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On the subject of Muslims and Islam there are many quality research articles with free downloads. Few of the research articles are discussed below:
Terrorists & Muslims: The Construction, Performance and Regulation of Muslim Identities in the Post-9/11 United States. In this article, author Cyra Akila Choudhury examines and critiques the construction, performance and regulation of Muslim identities in the United States. Focusing on three main characters - the Terrorists, the Believers and the Moderate - she traces the genealogy of these constructions from a common Arab stereotype to their present manifestation. She argues that these constructions are then deployed by the State and the dominant Muslim Community to regulate Muslims in the US.
Why Europe Has to Offer a Better Deal Towards its Muslim Communities: A Quantitative Analysis of Open International Data. The study breaks the myth that as large scale poverty of Europe’s Muslim communities threatens to grow, political radicalism might fall on a fertile ground. Authors present materials, based on the ESS that give strong support to the hypothesis that passive support for Islamist radicalism in Europe and the complete distrust in democracy does not exceed 400,000 persons.
Authors also compare their research results with the recent PEW data. By and large, the two data sets yield the same results. Regrettable as Islamist extremism in Europe might be, it is far way from alarmist views that present Islam in Europe as such as being incompatible with the future of democracy.
Authors also find strong evidence that Muslim communities in Europe are not different from other religious communities in their tendency towards secularism. They also find that Muslim economic and social alienation in Europe very much corresponds to deficiencies of the implementation of the Lisbon process.
Why the Muslim World is Rebelling? By A. R. M. Imtiyaz. Anti-Americanism has been growing in the Muslim world rapidly. This reality leads the author to ask why a considerable amount of Muslims consider Americans as their major enemy? Why the US blueprint for the democracy does not enjoy the fascinating acceptance in the Muslim world? Is there any logical and satisfactory way to get out of the present mess to establish peace and democracy in the Muslim world? This theoretically based, but historically approach paper attempts to address these questions by analyzing historical mistakes successive US leaderships committed.
Muslim Converts in Prison: by Basia Spalek and Salah el-Hassan. There has been something of a moral panic about individuals converting to Islam whilst incarcerated. A number of newspaper articles have suggested that within prisons there is a potentially toxic mix of extremist ideology and a criminal past. This article presents the results of a study exploring conversion to Islam wit-hin two prisons in England. The main findings suggest that for those individuals who convert to Islam in English prisons Islam provides them with a moral fra-mework from which to rebuild their lives. As such, the positive work carried out by prison Imams ne-eds to be supp-orted more fully, particularly when resettling individuals who are newly released from jail. At the same time, Islam seems to help prisoners to cope more positively with the prison environment, reducing their propensity to aggression and violence.
Int- erpreting the Qur’an and the Constitution: Similarities in the Use of Text, Tradition, and Reason in Islamic and American Jurisprudence by Asifa Quraishi. This article identifies parallels in interpretive theories within Islamic and American jurispru-dence. It expl-ains how, altho-ugh they oper-ate against very different cultures and legal institutions, jurists of both Islamic and Am-erican law have adop-ted a similar range of appr-oaches to interpreting their founding texts, the Qur’an and the Consti-tution, resp-ectively.
Seen in this comparative context, it becomes clear that jurists of these different legal cultures often have more in common with each other than with their fellow jurists adhering to opposing methodologies within their own system. These similarities stand as a counterpoint to the stark polarities often drawn between “Islam” and the “West.” This article thus fills an empty space in the comparative law literature by identifying phenomena that have been unrecognized so far, largely because the greater Muslim and American legal communities have themselves been talking past each other for so long.
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May 2008 |