Overview

Home to the largest Muslim minorities in Western Europe and Asia, France and India are both grappling with crises of secularism. In Politicizing Islam, Fareen Parvez offers an in-depth look at how Muslims have responded to these crises, focusing on Islamic revival movements in the French city of Lyon and the Indian city of Hyderabad. Presenting a novel comparative view of middle-class and poor Muslims in both cities, Parvez illuminates how Muslims from every social class are denigrated but struggle in different ways to improve their lives and make claims on the state. In Hyderabad's slums, Muslims have created vibrant political communities, while in Lyon's banlieues they have retreated into the private sphere. Politicizing Islam elegantly explains how these divergent reactions originated in India's flexible secularism and France's militant secularism and in specific patterns of Muslim class relations in both cities. This fine-grained ethnography pushes beyond stereotypes and has consequences for burning public debates over Islam, feminism, and secular democracy.

Full Product Details

9780197610558

Table of Contents

Reviews

Fareen Parvez's book raises important questions on how class dynamics, state regulation, and religious orientation co-constitute and interact with each other. Her work contributes importantly to de-essentialize reigning views on Muslim politics by showing their inner complexity. It also raises important questions on the dialectical relationship between materiality and religiosity or on the all too prevailing assumption that European countries are simply a space of religious freedom. -- Journal of Religion In Politicizing Islam, Parvez has produced a superb, multidimensional account of the ways that state models of secularism, together with community specific relations of class, inform the aims, tactics, and orientations to state power of Islamic revival movements. ... Sociologists of religion, gender, race and nation, as well as those interested in further unpacking the relationship of social and political movements to the state, will find much to engage with in this work. -- Emily Laxer, Social Forces Fareen Parvez has done remarkable fieldwork among French and Indian Muslim populations. In particular, she has been able to closely observe the complex motivations and attitudes of burqa-wearing French Muslim women, breaking the cliches of submission and alienation. She is one of the very few sociologists I know who has really done participant observation in difficult and destitute neighborhoods. This is an excellent and innovative book. --Olivier Roy, The European University Institute, Florence Politicizing Islam offers a vivid glimpse into Islam and politics in France and India, two cases with more in common than one might expect, where Muslim minorities face rising hostility from the nominally secular state. In one case, Parvez finds, Muslims have developed robust civic and political organizations-in the other, they have turned inward toward revivalist antipolitics. Parvez's rich analysis uncovers class and gender dynamics beneath the veneer of communalism. --Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Fareen Parvez offers us a unique comparative perspective on the ways in which Islam is politicized in cities as far apart as Lyon in France and Hyderabad in India. The book gives us not only a political scientific analysis of the different forms of secularism in France and India and their divergent effects on Muslim politics, but also a cultural interpretation of the differences in class and gender relations in these two nation-states. It is a fascinating corrective to many misunderstandings of the relation between Islam and politics and needs to be read by scholars, journalists and an informed public alike. --Peter van der Veer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen

Fareen Parvez's book raises important questions on how class dynamics, state regulation, and religious orientation co-constitute and interact with each other. Her work contributes importantly to de-essentialize reigning views on Muslim politics by showing their inner complexity. It also raises important questions on the dialectical relationship between materiality and religiosity or on the all too prevailing assumption that European countries are simply a space of religious freedom. -- Journal of Religion In Politicizing Islam, Parvez has produced a superb, multidimensional account of the ways that state models of secularism, together with community specific relations of class, inform the aims, tactics, and orientations to state power of Islamic revival movements. ... Sociologists of religion, gender, race and nation, as well as those interested in further unpacking the relationship of social and political movements to the state, will find much to engage with in this work. -- Emily Laxer, Social Forces Fareen Parvez has done remarkable fieldwork among French and Indian Muslim populations. In particular, she has been able to closely observe the complex motivations and attitudes of burqa-wearing French Muslim women, breaking the cliches of submission and alienation. She is one of the very few sociologists I know who has really done participant observation in difficult and destitute neighborhoods. This is an excellent and innovative book. --Olivier Roy, The European University Institute, Florence Politicizing Islam offers a vivid glimpse into Islam and politics in France and India, two cases with more in common than one might expect, where Muslim minorities face rising hostility from the nominally secular state. In one case, Parvez finds, Muslims have developed robust civic and political organizations-in the other, they have turned inward toward revivalist antipolitics. Parvez's rich analysis uncovers class and gender dynamics beneath the veneer of communalism. --Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Fareen Parvez offers us a unique comparative perspective on the ways in which Islam is politicized in cities as far apart as Lyon in France and Hyderabad in India. The book gives us not only a political scientific analysis of the different forms of secularism in France and India and their divergent effects on Muslim politics, but also a cultural interpretation of the differences in class and gender relations in these two nation-states. It is a fascinating corrective to many misunderstandings of the relation between Islam and politics and needs to be read by scholars, journalists and an informed public alike. --Peter van der Veer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen

Author Information

Z. Fareen Parvez is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available