Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies

   1. Introduction Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies

      • Armando Salvatore, Mark LeVine

      Pages 1-25

3. Contested Hegemonies in the Public Sphere

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-27

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   2. Socio-Religious Movements and the Transformation of “Common Sense” into a Politics of “Common Good”

      • Mark LeVine, Armando Salvatore

      Pages 29-56

   3. Power, Religion, and the Effects of Publicness in 20th-Century Shiraz

      • Setrag Manoukian

      Pages 57-83

   4. “Doing Good, Like Sayyida Zaynab”: Lebanese Shi‘I Women’s Participation in the Public Sphere

      • Lara Deeb

      Pages 85-107

   5. “Building the World” in a Global Age

      • Raymond William Baker

      Pages 109-131

4. Practice, Communication, and the Public Construction of Legal Argument

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 133-133

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   2. Constructing the Private/Public Distinction in Muslim Majority Societies: A Praxiological Approach

      • Baudouin Dupret, Jean-Noël Ferrié

      Pages 135-153

   3. Communicative Action and the Social Construction of Shari‘a in Pakistan

      • Muhammad Khalid Masud

      Pages 155-179

   4. Is There an Arab Public Sphere? The Palestinian Intifada, a Saudi Fatwa and the Egyptian Press

      • Dyala Hamzah

      Pages 181-206

   5. Cover Stories: A Genealogy of the Legal Public Sphere in Yemen

      • Brinkley Messick

      Pages 207-229

5. Conclusion Public Spheres Transnationalized: Comparisons Within and Beyond Muslim Majority Societies

   1. Conclusion Public Spheres Transnationalized: Comparisons Within and Beyond Muslim Majority Societies

      • Cecelia Lynch

      Pages 231-242

6. Back Matter

   Pages 243-249

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This collection of essays examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask - often both simultaneously - discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. It builds on scholarship that re-imagines theories and practices of the public in modern and contemporary societies. While examining disparate time periods and locations, each contributor views modern and contemporary public spheres as crucial to the functioning, and understanding, of political and societal power in Muslim majority countries.

• hegemony
• participation
• politics
• transformation

"Fresh and insightful, this provocative and original collection of essays explores ideas of the public, public reason, and civic virtue as they are being reshaped through increasingly open debate and practice in law, the media, religious expression, and women's movements in Muslim majority societies. In scope and approach, this volume is good to think with." - Dale F. Eickelman, coauthor, with James Piscatori, of Muslim Politics (new edition, 2004).

"This edited collection of essays is highly informative and often insightful in its assessment of the applicability of the concept of "the public sphere" to a variety of contexts in the Middle East. Most interesting and thought-provoking are the joint pieces by the editors Mark Levine and Armando Salvatore in which they draw on little-known writings by Gramsci and Foucault to re-examine the religious movements in the contemporary Muslim world. A very valuable contribution to understanding developments in that region."

- Talal Asad, Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut), Essen, Germany

  Armando Salvatore

• Institute of Social Science, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

  Armando Salvatore

• University of California, Irvine, USA

  Mark LeVine

ARMANDO SALVATORE is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University, Germany. He is author of Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Ithaca Press, 1997) and editor of Between Europe and Islam: Shaping Modernity in a Transcultural Space (co-edited with Almut Höfert, Peter Lang, 2000).

MARK LE VINE is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Culture and Islamic Studies at the University of California, USA. He is the author of Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine (UC Press, NYP), Why They Don't Hate Us: From Culture Wars to Culture Jamming in the Global Era (Oneworld PressNYP), and co-editor with Viggo Mortensen and Pilar Perez of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press).

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