This article looks at the mediation of one aspect of Middle Eastern culture, Islam, in the context of diasporic Muslim communities in the West. It explores the impact of information and communications technologies on debates relating to the normative boundaries of Islamic identity and community. It is argued that media technologies provide channels for new or previously disenfranchised voices to be heard in the public sphere of Muslim diasporas. Simultaneously, traditional structures of authority are refigured and, to some extent, marginalized in favour of alternative interpretations of religious knowledge perceived as more relevant to contemporary diasporic life in the West.

Abstract This chapter introduces the volume by offering a survey of scholarship on religion in international relations (IR) to date and explaining the sources of religion’s exclusion from the canon of IR. It proceeds to frame the concept of religious soft power as a useful supplement to Joseph Nye’s well known formulation of soft power, arguing that current shifts in global order are generating renewed salience for religion as an instrument of statecraft. The chapter then provides an overview of the volume and its contents, showing how the various country case studies and theoretical discussions that collectively comprise the book offer a comprehensive analytic portrait of emerging cross-national patterns in the use of religion as a tool of foreign policy.

This chapter provides the reader with a broad overview and introduction to the historical evolution, structure, and potential futures of transnational religious activity emanating from Saudi Arabia. It surveys the major actors and institutions involved in Saudi global religious propagation activities—such as government ministries, the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, and the Islamic University of Medina—and examines the evolving political logic behind Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabism during the past half century. After overviewing some of the major effects of Saudi efforts to export Wahhabism worldwide, the chapter then concludes with a brief discussion of what the future may hold with respect to Saudi religious transnationalism in the era of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.

During the twentieth century, US foreign policy, as pursued by administrations of both major political parties, regarded Islam as a useful force for advancing US strategic interests in certain world regions. More recently Islam has come to be associated in both American policy discourse and the US public sphere with instability, violence, and terrorism. This chapter argues that recent US foreign policy has treated Islam fundamentally differently from how it regards other world religions. More specifically, the United States has created diplomatic positions and a wide array of outreach programs that single out Muslims and Muslim-ness in ways that differ significantly from the way America treats the members of other world religions (who tend to be engaged as citizens of particular nation-states rather than as the holders of particular religious identities).

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the evolution of recent U.S. approaches to religion and foreign policy. The account offered here employs as an organizing principle a set of three challenges the United States has faced in the course of finding a modus vivendi with religion in foreign policy. Briefly put and stated here on a continuum spanning the conceptual to the operational, these are: (1) the challenge of defining and conceptualizing religion's place and salience within foreign policy; (2) the challenge posed by the presence of a secular bias within foreign policy institutions; and (3) the challenge of legal constraints to and limitations on religious engagement; (4) tension between the promotion of religious freedom around the world as a legally mandated component of American foreign policy and efforts to establish broader approaches to engaging religion with U.S. diplomacy. These challenges, it should be reiterated, are in no sense unique to the United States, although the specific form each assumes as well as its relative weight can be treated as a function of the broader American diplomatic and public policy culture.

Drawing on a combination of academic research and practical experience, this essay explores recent policy trends at the intersection of religion and diplomacy. Framing the issue in terms of a need to “right-size” approaches to religion in foreign policy, this analysis reflects on how to think about assessing the relevance of religion in particular diplomatic and developmental settings; efforts to determine the appropriate scope of religious engagement work in diplomacy; and the challenge of building broader constituencies within the policy community to support religious engagement work.

Muqtedar Khan’s Islam and Good Governance: A Political Philosophy of Ihsan is, above all, an expression of faith.[1] This does not mean that we should engage it as a confessional text — although it certainly is one at some level — or that it necessitates or assumes a particular faith positionality on the part of its reader. Rather, Khan seeks here to build a vision and conception of Islamic governance that does not depend on compliance with or fidelity to some outward standard — whether that be European political liberalism or madhhabi requirements. Instead, he draws on concepts, values, and virtues commonly associated with Islam’s more inward dimensions to propose a strikingly original political philosophy: one that makes worldly that which has traditionally been kept apart from the world. More specifically, Khan locates the basis of a new kind of Islamic politics within the Qur’anic and Prophetic injunction of ihsan, which implies beautification, excellence, or perfection — conventionally understood as primarily spiritual in nature. However, this is not a politics that concerns itself with domination (the pursuit, retention, and maximization of power); it is neither narrowly focused on building governmental structures that supposedly correspond with divine diktat nor understood as contestation or competition. This is, as the book’s subtitle suggests, a pathway to a philosophy of the political which defines the latter in terms of searching for the Good.

1. Introduction: thinking about Islam and politics in global perspective 2. Islam and politics: history and key concepts 3. State formation and the making of Islamism, 4. Islam in the system: the evolution of Islamism as political strategy 5. Islam as the system: Islamic states and "Islamization" from above 6. Islam for lack of a system: Islamism in weak and failed states 7. Islam and militancy beyond the nation-state: the global jihadist movement 8. Towards post-Islamism? Globalization and Muslim politics 9. Conclusion: the Arab Uprisings and beyond

What do we mean when we talk about religion? Scholars have struggled and argued for many years about how to define religion. Some emphasize the idea that religion is concerned primarily with conceptions of God, divinity and the meaning and order of human existence. Others have tended to emphasize the way religion serves to draw distinctions between sacred (that is, transcendent or other-worldly) forms of space and belief and more mundane, or profane, domains of ‘worldly’ human endeavour. Some definitions, such as that of anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), focus on the symbolic power of religion and its ability to influence how people understand their place in the world and also to impart 1111 2 3 4 5222 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5222 6 7 8222 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2 3 4222 ■ The question THE ROLE OF RELIGION TODAY

Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction contains a selection of articles reprinted from the much larger and comprehensive Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought published in 2012 (hereafter PEIPT). More specifically, the sixteen chapters here represent the full contents of the earlier work’s ‘Central Themes’ section with the addition of an article on ‘women’, which, curiously, had originally been part of PEIPT’s section on ‘Modern Concepts, Institutions, Movements, and Parties’. Editor Gerhard Bowering explains the purpose of Islamic Political Thought as seeking to ‘integrate and contextualize the contemporary political and cultural situation of Islam while also examining in depth the historical roots of that situation’. By and large the book achieves that goal, and the quality of scholarship here is unimpeachable. Perhaps the more relevant question to ask is whether this volume lives up to its subtitle (‘An Introduction’) and manages to jump categories from the comprehensive reference work that PEIPT represents to something more approaching a readable overview of political thought in Islam.

This essay tracks how Islam and Muslims have figured in American and European policy in recent years, and assesses the practical implications of specific Muslim-oriented policy initiatives. The central dilemma policymakers need to contend with is not one of determining the most appropriate policies for addressing challenges arising specifically from Islam and Muslims, but rather recognizing that in many respects the "Muslims" in question have been created by these very policies. From this insight follow a number of recommendations with respect to how governments can most constructively address the issues understood to surround Muslim communities while avoiding the exacerbation of those same challenges. This essay is adapted from a paper commissioned and published online by the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies.