Rico (a Moor and Christian celebration in honor of St. James, the Moor Slayer) offer a uniquely different expression. The celebration not only displays remnants of cultural and religious practices influenced by several world traditions such as folk Catholicism, Santería, Espiritismo, and Islam, but embraces the Vejigantes character which symbolizes the Muslim. The implications of these celebrations attest to a historically covert Muslim presence or at least a less biased conceptualization by the Puerto Rican people regarding Muslims. Unlike Medieval Spain, where Muslims were deemed invaders from 711-1600's, the religious, cultural, and political history of Puerto Rico does not suggest a deeper legacy of conflict that includes Islam as an adverse religious and cultural tradition.
ContributorsSaez, Lourdes (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis advisor) / Moore, Moses (Committee member) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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The thesis I have written aims to investigate the underlying reasons why France has considered Islam as unassimilable and why it has targeted Muslim women’s bodies to force assimilation. In the first section of the thesis, I examine the colonial relationship between France and Algeria. I conclude that Algeria’s independence

The thesis I have written aims to investigate the underlying reasons why France has considered Islam as unassimilable and why it has targeted Muslim women’s bodies to force assimilation. In the first section of the thesis, I examine the colonial relationship between France and Algeria. I conclude that Algeria’s independence from France significantly influenced the negative treatment towards immigrants in postcolonial France. I then study the racist discourse that dominated French politics in the 1980s; and clarify how this has laid the foundation for the first attempt to ban the headscarves in public schools during the 1980s. The final section explores the 2004 ban on conspicuous religious symbols, a ban that significantly targeted the headscarf. I conclude that the prohibition of the headscarf undermined the rights of Muslim women and symbolized France’s inability to accept Islam, since France feared Islam’s visibility weakened a dominant French identity.
ContributorsAhmed, Noura (Author) / Keahey, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Toth, Stephen (Committee member) / Behl, Natasha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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This dissertation research employs biological distance and mortuary analyses in tandem with historical sources to investigate the degree to which conversion, as opposed to migration, contributed to the spread of Islam in southern Iberia. The dynamics of the 8th century conquest of Iberia by Muslim Arab and Berber forces from

This dissertation research employs biological distance and mortuary analyses in tandem with historical sources to investigate the degree to which conversion, as opposed to migration, contributed to the spread of Islam in southern Iberia. The dynamics of the 8th century conquest of Iberia by Muslim Arab and Berber forces from North Africa, and the subsequent 800-year period of religious, political, and social change, remain contested and poorly understood. Migration of Islamic peoples to the peninsula once was invoked as the primary vehicle of Islamic influence, but religious conversion, whether true or nominal, increasingly is regarded as a key component of those changes. This dissertation proposes that conversion, whether a prelude to or a component of Islamization, altered social group affiliations and interactions among those living in southern Iberia. Such changes in social relations and the resultant patterns of mate exchange will be recognizable by means of altered biological patterns of phenotypic variation. Through the examination of ~900 individuals from both Iberian and North African skeletal collections, this study concludes that conquest resulted in a great increase in phenotypic variability in the peninsula from the 8th-11th centuries. The data further indicate that males contributed this phenotypic variability to the samples in the Early Conquest period. Females, most frequently from Hispano-Roman Christian groups, appear to have ‘intermarried’ with these early conquerors and with the Muwallads, male Islamic converts, and are included in the early Muslim burial programs. From the 11th to the 14th centuries, the data presented here demonstrate a stasis and even a slight decrease in phenotypic variability in southern Iberia, which may be explained by endogamy among religious groups in this region.
ContributorsBolhofner, Katelyn L (Author) / Buikstra, Jane E. (Thesis advisor) / Stojanowski, Christopher (Committee member) / Curta, Florin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Undertaking an intellectual history and employing a diachronic approach, this study seeks to unravel both the continuity and change in the ulama’s discourse on the usurpation of power from the 2nd - 9th Islamic Era or between the 8th-15th Common Era, the early twentieth century, and the period of the

Undertaking an intellectual history and employing a diachronic approach, this study seeks to unravel both the continuity and change in the ulama’s discourse on the usurpation of power from the 2nd - 9th Islamic Era or between the 8th-15th Common Era, the early twentieth century, and the period of the Arab Spring. I define usurpation in this study as an unlawful encroachment against a ruler which consists of one of the three following actions: military coup (al-taghallub), domination (al-ḥijr), and seizure of local territory (al-ʿistīlāʾ ʿalā al-ʾimāra). In doing so, I pay particular attention to discursive strategy and shift: the ways in which the ulama construct their discourses within the paradigms of the existing Islamic legal and theological schools and the way the Western political philosophies, particularly constitutionalism and legitimacy, may have shaped their ideas. I also discuss the extent to which they called for reformulation of Islamic political tradition. I argue that the ulama responded to recurrent phenomena of usurpation in history by mobilizing historical arguments from Islamic intellectual legacy (turāth). Despite their divergent substantive opinions and approaches to the issue of usurpation, they share a commitment to Islamic tradition. This reliance on tradition contrasts with the tendency of the Western Post-Enlightenment thinkers who perceive the past as darkness and immaturity. My dissertation also demonstrates how modernity informs contemporary ulama to generate various approaches to the agreed-upon pre-modern legal norms of usurpation of power.
ContributorsMuzakkir, Muhamad Rofiq (Author) / Haines, Chad (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shala (Committee member) / Mahgoub, Miral (Committee member) / El Hamel, Chouki (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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This dissertation examines the concept of gendered space as it applies to prayer spaces in Islam, particularly mosques and mushollas exclusively for women. Gendered space is often articulated as space created by those with power—men— in order to control women’s access to knowledge and to put them at a disadvantage,

This dissertation examines the concept of gendered space as it applies to prayer spaces in Islam, particularly mosques and mushollas exclusively for women. Gendered space is often articulated as space created by those with power—men— in order to control women’s access to knowledge and to put them at a disadvantage, thereby maintaining patriarchal structures. Yet, when groups are relegated to or voluntarily choose the margins, those within may transform the margins into sites of empowerment. I consider the dynamics of religious space, including its construction, maintenance, and activities performed by its inhabitants, by focusing on the Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles, which opened in 2015, and Musholla ‘Aisyiyah Ranting Karangkajen and Musholla ‘Aisyiyah Kauman, which have been in operation since the 1920s in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This work is based on ethnographies of the attendees of these three sites in order to explore the experiences of the women and the impact both traditional religious spaces and religious spaces exclusive to women have on their spirituality, ideas of authority, and sense of community. The Women’s Mosque of America and ‘Aisyiyah women’s mushollas create opportunities for women to participate in and contribute to Muslim communities by basing their efforts on the Sunnah and examples of female piety and leadership in early Islam. The present research challenges the argument that gendered spaces are inherently detrimental and must be remedied by a de-gendering process. Rather, the accounts of the attendees of the Women’s Mosque of America and ‘Aisyiyah women’s mushollas speak to the possibilities of creating an exclusive space that privileges those within it, fulfilling the women’s desire of religious knowledge, leadership, community, and piety in ways that traditional religious spaces have at times fallen short.
ContributorsElias Jenner, Bethany Mintha (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis advisor) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / Brenner, Suzanne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Following the 1991 Gulf War, the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia constrained the religious establishment by remapping the hierarchy of authority in the kingdom legally, conceptually, and historically. Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 constituted an unprecedented crisis in Saudi politics which contributed to the religious establishment questioning

Following the 1991 Gulf War, the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia constrained the religious establishment by remapping the hierarchy of authority in the kingdom legally, conceptually, and historically. Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 constituted an unprecedented crisis in Saudi politics which contributed to the religious establishment questioning the political legitimacy of the ruling royal family, Al Saud. The elite religious establishment, or ulamā, publicly challenged the legitimacy of Al Saud’s unchecked authority when they composed the 1991 Letter of Demands. After the war, I suggest that ruling elites set out to change the basis of their political legitimacy by redefining the religiopolitical orthodoxy which governs their relationship with the religious establishment. I propose that the 1992 Basic Law of Governance—the first positive legal charter for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—expands the authority of the King while offering the appearance of constraining the exercise of political authority. In this thesis, I analyze the ways in which the text of the Letter of Demands and the Basic Law of Governance offer disparate visions of orthodox Islamic governance according to the Saudi tradition. I hypothesize that the text of the Letter of Demands, as well as the circumstances surrounding its production, involved a reassertion of authority by the elite religious establishment in religious spaces. I suggest that, in response, the Basic Law of Governance expanded the authority of the King and delivered an alternative vision of Saudi orthoprax governance. I contemplate some of the ways that expanding their authority was part of a larger project undertaken by the royal family after the 1991 Gulf War to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy. Finally, I offer a meditation on the idea that the project undertaken by Al Saud to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy necessitated reformulating the historical narrative of the kingdom’s origin and policy in the twentieth century. In this thesis, I set out to contemplate the epistemic relationship between sociopolitical inflection and diachronic changes to Islamic concepts. In other words, how do Islamic concepts, and the practices they underlie, change over time and in response to moments of social and political crisis? This is where I imagine my work broadly contributing to Religious Studies as a field. I am interested in historical instances where political authorities instrumentalize cultural forms, including historical narratives and religious discourses, to legitimize their own interests, consolidate power, and maintain hegemony. The instrumentalization of religiocultural discourses in order to articulate new modes of state and subject formation is a vital topic of inquiry. I aspire that my work can contribute to this tertiary dialogue by showcasing one historical instance where religious concepts and historical narratives were instrumentalized to legitimize elite interests, consolidate monopolistic political power, and maintain social, political, and cultural forms of hegemony. My aim is to use these narratives about epistemic violence to trouble the power dynamics that get reproduced in Euro-North American knowledge produced about the Global South.
ContributorsBean, Skyler Allen (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Liew, Han Hsien (Committee member) / Alhassan, Shamara Wyllie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it

This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it unfolds from the stories of disoriented Muslim worshippers at prayer together. It looks first at the religious life stories of a network of queer Pakistanis contending with the heteropatriarchal and cisgender norms of mainstream Muslim life, in struggle to continue their orientation towards Allāh alongside their own existential reality. It then narrates the last rites of two Pakistani women by describing the circumstances in which their namāz-e-janāza, i.e. their funeral prayers were performed. These funerals are moments and spaces that alter the received understanding of jamāt so that disoriented worshippers who have been made unwelcome in the larger collectivity can reorient towards compassionate convening with each other and with Allāh.  The portraits of Muslims convened for prayer that are drawn together here bring into conversation multiple ways of being Muslim and describe an emergent queer Muslim praxis that expands the parameters of what is thinkable in Islam. This narrative ethnography sheds light on how it is that mainstream Pakistani religious life disorients women as well as transgender and queer folks by narrowing the space available to these bodies within the jamāt. Deploying multiple methodological approaches in a number of research sites, this dissertation draws on events and lived experiences of ritual and religious convenings to propose and advance an understanding of the jamāt as both a congregation of worship and a congregation of care. This dissertation is an exploration of the conditions of possibility for livable life for those who are disoriented in the space of Muslim communal gathering—a life that is queer, Muslim, safe from harm, and joyful—arguing that for queer and disoriented Muslims, solidarity and a livable life go hand in hand.
ContributorsPasha, Kyla Pria (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Haines, Chad (Committee member) / Quan, H. L. T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022