This paper explores how battlefield miracles were experienced, explained, and debated during the Afghan jihad between 1982–1992. Competing with the secular histories written by foreign journalists, diplomats, and communists, the study argues that the influential jihadist scholar ’Abdullah ‘Azzam (d. 1989) endeavored to write an alternate sacred history of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989), the course of which was determined neither by military prowess nor luck, but by the miracles granted by God. Perusing more than three hundred miracle stories compiled by ‘Azzam, the article demonstrates that the wonderworking mujahidin were indebted to a longstanding and complex tradition that determined the varieties of miracles experienced in Afghanistan. Moreover, the mujahidin’s own miracle stories shed light on when and how miracles paralleled or diverged from past tradition while raising important questions about the threshold of the supernatural, the mujahidin’s spiritual rank, and their abilities to encounter miracles. However, both mujahidin and the general public occasionally doubted whether miracles had really occurred, and so the article attempts to replay the discussions that surrounded ‘Azzam’s miracle stories, paying attention to how they were published, circulated, and received in the Muslim world. Thus, by looking at how the religious validity of battlefield miracles were debated between a broad range of actors, this paper ultimately hopes to provide a better understanding of the interrelated social and intellectual trajectories of Islamism and Jihadism.

This paper investigates the form of collective identity and subjectivity that the Islamic State (IS) group strives to construct for its members and the broader Muslim community. The notions of identity and subjectivity are closely interrelated in discourse analytical studies. In accordance with the predominantly post-structuralist-oriented discourse theory, I understand identity as identifying with a subject position, or a form of subjectivity within a discourse. As Hall (1996) put it, identity is a point of suture between different discourses, practices and processes which interpolate individuals as subjects and produce subjectivity. Subjectivity, in this sense, denotes agency and actorhood as well. Carrying out a multiperspectival discourse analysis of nearly 70 articles in IS’s former English-language magazines, Dabiq and Rumiyah, 35 articles in its weekly Arabic-language newsletter, an-Naba’, and 18 audiovisual messages, covering a period from 2013 to 2019, I argue that the Islamic State’s discourse attempts to construct a distinctly ideal Muslim subject, or what, following the work of Wodak et al. (1999), I call a homo Islamicus. This subject is articulated in relation to a singular, totalizing, salvific, and transcendent—in the sense of drawing its legitimacy from a sacred realm transcending temporal, material existence and experience – mode of collective identity. Formulated as an articulatory disruption in the modern Muslim context and beyond, I identify tawhid, or the notion of unicity of God, as the nodal point or central sign in IS’s multi-layered structure of identity/subjectivity, around which other important signs, or what I call sub-categories of praxis, are (re)configured. The related signs include: al-wala wal-bara, or the notion of loyalty to Islam, Muslims and God while disavowing disbelievers and their ideas; jihad, in the sense of armed campaign; jama’a, the sole righteous congregation of Muslims; belief in the urgency of the IS caliphate here and now; and bay’a or allegiance to the IS leader/caliph. IS articulates its “divinely-sanctioned” form of identity and subjectivity in opposition to extant Muslim subjectivities interpellated by other Islamist and non-Islamist discourses. This entails a discursive struggle with rival discourses over the very ontological meaning of Islam and Muslimness. Because IS’s discourse, as the manifestation of its ideology, promotes its interpretation of divine truth as the sole universal truth, it consequently believes that there is only one true Muslim identity and true Islam, which IS has the exclusive privilege of comprehending in its purest, trans-temporal and trans-spatial form.

Religion serves as an essential framework through which individuals reconcile experiences of trauma, tragedy, and profound injustice with prior beliefs about the world and the divine logic through which it is structured. In this sense, religion offers a means of coping with adversity via a multiplicity of material practices, rituals, speech acts, and psychological processes. Talal Asad transformed scholarship on Islam through his notion of the discursive tradition, defined by its relation to a past upon which it makes claims to authenticity and to a future, for the sake of which knowledge of the correct, authentic form of a practice must be preserved. Islamic belief and practice are not monolithic, homogenous entities, but must be analyzed as historically-deep, contextualized phenomena. Rarely is religious doctrine neatly translated into everyday meaning-making and material practice. Over the last two decades, the positive psychology movement has inspired interdisciplinary inquiries into the nature of religious gratitude and its beneficial effects for both physical and mental health. However, the majority of this research has been conducted with Christian populations and informed by assumptions about the theological significance of gratitude that are grounded in Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Our study draws upon the results of a systematic literature review conducted by the authors and initial findings of pilot qualitative interviews on the lived experience of gratitude. The review employed systematic methods to identify 125 scholarly articles available in Arabic, English, Farsi, and Turkish related to the topic of religious gratitude in order to provide a comprehensive synthesis of the theological significance of gratitude to God within Islamic doctrine and everyday practices. Qualitative interviews were conducted with Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Turkey to explore gratitude as a lived experience and embodied practice. This study thus examines the connections between the lived experience of GTG as an affective, bodily practice and the significance of gratitude within historical and contemporary Islamic sources. Via archival and ethnographic work, we ask how religious ideals of gratitude shape everyday practices of gratitude and in what ways these practices contribute to the psychological process of coping—broadly defined—with hardship through multi-sited fieldwork, participant observation, and person-centered interviews with Syrian refugees.

The sermon in Islam has usually been classified into two typologies. The homily (wa’z) delivered any time as an exercise in exposition, explanation of a variety of topics in exegesis, jurisprudence or ethics. The second is the Friday sermon (khutbat al-jum’ah) delivered from the pulpit during the Friday worship service. During the first centuries of Islam preachers developed homilies rooted in a certain versed prose with attention to stylized language called albadi’. On this account, the sermon eventually exhausted its rhetorical and emotive devices and therefore became clichéd, regressive, and pedantic. In the modern context and with the rise of new technologies, the sermon in Islam has exhibited radical and “unnerving” changes. My paper begins by tracing some of the major shifts of the Islamic sermon in the postcolonial period including the proliferation of state sponsored sermons to cassette-based sermons. Second, and by focusing on the case of the Palestinian Austrian preacher Adnan Ibrahim based in Vienna, I will argue that the ubiquitous alterations in sermon structure pertain to method and form. I will look at Adnan’s archive of digital YouTube series of critical sermons and lectures called “The Hammer of evidence and the Glass of Atheism”, “Al Ghazālī and the Search for Truth” and “the Evolution Theory”. Through comparison with other prominent preachers like Yūsuf al Qardāwī, Zakir Naik, Amr Khaled, and Fathullah Gülen I will show that Adnan’s case – which has been noticeably marginalized in Sermon and Islamic studies - demonstrates the most significant paradigm of transformation in sermon composition, texture and form grounded in an ontological and anthropological awareness of its “democratic” cyberspace, European diasporic place, and its multi-faith context. Adnan’s digital sermons attempt to preserve the truth claims of an “exilic” Islam and fractured Muslim communities by accommodating philosophical inquiries equally encroaching on a post secular Christian and Judaic sermon. Adnan’s innovation includes a methodical and “interdisciplinary” engagement with classical and modern sources of theology and philosophy favoring in particular the critical interface possible between classical Islamic thought and several post-Enlightenment Western thinkers. Adnan’s new method and form of Qur’anic exposition lies in interweaving several approaches of exegesis and hermeneutics in order to allow Islamic thought to shape and dynamize an exiled faith community, and to respond to the digital dissemination of exclusionary and ideologically driven sermons.

This paper examines how Muslim Egyptian preachers (duʾāh al-judud) harnessed the positive affective states of the youth who took part in what, in 2011, was a successful social movement to promote ethical self-cultivation. The duʾāh al-judud appeared on the scene in Egypt in the early 2000s. Young, charismatic men with no extensive religious training, the duʾāh appealed mostly to the young (teens and people in their twenties) and used emotion and storytelling to move the audience and guide viewers toward a virtuous life (Moll 2012a; 2012b). Through their shows, which aired on satellite television, radio and YouTube channels, the preachers offered alternative Islamic media and addressed topics that were relevant to the youth with the aim of edifying young Muslims spiritually and morally (Hirschkind 2012; Moll 2020). Essential to their teachings were three goals for every Muslim: Worshipping God, civilization-building and doing good for others, and purifying the self (ʿibādat Allāh, ʿimārat al-arḍ, tazkiyat al-nafs). In 2011, just a few short months after the Egyptian uprising toppled then president Ḥusnī Mubārak, one of the preachers, Moez Masoud, harnessed the hopeful affective energy generated by the revolutionary moment to call people to start a “revolution against the self (thawra ʿalā al-nafs)” in his show by the same name. Masoud himself was politically active and joined the protests in Taḥrīr Square, and his involvement gave him credibility as a revolutionary figure (at least, for the time being). This paper examines a moment when a positive moral mood, hope (Throop 2015), becomes a vehicle toward ethical self-fashioning (tazkiyat al-nafs) through content analysis of the first season of Masoud’s show. Masoud focuses on the Sufi theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s concept of the nafs, how “diseases of the heart” ail it, and how to “overthrow the corrupt, internal regime of the heart” as Egyptians overthrew the corrupt, external regime of Mubārak. The heart becomes a battleground where one constantly, deliberately fights against the evils and desires toward which one is naturally inclined toward the “virtuous formation of the soul” (Asad 2017). The duʾāh’s influence in Egypt today has waned, especially as the fervor and optimism of the social movement in 2011 have wavered (Amin 2021). But it was precisely the revolutionary moment and the hope that it engendered that made talk of drastic (internal and external) change warranted and viable.

This paper asks how Malcolm X's image and ideas were transnationally diffused and interpreted among Turkish Islamists shortly ahead of and during the ruling AK Party's rise. Drawing from a discourse analysis of 242 columns published from 1996–2019 in three prominent newspapers read by religious conservatives (Yeni Safak, Yeni Akit and Milli Gazete), this study reveals similarities in how authors: 1) assigned credibility and significance to Malcolm X’s Muslim identity; 2) referenced him to reaffirm negative beliefs about the West; and 3) approached his life and the Black experience as analogous to their own political struggles. Applying a social movement theory foundation built on Erving Goffman's concept of "framing," this paper argues that shared anti-colonial and pan-Islamist sentiments likely facilitated the adoption of Malcolm X as a potent political symbol by Turkish Islamists, who decontextualized and selectively emphasized his image and ideas in service of conservative religious aims. Paradoxically, although Malcolm X served as a symbol of defiance against state power in the case of Turkish Islamists' opponents—i.e., secularists and Western powers—he was also used to support the authority of the state under AK Party rule. Notably, this discourse omitted the subversive implications Malcolm X’s cause had for ethnic minorities in Turkey, such as its Kurdish, Alevi, Jewish and Christian communities. As a result, this paper suggests there are ideological limits to the Islamist discourse around Malcolm X in Turkey, and calls for further investigation into how the AK Party's domestic hegemony might be reshaping Turkish perceptions of international history and foreign political figures.