This book sheds light on how the Shiite-dominated government's sectarian policy deepened the divide between Iraq's major communities (Shiites, Sunni Arabs and the Kurds) and led the country on the path of unending sectarian violence. It explains how government's failure to addre…
This dissertation traces the multi-generational, interregional and transnational experiences of Sunni Punjabi migrants who moved from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and then to Canada after the 1970s. In particular, …
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the lives of Muslims living in an Islamic village through their own perspectives, experiences, and lives in accordance with Islamic beliefs and customs. This study was important because the Muslim population is growing rapidly…
This dissertation challenges the prevailing rentier state interpretation of political life in the countries of the Arab Gulf, a theoretical framework little changed for more than a quarter century. It does so by evaluating for the first time the fundamental claim of rentier theo…
This dissertation seeks a better understanding Sunni Islamic Intellectual History through an investigation of what I call the archetype of the pre-modern Muslim scholar. The archetypal scholar was a jurist/theologian/mystic--with affiliations to established schools of law, theol…
In the Levant, (Greater Syria, Arabic al-Sham ), the fifth/eleventh to seventh/thirteenth centuries was a time of great religious enthusiasm. The depredations of Crusader forces, a movement for the revival of Sunnism (ih[dotbelow]ya' al-sunna ), and the political claims of new, …
This dissertation analyzes the stance the `ulama of the four Sunni madhahib took during the political confrontation between the Ayyubids and the Mamluks in the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period, 637-676 A.H./A.D. 1240-1277. Struggles for power among members of the Ayyubid fam…
This is an analytical study of the most known technical manual treating h[dotbelow]adith criticism: Nukhbat al-Fikr fi Mus[dotbelow]t[dotbelow]alah[dotbelow] Ahl al-Athar by Ah[dotbelow]mad ibn c Ali ibn H[dotbelow]ajar al-c Asqalani (773-852/1372-1449). In defending the positio…
Mahdism, the nearest Islamic analog to messianism, is generally seen by scholars as operative within Shî`ism but not within Sunnism. To the extent that the existence of Mahdism within Sunnî Islam is acknowledged, it is usually portrayed as being primarily the province of the pas…
During the period of Mongol occupation, Baghdad, a long established center of learning in the Islamic world, emerged as a site of intense intellectual debate and dialogue between Shi`i and Sunni scholars. Shi`i and Sunni scholars participated extensively in the transmission of k…
There is a dearth of literature on Black Sunni Muslims in the field of psychology. More so, there is no literature specifically analyzing the influences upon Black religiosity. The literature has established that personality has significant influence upon religiosity. The litera…
The 1991 uprisings in Iraq's southern governorates following Operation: Desert Storm - and the decade of trauma that followed them - were the "Big Bang" that begat the modern era of Iraqi sectarianism and the Sunni-Shi'a divide. The memory of the 1991 intifada created new Iraqi …
The removal of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq gave rise to a plethora of non-state actors, sub-state political factions, warring ethnic groups, and terrorist organizations all seeking to fill the political power vacuum. Using theories from academic literature on coali…
Islam is often viewed as the religion par excellence of divine transcendence. God is khilaf al-`alam , "the absolute divergence from the world" and this characteristically Islamic doctrine of mukhalafa "(divine) otherness" precludes divine corporeality. In as much as this latter…
The present study scrutinizes the opposition to the use and authority of the H[dotbelow]adith that is recorded in various classical Sunni Muslim sources spanning several centuries and compares that early opposition to its recent and contemporary counterparts. Scrutiny of relevan…
This dissertation is a study of the theory and practice of punishment in medieval Islam in the context of Saljuq society in Iraq and Persia during the 5th /11th and 6th /12 th centuries. Punishment, which for the purpose of this study is defined as the use of legitimate force in…
The purpose of this thesis is to explain how and why many modern Twelver Shi'a, Sunni, and Western scholars have structured political and religious conflict during the formative era of Islam (610-945 C.E.) around a partisan Sunni-Shi'a divide that did not truly exist, at least a…
The two h[dotbelow]adith collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, the S[dotbelow]ah[dotbelow]ih[dotbelow]ayn, are the most revered books in Islamic civilization after the Qur'An. This dissertation addresses how, when and why these two books achieved this status and identifies their…
This dissertation examines the relationship between the medieval Sunni Islamic theory of the caliphate and the debate over the revival of the caliph in Egypt between the abolition of the Ottoman caliph by Ataturk in 1924 and the failure of the General Conference for the Caliphat…