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Secularizing Islamists?

Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan

Humeira Iqtidar author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:4th Mar '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Secularizing Islamists? cover

Secularizing Islamists? provides an indepth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama'at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama'at-ud-Da'wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

"Iqtidar has fashioned a short but important examination of not only Islamist but religious practice in the modern world." (Anthropology Review Database) "In this slim, densely argued book, Iqtidar makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate about secularism, secularization, and the liberal state.... Iqtidar combines an impressive mastery of the literature in a variety of academic disciplines with ethnographic fieldwork among the two Islamist groups during 2005 in Lahore." (H. Net Reviews)"

ISBN: 9780226141732

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 1mm

Weight: 369g

232 pages