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at a time when multiculturalism has brought issues of religion and politics back to the foreground, religious literacy is lacking

such arrangements may serve to contain the critical voice and positive role religious faiths can play in the public sphere precisely because of their religious orientation, in challenging such things as the misuse of power or excesses of capitalism, for instance, and how this role might contribute towards developing a more equal society

a religiously literate secularity is a benefit to everyone

such literacy improves rather than detracts from the ability to engage with religion when its societal impact might be negative. A will to understand is surely more powerful here than a will to ignorance. The presence of religious reasons, language and motivations in the public sphere provides a deeper engagement with them, which both enables better understanding between co-citizens of different faiths, denominations and none, as well as a more literate way of challenging them where that is necessary and where it is part of a healthy democratic engagement.

In Iraq, militants also exploit security gaps at a time of an ongoing territorial dispute and a U.S. troop drawdown.

IS was benefiting from a “gap” between Kurdish forces and federal armed forces caused by political infighting.

In northeast Syria, Kurdish-dominated police have become a more visible target for IS as they patrol the streets to implement anti-virus measures,

IS fighters in late March launched a campaign of attacks in government-held parts of Syria, from the central province of Homs all the way to Deir el-Zour to the east, bordering Iraq. Some 500 fighters, including some who had escaped from prison, recently slipped from Syria into Iraq, helping fuel the surge in violence there, Iraqi intelligence officials said.

more IED attacks, shootings and ambushes of police and military

The number of Iraqi military personnel on duty has dropped 50% because of virus prevention measures

territorial disputes between Baghdad and authorities from the northern Kurdish autonomy zone have left parts of three provinces without law enforcement

“Before the emergence of the virus and before the American withdrawal, the operations were negligible, numbering only one operation per week,” said a senior intelligence official. Now, he said, security forces are seeing an average of 20 operations a month.

Iraqi military officials believe the improved, organized nature of the attacks serves to cement the influence of new IS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, who was named after his predecessor was killed in a U.S. raid late last year. One military official said more operations are expected during Ramadan to demonstrate the new leader’s strength.

because of the security situation in the desert several gas wells in the fields of Shaer and Hayan were damaged, leading to a 30% drop in electricity production.

n 1989, a few Muslim girls were expelled from school when they refused to take off their hijabs, or headscarves, which the principal believed was an assault on the secular character of public schools. Shortly after, the French administrative court, the Conseil d’État, ordered them to be reinstated. But two years after 9/11, when similar incidents were repeated at other schools, the court reversed its original finding. While all “ostentatious” signs of religious faith — be they Jewish yarmulkes or Sikh turbans — were declared verboten in public schools, everyone knew that the principal target of the law was the hijab.

From the Parti de Gauche on the extreme left to the National Front on the extreme right, there is the same fundamentalist vision of laïcité. The world, according to these defenders of the term, is one without headscarves in schools, without burkinis in stores, and without the faithful praying in the streets. It is also a world with pork served in school lunches and holidays based on the Christian (not Muslim or Jewish) calendars. It is, taken to extremes, a world where Muslims eat, drink, and dress like proper Frenchmen and women.

As Aydın shows, the most prominent strategy in the making of imperial subjects, as well as citizens, was the notion of civilization and its twin, race—that is, racialization. In this way, Aydın echoes Partha Chatterjee, who forcefully argues that colonial power operates through a “rule of colonial difference,” where the colonized are embedded in social and political relations of inferiority vis-à-vis their colonial counterparts. For Chatterjee, this is done through emergent notions of race and practices of racial difference.

Aydın’s argument resonates with Chatterjee’s insistence on racial difference as a key component of imperial power and Scott’s critical revision that the creation of racialized subjects takes place through practices that change over time, adapting to new circumstances thus enabling the production of new kinds statements, arguments, and practices in turn.

While the idea of bounded entities, which are, supposedly, culturally and religiously distinct, has been subject to numerous revisions and criticisms, it has maintained a constant presence in news media and policy circles. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” narrative has reappeared in the likes of Donald Trump’s recent speech in Poland, where he questions, in racially and religiously coded terms, whether the “West has the will to survive,” or if its “civilization” can be “preserved”; these are strong indications of the lasting hold of imperial concepts on the imagination of policymakers and politicians even as we acknowledge a transformation in the historical conditions of their articulation.

assuming the adjective “Muslim” tells us something about the kinds of political actions one undertakes is not only delusional, but also dangerous for democratic politics.

Years after Francis Fukuyama hailed with melancholic resignation the end of history, the supposed triumph and totalization of global capital remains tied to concerns about a loss of transcendence. Without the agonism of economic alternatives and manifest visions of different modes of production, can we still posit an “outside” to our moment? Is this all that there is?

the global story of money and capital in the West. It is a polycentric tale that cannot forget the colonial encounter, as well as attempts to both manage and bypass the Near East. Even as European bankers and traders appropriated the calculus of double-entry bookkeeping from the Arabs, and in so doing generated conceptual changes that enabled capitalism, they sought trade routes that superseded—or transcended—the Silk Road. Explorers circumnavigated the globe to avoid that ancient enemy, the Islamic empires at Europe’s gates. Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus wanted to reach India and the Far East without dealing with the turbaned Moors who stood in the way, obscuring the view.

Perhaps the greatest irony of France’s policy debates on Islam involves the role of gender, in particular the ways politicians and public figures have manipulated gender for the purpose of excluding and targeting Muslims. In the name of protecting women and gender equality, they have increasingly regulated Muslim women’s veiling practices, claiming that they violate the so-called neutrality of the public sphere and promote sexism. They have long claimed that women are forced into wearing the hijab yet deliberately excluded Muslim women’s voices from Assembly hearings. As Muslim women activists increasingly organize and speak out against the state’s policies, the argument that anti-veiling legislation protects them from coercion becomes clearly implausible. In my own research, almost all the women I encountered chose to wear the hijab or jilbab, at times even against the wishes of their husbands or parents. 

its own historical complicity with colonialism and racism has allowed feminism to be mobilized toward anti-Muslim policies that ultimately oppress minority women

In a national context where the extreme cultural assimilation of minorities remains the expectation and the government refuses to enumerate racial and ethnic categories, the attacks on academic schools of thought that analyze structural racism are not surprising. The denial of racism allows for rampant discrimination against those with Muslim backgrounds, as well as everyday slights, like when my interlocutor Amal was reprimanded this winter by her son’s schoolteacher for teaching him Arabic

the oppressive conditions of many French Muslims are explained in part by the intersections of gender and race as axes of power. The state’s attempts to undermine even the intellectual tools and language that facilitate discussion of such power and domination only reinforces this reality.

Vidal’s attack on academic researchers who, as part of an international community of scholars, work within postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional studies needs also to be put into context as just the latest iteration of a deep suspicion of North American (and particularly, U.S.) intellectual and political cultures. This suspicion goes back to the 1990s, when certain French academics, politicians, and media firmly rejected “Anglo-Saxon” multiculturalism or communautarisme in favor of the oxymoronic “French universalism” (for how can a nationally inflected universalism ever be universal?). 

The “French Muslims Abroad” project at the University of Lille is precisely looking at a growing diaspora of highly educated French Muslims who are choosing to leave France, a trend which could in part be due broader patterns of stigmatization affecting professional opportunities

the anti-religious pluralism and anti-Islam stance that we see unfolding in France risks turning laïcité into a civil religion itself

perhaps what is needed is an alternative approach to the concept of secularism which deconstructs the idea that it is a stable, equality-bearing framework on the one hand and that religious minorities are the “problem” on the other

Because of the shift from a human rights-compatible laïcité in which all individuals are equal regardless of their religion to a regime in which laïcité became the weapon of choice to defend a particular cultural and political identity, laïcité as we have come to see it today is fundamentally incompatible with international human rights

First-generation immigrants were discreet about their religious expression and kept to themselves, while the new generation is more comfortable in manifesting their French-Muslim identity publicly. The public square is the place where people should feel free to express both differences and similarities, exchange points of view, and appreciate each other’s unique contributions. A truly laïque state should be guaranteed based on its neutrality and not on the neutrality—and invisibility—of its citizens.

For reformers, an ideal society would not necessarily be liberal in the sense Western liberals understand it — such as holding liberal social values, being accepting of abortion and homosexuality, for example — but would instead be politically liberal, meaning it would allow minority faiths to both practice and — and this is the crucial bit — express their religious faith in public. That’s a critical distinction that liberals have yet to grapple with.

Western European liberals have forgotten how to grapple with faith, so religion has been comprehensively pushed to the margins of public life

the idea of groups coming together, which may have differing views about how a future society should be organized, is the basis of politics itself

The broad coalition of ideologies that make up the left today have different conceptions of what an idealized society would look like. Yet they agree on the political task of removing structural inequality and injustice today.

While there are certainly questions about this alliance between liberals and faithful Muslims, and some on each side eye each other warily, I don’t share the belief that there is anything unusual or uniquely challenging about this political alliance. For one thing, the rising progressive wing of the liberal movement — the one so often derided as “woke,” as if that were a bad thing — has more in common with Muslim millennials than the previous political generation

A rising generation of liberals now looks at social institutions as the problem. They look at the way hierarchies are constructed — in society, at work, even in relationships — and believe the structures themselves are the problem. The same with schools, banks, the police, and so on. The value systems within these structures are the problem, not the people within them who are incentivized to uphold these values.That analysis chimes with a changing Muslim political community, too. For Muslim millennials, integration is not the overarching political ambition that it was for a previous political generation. The current political generation of Muslims in the West applies a structural analysis of what is wrong with the world. This is where the overlap occurs. The two groups look at the structures of power and see clear links between the historical crimes of slavery and colonialism, as well as the hierarchies of race, gender, and faith, and the situations in the West and the Muslim world today.

Progressive liberals are upending some of the distinctions long thought to be immovable. As that movement shifts from analyzing hierarchies in society, work, and relationships to hierarchies in politics, some of the questions that were taken for granted will be upended.One of those questions will be about the role of faith in public life, or, to say it more specifically, what exactly counts as the display of faith in public life. As religion shifts from being something about the afterlife to being something about culture in this earthly life, there will be a shift in what counts as the display of faith in public life.

two powerful ayatollahs in Iran would like to see the project nipped in the bud, saying Sufism is a deviation from Shiite Islam and any attempt to promote or spread it with a movie would be "haram"

The country’s culture minister, Abbas Salehi, a cleric who doesn’t wear a turban, told reporters after the Sept. 25 Cabinet meeting that while the opinions of marjas — the highest Shiite authorities — should be respected, “the country has its own laws.” This was taken to mean that the making of the film would not be prohibited because of the objections. So far, there are no indications that the movie is being obstructed by Tehran.

Members of the hadith current have issued fatwas against mystics repeatedly. For example, a summit in Qom in 2007 declared Rumi a heretic.

Part of the opposition to the film is based on the fact that it is a co-production with Turkey. A group of experts and journalists stated their opposition to the Rumi and Shams movie owing to the presence of a Turkish producer behind the film, implying that the two countries — both of which claim the heritage of Rumi — have different interpretations on the life and works of the mystic poet.

“Drunk on Love” is not the only controversy in Iran over films that deal with religious figures. In September, member of parliament Ali Motahari called on authorities to permit the movie “Hussein Who Said No” to be screened in cinema and theaters across the country. The movie, which has been banned for seven years, narrates the story of battle of Karbala in the year 680, where the third imam of the Shiites, Hussein ibn Ali, and 72 male companions were killed by Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya’s army. “The main obstacle [in the way] of receiving the screening permit has been the portrayal of the face of ‘Abbas’ that I believe has no religious problem,” Motahari wrote on his Instagram page Sept. 23. Motahari said Abbas ibn Ali — the half-brother of Hussein — is not one of the sacred Shiite imams, which means the portrayal of his face should not be prohibited.

“People wandering around East Jerusalem might think that they are visiting a Turkish city. There are voluminous amounts of flags, stickers and signage, and the Turkish presence is very obvious. This includes charitable activity. In winter, they distribute heaters, warm clothing and food stamps. Last Ramadan, they handed out $100 to all businesses in the Old City. They are involved in the educational system, they renovate buildings and they organize heavily subsidized and even free trips [from Turkey to Al-Aqsa Mosque]. As someone on the ground here, I am constantly surprised by the scope of this activity."

a neo-Ottoman policy that Erdogan has been promoting over the past few years. Its goal is to bolster Turkish control in Jerusalem

“As far as he is concerned, the fact that the Ottomans once ruled here means that he is no stranger to Jerusalem. He is also challenging Israeli sovereignty in the city. Turkish activity in Jerusalem is his way of engaging in the soft conquest of al-Quds [Jerusalem].”

Turks have renovated Mamluk buildings, which they then pass off as Ottoman. “Apart from the city walls, built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, there aren’t many Ottoman sites in Jerusalem. In contrast, the Mamluks invested quite a bit on construction in Jerusalem, and that’s good enough for Erdogan,” he told Al-Monitor. “It demonstrates his desire to flood Jerusalem with ties to the Ottoman Empire.”

Israeli experts estimate that another person particularly concerned about the situation is King Abdullah of Jordan, who has a special status in Jerusalem as “Protector of the Holy Sites.” The Foreign Ministry’s statement refers to these Jordanian concerns. “In accordance with the peace treaty with Jordan, the Jordanians have a special status at the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. As such, we will not allow Erdogan to interfere with this special status, as they are doing now,” reads the statement.

the growing presence of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs in the Temple Mount compound. They come with lots of money, and their efforts are already bearing fruit. Erdogan’s popularity among the Palestinians is skyrocketing, and the main person to suffer for that is Jordan’s King Abdullah. He cannot compete with the funds that the Turks are pouring in, while his rhetoric on behalf of the Palestinians pales in comparison to Erdogan’s stinging attacks.”

“Erdogan’s ultimate goal is Erdogan himself. He wants to become 'Sultan of all Muslims.' Unlike Iran, for example, which has no access to Jerusalem, Turkey does have access to the city. Israel allows him to operate on the ground and emblazon Jerusalem prominently on his personal banner. This positions him as the greatest Muslim leader in the world.”

“He wants to return to rule over all those lands that were once controlled by the Ottoman Empire. We are witnessing Turkish activity of this kind not only in the Middle East but in the Balkans and Caucasus too

Mordechai Goldman has served for the past few years as the diplomatic and military analyst of the ultra-Orthodox daily Hamevaser. He attended ultra-Orthodox rabbinical colleges and studied psychology at the Israeli Open University. He also participated in the national civil service program. Goldman lectures to ultra-Orthodox audiences on the diplomatic process and on the Israel Defense Forces and consults with companies in regard to the ultra-Orthodox sector.

the recent literature has produced ample evidence that socioeconomic factors matter in the historical development of religions

In addition to human capital, the Reformation has been shown to have affected secularisation, political change, technology diffusion, and social outcomes

recent works on missionaries show that early access to Christian missions still has educational, political, and economic consequences in present-day sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Various works have shown how the presence of Islam in law and politics has affected economic outcomes such as corporate development, usury restrictions, conflict, finance, and human capital development

Maybe the most challenging direction for future research is to dig deeper into the link between economics and religiosity rather than religious affiliation – what people think and feel and which specific beliefs they do and do not adhere to. Measuring religiosity and beliefs is demanding in contemporary work, and it is even harder in the historical context where the option of fielding a survey is no longer viable

While recent work has clearly shown that religion has played an important role in economic history, there remains ample room, not least for multidisciplinary approaches, to advance our understanding of how religious thoughts and activities changed people’s economic lives over the course of history.