Islam and popular culture

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the "Arab Spring," while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a "westernizing" or "secularizing" force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim. With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world. -- Provided by publisher.

Introduction: Islam and popular culture / Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mark LeVine, and Martin Stokes -- Part I. Popular culture : aesthetics, sound, and theatrical performance in the Muslim world. Listening acts, secular and sacred : sound knowledge among Sufi Muslims in secular France / Deborah Kapchan ; Islamic popular music aesthetics in Turkey / Martin Stokes ; Theater of immediacy : performance activism and art in the Arab uprisings / Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds -- Part. II. Artistic protest and the Arab uprisings. "Islam is there to make people free" : Islamist musical narratives of freedom and democracy in the Moroccan Spring / Nina ter Laan ; Visual culture and the Amazigh renaissance in North Africa and its diaspora / Cynthia Becker ; Can poetry change the world? Reading Amal Dunqul in Egypt in 2011 / Samuli Schielke -- Part III. Islam : religious discourses and pious ethics. The Sunni discourse on music / Jonas Otterbeck ; Shi'a discourses on performing arts : maslaha and cultural politics in Lebanon / Joseph Alagha ; Islam at the art school : religious young artists in Egypt / Jessica Winegar ; Writing history through the prism of art : the career of a pious cultural produc…