One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds: Spirituality, Identity, and Resistance across the Islamic World
Raymond William Baker
Abstract
Muslims today are creating a new era of Islamic Renewal. Islam’s “River of Life” has created oases from Morocco to China. The book captures the stories of ordinary Muslims living extraordinary lives, thanks to their rejuvenating springs. The accounts begin with the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta. We learn of his quest to deepen knowledge, intensify spirituality, and explore social customs and sexual mores as he moves through diverse Muslim communities. The book’s stories extend to the spiritual leaders of modern-day Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Their words are recorded by Fahmi Huwaidi, a ... More
Muslims today are creating a new era of Islamic Renewal. Islam’s “River of Life” has created oases from Morocco to China. The book captures the stories of ordinary Muslims living extraordinary lives, thanks to their rejuvenating springs. The accounts begin with the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta. We learn of his quest to deepen knowledge, intensify spirituality, and explore social customs and sexual mores as he moves through diverse Muslim communities. The book’s stories extend to the spiritual leaders of modern-day Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Their words are recorded by Fahmi Huwaidi, an Egyptian journalist and respected Islamic intellectual who gains intimate access to their worlds, crisscrossing the Islamic world to hear contemporary voices of spiritual awakening and heroic resistance alongside everyday tales of common people struggling to meet basic needs while living in accord with their faith. The stories of these ordinary Muslims contextualize the eruptions of political events like the great 1979 Iranian revolution, the ongoing resistance movements of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, the revolutionary uprisings across the Arab world in the spring of 2011, and the assertions today of virulent extremisms. The book gives us some of the most important voices of a centrist Islam that Westerners rarely hear and that reveal much more than the fringe stories of the latest Islamic threat projected by the corporate media. With 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today and far less than 100,000 ISIS fighters, this book highlights the centrist Islam of the vast majority of Muslims.
Keywords:
Islamic Renewal,
Ibn Battuta,
spiritual leaders,
Iranian revolution,
resistance,
uprisings,
extremists,
ISIS,
centrist Islam
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199846474 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199846474.001.0001 |