| Summary: | Politicizing Islam explores Islamic revival movements in the French city of Lyon and its outer banlieues and the Indian city of Hyderabad, where Parvez conducted two years of ethnographic research, immersed in mosque communities, women's welfare centers, Islamic study circles, and philanthropic associations. The book provides an in-depth view of middle-class Muslims and elites, as well poor and subaltern Muslims in stigmatized neighborhoods, to show how Muslims make claims on the secular state and struggle to improve their lives as denigrated minorities. In Hyderabad, Muslim elites struggle for redistribution to the poor, who then use their patronage to practice autonomy from the state and build vibrant political communities. In Lyon, middle-class Muslims face widespread discrimination and negotiate with the state for religious recognition. But they remain estranged from Muslims in the banlieues who have embraced a sectarian form of Islam and retreated into the private sphere. Politicizing Islam explains how these diverse movements originated in either a flexible or militant secularism, and how Muslim class relations ultimately have consequences for debates within the Islamic tradition, the situations of Muslim women, and the potential for minority democratic participation.
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