Convivencia Contested Al-Andalus between Historical Memory and Modern Politics Samuel C. Barry | November 10, 2016 Critical Approaches, Images & Intersections AboutCritical Approaches AboutImages & Intersections Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal... Read the rest of this entry
“Do Not Take Unbelievers as Your Leaders” The Politics of Translation in Indonesia Jeremy Menchik | March 31, 2016 Critical Approaches / Texts & Translations AboutCritical Approaches After achieving independence in 1945, Indonesian leaders began tackling the basic questions that faced all postcolonial state-builders: What principles would guide the state and nation? Communism or capitalism? Secularism or Islam? How could they craft a common national identity from a diverse population? It is against this backdrop that in the April 1954 issue of the popular Indonesian Muslim periodical Al-Muslimun, the editors published an unusual translation of a well-known verse from Sūrat al-Nisāʾ of the Qur’an from Arabic into Indonesian... Read the rest of this entry
VIDEO: The Islamic State: Motivations, Emigration, and Ideology Michael Pregill | January 21, 2016 Critical Approaches / Current Events AboutCritical Approaches Mia Bloom encourages us to take a more nuanced approach to understanding the demographics and ideology of foreign fighters emigrating to join ISIS. Franck Salameh challenges the claim that ISIS is anomalous in the political and social history of the modern Middle East, which has been dominated by secular nation-states and only in recent decades witnessed perennial appeals to so-called 'fundamentalist' groups that espouse radical ideologies grounded in religious claims. Read the rest of this entry