The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious …
The vast majority of books on Buddhism describe the Buddha using the word enlightened, rather than awakened. This bias has resulted in Buddhism becoming generally perceived as the eponymous religion of enlightenment. Beyond Enlightenment is a sophisticated study of some of the underlying assumptions involved in the study of Buddhism (especially, but not exclusively, in the West). It investigate…
Jihadist militants keep being a global threat. Many observers suggest that a transformation is likely to happen in their organisation, operation, mobilisation, and recruitment strategies, particularly after the territorial decline of the “Caliphate” of the “Islamic State.” This volume explores different aspects of the future trajectories of militant jihadism and the prospective transfor…
This edited volume of chapters resulted from an international conference held at the University of Adelaide in July 2016 under the same title to explore the multifaceted concept of ʿilm in Islam — its agency and manifestations in the connected realms of science, religion, and the arts. The aim is to explore the Islamic civilisational responses to major shifts in the concept of ‘knowledge…
diversity; architecture; culture; vulnerability; conservation
The core teachings and practices of Buddhism are systematically directed toward developing keen and caring insight into the relational or interdependent nature of all things. Hershock applies Buddhist thought to reflect on the challenges to public good, created by emerging social, economic, and political realities associated with increasingly complex global interdependence. In eight chapters, t…
Cirebon; Rituals; Islam; Muslims; Indonesia
The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) is the most interesting phenomenon in contemporary Indonesian politics. Not only is it growing rapidly in membership and electoral support, it is also bringing a new and markedly different approach to Islamic politics, one which has no precedent in Indonesian history. Understanding PKS and analysing its political behaviour presents challenges to scholars and o…
This book was first published in 2015 in Turkish by İletişim Publishing. It is the first ethnographic study written about the Kurdish Hizbullah. This study constitutes a sociological and historical analysis of the 35 year-long period from Hizbullah’s emergence as an illegal underground organisation in 1979 until the time of writing, when Hizbullah had been legally acti…
An extensive body of literature on Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing has been written since the 1980s. This research has for the most part been conducted by scholars operating within Western epistemological frameworks that tend not only to deny the subjectivity of knowledge but also to privilege masculine authority. As a result, the information gathered predominantly reflects the types o…