How do contemporary teenagers experience and understand religious, spiritual, gender and sexual diversity? How are their experiences mediated by where they go to school, their faith and their geographic location? Are their outlooks materialist, religious, spiritual, or do they have hybrid identities?Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity offers powerful insight into how teenagers make sense of the world around them. Drawing o...

Challenging the view of Islamic extremists and critics of Islam, this book explores the very topical issue of Islam’s compatibility with democracy. It examines:principles of Islam's political theory and the notion of democracy thereinthe notion of democracy in medieval and modern Muslim thoughtIslam and human rightsthe contribution of Islamic legal ideas to European legal philosophy and law.The book addresses the pressing need for ...

Religious diversity is now a social fact in most countries of the world. While reports of the impact of religious diversity on Europe and North America are reasonably well-known, the ways in which Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific are religiously diverse and the ways this diversity has been managed are not. This book addresses this lack of information about one of the largest and most diverse regions of the world. It describes the religious diversity of 27 nations, as large and complex as In...

In Islamic Exceptionalism, Brookings Institution scholar and acclaimed author Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Divides among citizens aren't just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state—and the vexing problem of religion's role in public...

Islamic, authoritarian, democratic, developing, disintegrating, Indonesia is an enigma to outside observers who have never seemed sure just what it is.The largest country in its region, Indonesia holds the key to Southeast Asia's future, while recent developments (demands for greater regional autonomy, ethnic, political and religious conflict) are making the archipelago significant on the world stage and prompting re-examination of its history.As a state Indonesia is a twen...

A fresh and illuminating perspective on the surge in religion"s political influence across the globe. Is religion a force for good or evil in world politics? How much influence does it have? Despite predictions of its decline, religion has resurged in political influence across the globe, helped by the very forces that were supposed to bury it: democracy, globalization, and technology. And despite recent claims that religion is exclusively irrational and violent, its political influence is in...

Islam features widely in the news, often in its most militant versions, but few people in the non-Muslim world really understand the nature of Islam.Malise Ruthven's Very Short Introduction contains essential insights into issues such as why Islam has such major divisions between movements such as the Shi'ites, the Sunnis, and the Wahhabis, and the central importance of the Shar'ia (Islamic law) in Islamic life. It also offers fresh perspectives on contemporary questions: Why is the greatest ...

Why are Southeast Asia's richest countries such as Malaysia riddled with corruption? Why do Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines harbour unresolved violent insurgencies? How do deepening religious divisions in Indonesia and Malaysia, and China's growing influence, affect the region and the rest of the world?Thought-provoking and eye-opening, Blood and Silk is an accessible, personal look at modern Southeast Asia, written by one of the region's most experienced outside obs...

From Gandhi's movement to win Indian independence to the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, an expanding number of citizens have used nonviolent action to win political goals. While such events have captured the public imagination, they have also generated a new surge of scholarly interest in the field of nonviolence and civil resistance studies. Although researchers have produced new empirical data, theories, and insights into the phenomenon of nonviolent struggle, the field is still quite un...

With Malaysia in the throes of sweeping political change, academic turned political activist and presently, Senator from Selangor state to the Parliament, Dr Syed Husin Ali traces how ethnicity has been manipulated, since Independence, by Malaysian politicians for their own gain to the detriment of the masses. In articles spanning more than three decades, collected for the first time here, he dissects the origins, fallacies and destructive nature of communal politics in Malaysia and examin...

"This excellent volume, edited by Ooi Kee Beng and Wan Hamidi Hamid, discusses what it means to be Malay in Malaysia. And in doing that, it seeks to be much more..Being a Malay is about expressing the cultural interactions and assimilations that undeniably take place among the various ethnie that inhabit and have inhabited Malaysia. It is not only about being Malay, or being Malaysian. It is about being humans." - Senator Ariffin Omar.This collection of nine essays by young and 'you...

Explores the role of women’s status, bodies, and sexuality in global conflicts.Women's bodies have become a battleground. Around the world, people argue about veiling, schooling for Afghan girls, and "SlutWalk" protests, all of which involve issues of women's sexuality and freedom. Globalization, with its emphasis on human rights and individuality, heats up these arguments. In Of Virgins and Martyrs, David Jacobson takes the reader on a fascinating tour of...