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1 – 10 of over 2000
Book part
Publication date: 9 September 2020

Fahad Ahmad

Purpose – This chapter highlights how counter-radicalization, as a manifestation of diffuse securitizing, impacts the work of Muslim civil society organizations (CSOs) in Canada…

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter highlights how counter-radicalization, as a manifestation of diffuse securitizing, impacts the work of Muslim civil society organizations (CSOs) in Canada.

Methodology – The author presents how Muslim communities and their civil society representatives experience and adapt to the pressures from counter-radicalization policies. Data for the analysis are drawn from 16 semi-structured, anonymized interviews with managers and board members of prominent Muslim CSOs that are based in urban centers in Canada with high density of Muslim populations.

Findings – Though counter-radicalization policies are advanced under the rubric of community-orientedness and risk governance, security discourse and practice constructs radicalization as a problem within Muslim communities treating them as suspects who are “potentially radical.” Despite this framing, Muslim CSOs are cooperating with state security agencies in counter-radicalization efforts but are doing so cognizant of the immense power the state exerts over them in such “partnerships.” CSOs are raising questions about the selective nature of security practice which views Muslims as dangerous and violent but fails to fully acknowledge their reality as victims of Islamophobic violence. CSOs are using anti-racism, anti-oppression, and rights-based frames to call out the discriminatory treatment of Muslims under national security.

Originality/Value – The author’s study contributes to a community perspective in counterterrorism and counter-radicalization research that is dominated by analyses from “above.” By sharing the experiences of Canadian Muslim CSOs under counter-radicalization, the author illustrates the practice of “diffuse securitizing” and how it limits the work of civil society in liberal democracies.

Details

Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-988-8

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 28 May 2019

Amaarah DeCuir

In this empirical study, I describe how Muslim women leading American Islamic schools demonstrate emotionality by managing their own emotions and the emotions of others as core…

Abstract

In this empirical study, I describe how Muslim women leading American Islamic schools demonstrate emotionality by managing their own emotions and the emotions of others as core components of leadership practices. Using the lens of critical feminist studies, this research makes private emotional expressions a site for critical analysis of social, cultural and political influences that reflect patriarchal power imbalances and rising anti-Muslim sentiment. Through a national analysis of 13 interviews of Muslim women school leaders, centering their everyday leadership experiences as qualitative data, I found that these women skillfully managed emotions as both a demonstration of their faith and a professional effort to advance their school communities. The following themes emerged from the data as evidence of emotionality within American Islamic schools: (a) emotions as nurturing; (b) emotions as burdens; (c) emotional fluency and (d) emotions as resistance. This study expands the scholarship of critical feminist studies that examine the intersections of emotionality and leadership, by adding the voices of Muslim women school leaders who expertly manage emotions across cultural boundaries, through a difficult political environment, and as an embodiment of prophetic principles.

Details

Emotion Management and Feelings in Teaching and Educational Leadership
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-011-6

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 8 August 2023

Umer Hussain and George B. Cunningham

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals face an elevated level of prejudice in various social settings like sports. These biases can relate to…

Abstract

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals face an elevated level of prejudice in various social settings like sports. These biases can relate to internalized stigma, which might prompt LGBTQ+ athletes to implement numerous identity coping strategies. Muslim LGBTQ+ athletes are likely to experience these dynamics more than others. However, there remains a dearth of scholarship on understanding how Muslim LGBTQ+ athletes employ different identity development coping strategies to tackle the prevalent stigma against them and use their visible identity development process as a means of social activism. Hence, in this book chapter, the authors explore the development of Muslim LGBTQ+ sportspersons' visible identity by defining the forces that shape their identity. The first author of the book chapter sheds light on his experiences while working with the LGBTQ+ community in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and his recent interactions with the Muslim LGBTQ+ community in North America. The authors then highlight how Muslim LGBTQ+ athletes might use different identity coping strategies to show personal agency against the heteronormative system. Furthermore, the authors elucidate how sexual orientation intersects with religion within the sociocultural domain in shaping the identity and present global Muslim LGBTQ+ identity typology. Finally, the authors argue that Muslim LGBTQ+ athletes' visible identity depends upon two factors: religious negative/positive self-beliefs about religion Islam's openness toward LGBTQ+ rights and social acceptance, bounded by time and space.

Book part
Publication date: 29 May 2018

Katherine Pratt Ewing

Purpose – This chapter examines the problem of belonging for Muslims in the United States in a political environment where Muslims are increasingly represented as a threatening…

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter examines the problem of belonging for Muslims in the United States in a political environment where Muslims are increasingly represented as a threatening ‘other’ by conservative politicians and right-wing media. The goal is to demonstrate how an emotionally charged event, the murder of three middle class Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2015, was taken up by the media in ways that reflected sharply contested political agendas and constituted divergent stories and biographies of belonging and stigmatization for the victims, their families and the broader Muslim community.

Approach – The research draws on a wide range of media representations of the murder, including local, national and international news sources and social networking sites. The analysis is based on close readings of this range of stories.

Social Implications – The analysis demonstrates that this murder drew widespread attention in the Muslim community because these particular victims readily became representative of a Muslim ‘model minority’. Despite the ambivalence associated with belonging on such terms, the families and Muslim community used the stories of these murder victims to speak out against negative stereotypes and to remind the American public of the dangers of inflammatory rhetoric.

Originality – The chapter takes an original approach to the problem of belonging by tracing in detail how a single event can generate divergent stories that mark their narrators as belonging in ways that are contested by others, vividly demonstrating the process of différance articulated by Derrida.

Details

Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-206-2

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Book part
Publication date: 28 October 2005

Christine Asmar

The impact of internationalisation and globalisation on western universities, together with the growing diversity of local communities, is sharpening a focus on religious…

Abstract

The impact of internationalisation and globalisation on western universities, together with the growing diversity of local communities, is sharpening a focus on religious difference, and on the responses such difference provokes. This chapter reports on a two-phase U.S. study of Muslim students, a growing but under-researched minority group in the west, in an attempt to explore the effect on such students of external events such as 9/11. The data reveal unforeseen developments such as heightened Muslim engagement and collaboration with fellow-students, suggesting that universities could (re-)consider how they might engage in similarly positive ways with what is perceived as different.

Details

International Relations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-244-3

Book part
Publication date: 10 July 2019

Fella Lahmar

The aim of this chapter is twofold: to provide a synopsis to the background underpinning Muslim diversity in Britain and to explicate how Muslim schools in Britain are embedded…

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is twofold: to provide a synopsis to the background underpinning Muslim diversity in Britain and to explicate how Muslim schools in Britain are embedded into their socio-political context. The process of migration and the flow of different cultural traditions beyond their nation states’ boundaries into Britain associated with late capitalism create what Featherstone coins ‘third cultures’. The process of moving backwards or forwards between an Islamic heritage, national experiences, British socio-political cultural context and global change necessitates ‘new types of flexible personal controls, dispositions and means of orientation, in effect a new type of habitus’ (Featherstone, 1990, p. 8). Accordingly, this chapter is divided into four parts. First, it relates Muslim presence in Britain contextualizing a history of migration. Second, it discusses British Muslim demographics and diversity. Third, it places Muslim schools within a British legislative context. Finally, it discusses leadership for Muslim schooling in Britain as praxis, in the Freireian sense, involving both reflection and action. This approach places Muslim schools within a socio-political context that includes a variety of contributors beyond those who initiated them.

Book part
Publication date: 24 May 2022

Serah Shani

Purpose: This ethnography examines West African immigrant youth attending an Islamic madrassa in a New York City mosque and their future educational aspirations.Methods: This

Abstract

Purpose: This ethnography examines West African immigrant youth attending an Islamic madrassa in a New York City mosque and their future educational aspirations.

Methods: This ethnographic research was conducted mainly through interviews of ten Muslim youth attending weekly madrasa at a West African mosque in the Bronx in New York City. I also did observations in the mosques, observing youth behavior, seating and listening in their classes, observing their interaction with one another and with their parents. While I had done this research within a month, I have been researching this community since 2006 at different times on the topic of parenting and schooling.

Findings: Muslim parents and teachers, concerned that children might fall into inner-city neighborhood life, engaged in teaching, guiding, and counseling the youth to keep them religiously and educationally engaged. As a result, the youth in this study demonstrated strong comittment to Islam and parental expectations but also expressed their own views of what their lives could become as transnational citizens.

Research implications: This research demonstrates that while schools, parents, and extracurricular programs are concerned with how youth will turn out, the youth are also making sense of their education experience in these spaces among others, and engage in carving a niche to inform their identity, education and career path. To this end, youth agency and voices should be acknowledged in educational research.

Value: The youth in this research demonstrate how contemporary young immigrants, living in a transnational world with diverse belief systems and ideals for success and socio-economic mobility, engage in imagination, resiliency and agency as they adapt to their new environment.

Details

Children and Youths' Migration in a Global Landscape
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-539-5

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Book part
Publication date: 6 September 2010

Jumana Vasi

Purpose – Islam's environmental ethic has been largely ignored by Western activists. This chapter attempts to fill this void by providing an overview of Islam's environmental…

Abstract

Purpose – Islam's environmental ethic has been largely ignored by Western activists. This chapter attempts to fill this void by providing an overview of Islam's environmental values and by exploring how this is related to behavior.

Design/methodology/approach – The study reports on data collected from a national survey of American Muslim women.

Findings – Results show that Muslim women living in the United States participate in a wide variety of outdoor recreation activities. They also engage in pro-environmental behaviors with frequencies similar to those of the general population. Yet as a group, Muslims are not taking action on environmental issues. This shows an untapped potential for mosques to build upon Islam's existing environmental ethic and develop an environmental agenda that incorporates the unique strengths of this American multi-ethnic, multiracial community.

Originality/value – This is one of the few studies to study Muslim environmentalism. It is also unique for its focus on Muslim women.

Details

Environment and Social Justice: An International Perspective
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-183-2

Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2010

Marcus L. Stephenson and Nazia Ali

This chapter critically focuses on Islamophobic practices that are embedded in travel and tourism environments. Muslims, especially those journeying to other Western nations, are…

Abstract

This chapter critically focuses on Islamophobic practices that are embedded in travel and tourism environments. Muslims, especially those journeying to other Western nations, are finding that their freedom of movement is restricted within environments perceived to be hostile, particularly in the context of post-September 11. The premise of this chapter is to illustrate the role of travel and tourism in continuing to reinforce Islamophobic attitudes of the West to Muslims worldwide. Importantly, the discussion critically highlights ways in which religious abhorrence, orientalist perspectives, ethnic detestation, and xenophobic intolerance significantly affect tourism experiences. These factors marginalize communities from appreciating the global attributes of tourism, especially elements that express the importance of cosmopolitan forms of citizenship.

Details

Tourism in the Muslim World
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-920-6

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2017

Golnaz Golnaraghi and Sumayya Daghar

The identities of Muslim women tend to be essentialized into binaries of what she is and what she ought to be (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016). For far too long Muslim women’s voices in…

Abstract

The identities of Muslim women tend to be essentialized into binaries of what she is and what she ought to be (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016). For far too long Muslim women’s voices in North America have been marginalized by hegemonic Orientalist (Said, 1978) and traditionalist (Clarke, 2003) Islamic discourses. When it comes to issues of agency, empowerment, and self-expression, it is either imposed by Western ideals or regulated by traditionalist politics of Islam (Zine, 2006). As such, Muslim women activists must engage and negotiate within the dual and narrow oppressions of Orientalist and traditionalist Islamic representations of her (Khan, 1998; Zine, 2006). Given the scarcity of space provided in print media (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016; Golnaraghi & Mills, 2013) for Muslim women to construct, appropriate, and remake their own identities, some have turned to social media to challenge these dichotomies through activism and resistance. Such a space is necessary in order to recover, resurface, and reauthorize the hybrid voices, experiences, and identities of the Muslim woman on their own terms in order to challenge hegemonic discourse. Highlighting the nuances of feminist activism, particularly that of Muslim postcolonial feminists that can make a difference to Critical Management Studies (CMS) as a community concerned with social justice and challenging marginalization and oppression. The “Somewhere in America #Mipsterz” (Muslim hipsters) video launched in 2013, the site for our critical discourse analysis, is one case where this resistance can be seen, showcasing fashionable veiled Muslim women artistically expressing themselves to the beats of Jay Z.

Details

Feminists and Queer Theorists Debate the Future of Critical Management Studies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-498-3

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