Leisurely Islam

Leisurely Islam
Author: Lara Deeb
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-10-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400848563

How the rise of leisure is changing contemporary Lebanon South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more politically involved, to the religious leaders worried that Lebanese youth are losing their moral compasses, Leisurely Islam provides a sophisticated and original look at leisure in the Lebanese capital. What makes a café morally appropriate? How do people negotiate morality in relation to different places? And under what circumstances might a pious Muslim go to a café that serves alcohol? Lara Deeb and Mona Harb highlight tensions and complexities exacerbated by the presence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun. The authors elucidate the political, economic, religious, and social changes that have taken place since 2000, and examine leisure's influence on Lebanese sociopolitical and urban situations. Asserting that morality and geography cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, Leisurely Islam offers a colorful new understanding of the most powerful community in Lebanon today.

Leisurely Islam

Leisurely Islam
Author: Lara Deeb
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-10-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691153663

How the rise of leisure is changing contemporary Lebanon South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more politically involved, to the religious leaders worried that Lebanese youth are losing their moral compasses, Leisurely Islam provides a sophisticated and original look at leisure in the Lebanese capital. What makes a café morally appropriate? How do people negotiate morality in relation to different places? And under what circumstances might a pious Muslim go to a café that serves alcohol? Lara Deeb and Mona Harb highlight tensions and complexities exacerbated by the presence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun. The authors elucidate the political, economic, religious, and social changes that have taken place since 2000, and examine leisure's influence on Lebanese sociopolitical and urban situations. Asserting that morality and geography cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, Leisurely Islam offers a colorful new understanding of the most powerful community in Lebanon today.

Religious Tourism in Asia

Religious Tourism in Asia
Author: Shin Yasuda
Publisher: CABI
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2018-11-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1786392348

This book brings together a range of case studies in the areas of religion, religious tourism and pilgrimage in Asia. It assesses the increasing linkages and interconnections between religious tourism and secular spaces on a global stage, and explores key learning points from a range of contemporary case studies of religious and pilgrimage activity related to ancient, sacred and emerging tourist destinations, new forms of pilgrimage, faith systems and quasi-religious activities. The development and marketing of religious tourism are also addressed in a few chapters. The book has 17 chapters, a list of discussion questions, and a subject index.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities

The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities
Author: Katie Day
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000289265

Like an ecosystem, cities develop, change, thrive, adapt, expand, and contract through the interaction of myriad components. Religion is one of those living parts, shaping and being shaped by urban contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is an outstanding interdisciplinary reference source to the key topics, problems, and methodologies of this cutting-edge subject. Representing a diverse array of cities and religions, the common analytical approach is ecological and spatial. It is the first collection of its kind and reflects state-of-the-art research focusing on the interaction of religions and their urban contexts. Comprising 29 chapters, by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts: Research methodologies Religious frameworks and ideologies in urban contexts Contemporary issues in religion and cities Within these sections, emerging research and analysis of current dynamics of urban religions are examined, including: housing, economics, and gentrification; sacred ritual and public space; immigration and the refugee crisis; political conflicts and social change; ethnic and religious diversity; urban policy and religion; racial justice; architecture and the built environment; religious art and symbology; religion and urban violence; technology and smart cities; the challenge of climate change for global cities; and religious meaning-making of the city. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and urban studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, history, architecture, urban planning, theology, social work, and cultural studies.

Everyday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe

Everyday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe
Author: Erkan Toğuşlu
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 946270032X

Muslims in Europe and the preservation of their religious-ethnic particularitiesEveryday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe explores how Muslims give meaning to Islam on a day-to-day basis. The contributions look at concrete practices, identities, memories, and normalities in daily Muslim life and provide insights to the complexities of identities. They examine Muslims’ use of and construction of spaces, daily practices, forms of interaction, and modes of thinking in different areas, resulting in a thorough analysis and framework of Muslims’ day-to-day life through topical chapters on food, space, entertainment, marriage, and mosque, covering both extent of hybridity and preservation of religious-ethnic particularities. Contributors Rachel Brown (Wilfrid Laurier University), Mohammed El-Bachouti (UPF), Valentina Fedele (Università della Calabria), Diletta Guidi (École Pratique des Hautes Études), Ossame Hegazy (Bauhaus, University, Weimar), Ajmal Hussain (Aston University), Jana Jevtic (Central European University), Elsa Mescoli (University of Liège), Wim Peumans (KU Leuven), Sumeyye Ulu Sametoğlu (EHESS), Leen Sterck (The Netherlands Institute for Social Research),Thijl Sunier (VU University Amsterdam), Erkan Toğuşlu (KU Leuven)

Wives and Work

Wives and Work
Author: Marion Holmes Katz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0231556705

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging implications. As early as the ninth century, the prevalent doctrine that wives had no legal duty to do housework stood in conflict with what most scholars understood to be morally and religiously right. Scholars’ efforts to resolve this tension ranged widely, from drawing a clear distinction between legal claims and ethical ideals to seeking a synthesis of the two. Katz positions legal discussion within a larger landscape of Islamic normative discourse, emphasizing how legal models diverge from, but can sometimes be informed by, philosophical ethics. Through the lens of wives’ domestic labor, this book sheds new light on notions of family, labor, and gendered personhood as well as the interplay between legal and ethical doctrines in Islamic thought.

Far from the Caliph's Gaze

Far from the Caliph's Gaze
Author: Nicholas H. A. Evans
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501715712

How do you prove that you're Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? In Far from the Caliph's Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, Far from the Caliph's Gaze presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.

God Is Not Great

God Is Not Great
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008-11-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1551991764

Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Beirut, Imagining the City

Beirut, Imagining the City
Author: Ghenwa Hayek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-10-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857736701

Beirut is the cultural, commercial and economic hub of Lebanon. But to what extent has the city affected and shaped the formation and perceptions of Lebanese national identity? Ghenwa Hayek here explores how anxieties over the past, present and future of Beirut have been articulated through a sense of dislocation present in Lebanese writing since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of cultural studies, geography and history, the author uses an interdisciplinary framework to explore the role that spaces - from rural to urban - have played and continue to play in the defining, and re-defining, of national identity in the seventy years since the creation of the Lebanese nation state. This theoretical perspective coupled with a close reading of little-explored contemporary writings lead Hayek to question the predominant assumption that Lebanese novelists only became engaged in discourses about place identity and individual and social belonging with the start of the fifteen-year civil war and the destruction of Beirut's city centre. Instead, the book shows that particular geographical imaginaries have been mobilized to describe, question and debate Lebanese identity since the 1960s and that some go back even further into the late nineteenth century. This re-reading calls for a re-evaluation of some of the most predominant assumptions about Lebanon and the processes of Lebanese identity formation across the country's modern history. Examining a wide range of modern and contemporary literature, Hayek charts the rise to cultural prominence of the city of Beirut as a significant player in shaping perceptions of Lebanese culture and identity.

War Remains

War Remains
Author: Yasmine Khayyat
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0815655789

War Remains traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war’s aftermath. She focuses on "Southern Counterpublics," a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins’ capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.