This dissertation explores questions of religion, law and gender in contemporary Delhi. The dissertation is based on eighteen months of fieldwork I conducted in four types of Muslim family law institutions: sharia courts (dar ul qaza institutions), women's arbitration centers ( …
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This thesis examines the striking disconnect between the extensive power wielded by women in medieval Cairo and the 'official' constructions of gender relationships articulated by the 'ulama'. The formal discourses produced by legal-religious scholars encouraged men to monitor, …
This work re-considers current descriptions of pre-colonial Swahili stone architecture by applying formal analysis to structures from the 'golden age' of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Swahili heartland regions of mainland Tanzania and Kenya. The results of this …
This Doctor of Ministry final project is a longitudinal impact study of the advanced Building Abrahamic Partnerships ( BAP II ) interfaith training course for Jews, Christians, and Muslims offered at Hartford Seminary in 2007, 2008, and 2009. As director of the Building Abrahami…
The lack of knowledge about the true values and tenets of Islam, coupled with the increased acts of terrorism committed by radical fundamentalists both in Europe and in the United States over the last decade, have led to a disconnect between the Western and Islamic cultures. The…
High fertility rates may not pose short-term threats to Pakistan's stability however, Pakistan's long-term survival largely depends on reducing the rate at which the population is expanding because this growth is outstripping economic development. This paper seeks to highlight a…
The common image that is associated with the religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages is paradoxical. On the one hand there is an aura of fervent religious piety, which also fueled religious animosity, most notably in the bloodshed and brutality of the Crusades. This overwhelming…
This dissertation treats the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730) in the context of the European early enlightenment. Intellectual historians have generally placed the Ottoman Empire outside the Enlightenment movement, while Ottoman historians have viewed the early …
This thesis examines the rise of Islamism in Turkey over the last three decades. It explores the increasing role of Islamism in Turkey in society and politics in detail in the context of the religion and development. Moreover, it investigates if and to what extent the Kemalist s…
My dissertation provides an introduction to the poetry and mystical thought of Mirza Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1644-1720), perhaps the foremost representative of the so-called "Indian style" of Persian poetry, through the study of his first long narrative poem, Muh[dotbelow]it[dotbelo…
This dissertation examines thematic compilations of H[dotbelow]adith dedicated to 'proofs of prophecy' and their social-historical context in the Arab and Persianate world of the 3 rd /9th and 4th /10th centuries. While previously dismissed as the products of popular prophetic v…
Nations tell stories about themselves that tend to cohere around a shared language and a history unique to a particular land. South and West Asia--regions that shared Persian as a language of social, cultural and political power and prestige for centuries, until the early 19th c…
This study explores Islamic and Islamist revivalism in Ba ́thist Syria. It addresses how the secular regime of both Hafez al-Asad and Bashar al-Asad paradoxically paved the way towards Syria's current Islamization. The study examines the following questions: Who are today's Syria…
In this project I examine how socially conservative, politically active Muslims (who I refer to as islamiyun ) in Morocco articulate and enact democracy. Based on nearly two years of fieldwork and conversations with over 100 interlocutors, I argue that there are two modes of inv…
This study looked at the experience of religion and the formation of a contemporary ethnoreligious identity in the lives of first generation Pakistani Muslim immigrant men and women who have been residents of Canada for five to ten years. The present research explored the life e…
The Islamic Moral Economy is a utopian economic, social and political idea where all forms of riba are absent; in a contemporary context, this includes the elimination of all financial interest and usury, utilization of full-reserve banking models, an asset-based money using a c…
This is a work of normative political philosophy that offers a broad philosophical framework for conceptualizing progressive and modern governance in a contemporary Islamic state. The model offered places primacy on traditional Islamic sources in organizing the state. However, i…
In this qualitative study I have explored the contemporary rise in Islamic fundamentalism. The case of two countries are examined, Sudan and Pakistan. Islamic fundamentalism is looked at and its definition discussed, and the causes of its rise are examined. This is followed by t…