International

This issue of the Dossiers focuses on two main areas: the role of culture in the making of religious identities; and progressive interpretations within Islam. The issue of culture viz religion and identity is crucial to us; one of the aims of WLUML is to facilitate debate towards disentangling cultural identity from religious and political identities.

Based on the sharing that took place at the 1999 WLUML Outreach Strategies Exchange Programme meeting, this tool documents some of the network’s experiences of outreach and identifies the basic principles that underlie outreach activities – no matter how diverse the actual activities have been across the Network With the aim of inspiring experimentation and dialogue among groups conducting outreach activities, it shared strategies at both general and specific illustrative levels.

Revealed narratives and legislation are then pursued through their medieval, modern, and contemporary interpretations. The theological exegetic sources here chosen, all Sunni, include the major classical works as well as, for the modern period, examples of modernist, traditionalist, and fundamentalist exegesis. For Hadith materials beyond the theological tafsir, Stowasser analyzes both popular narratives of the "tales of the prophets" genre and representative samples of the classical historical and legal hadith.

Interview and articles from Riffat Hassan, the progressive theologian and academic specialized in Islamic sciences. Riffat Hassan defends a more humane, democratic and feminist interpretation of Islam in general and of the Quran and other sacred texts in particular (in French).

The Muslim world in context

Internationally, it has become quite fashionable to speak of living in a global village. The expression is usually intended to positively express the linkages now established throughout the world, the similarities of issues confronting the different people who inhabit it and our ability, therefore, to connect with one another.
Abstract

Using the often scarce space available to them in very different political circumstances, women’s strategies in defence of their human rights range from entryism to internationalism.

While fundamentalists read all women’s strategies as equally significant of betrayal of their identity, liberals outside Muslim countries and communities - and increasingly inside too - select the entryist strategy as the only legitimate one insofar as it matches our “nature”.

While the women’s movement remains united in standing for the need to use
While the increasing internationalization of feminism provides new prospects for women’s solidarity throughout the world, theoretical perspectives such as identity politics, cultural relativism and postmodernism emphasize the uniqueness, particularism, and localism of each and every feminist movement.
There are few beliefs more entrenched in the modern liberal imagination than that of the virtues of pluralism and a multicultural society. The degree to which Sarajevo has assumed symbolic significance expresses the measure of attachment to the principles of a multicultural, multiethnic community. Just as in the thirties the struggle for Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War became symbolic of the defence of democracy against fascism, so the siege of Sarajevo has assumed a mythic status as a struggle between pluralism and barbarism.
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