Léon Buskens

Bio: Léon Buskens is an academic researcher from Leiden University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Islam & Sharia. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 15 publications receiving 192 citations. Previous affiliations of Léon Buskens include Utrecht University.

Recent debates on family law reform in morocco: islamic law as politics in an emerging public sphere

Abstract: In 1957-1958 Moroccan family law was codified in the Mudawwana , a text known for its close adherence to the classical Maliki tradition. Since the early 1980s the debate about reform has become more intense and widespread. The relatively limited reform of the Mudawwana in 1993 was closely linked to the beginnings of a process of cautious democratization. Since then the discussions have become more vehement, especially since the coming to power of a new government in 1998 consisting of former opposition parties. A year later this government presented a plan for extensive family law reforms. The plan has provoked considerable public debate over key concepts such as democracy , development , human rights , civil society , and ijtihād . Upon closer inspection, larger issues are at stake: Who may speak out in public and participate in politics? This new turn in the discussions is related to the emergence of a public sphere.

Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract: 15 m m The study of Islam and Muslim societies has changed drastically during the last three decades. The traditional methods of philology and intellectual history have met with considerable criticism by younger generations of scholars who have started to look at the social sciences, notably anthropology and social history, for guidance. These changes have been accompanied by the rise of new f ields, such as Islam in Europe and in Africa, and new topics, such as gender, or the renaissance of older topics, most notably Islamic law. Scholars have successfully overcome older, unproductive oppositions, especially between the study of texts and practices. Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century: Transformations and Continuities brings together a series of essays surveying these transformations written by prominent scholars in the f ield. They analyse major innovations and new directions to take, but are also conscious of underlying continuities with a venerable tradition of almost two centuries. The collection is an excellent introduction to state of the art debates for both graduate students and senior scholars.

Legal Documents as Sources for the History of Muslim Societies

Abstract: This volume examines the use of legal documents for the history of Muslim societies, presenting case studies from different periods and areas of the Muslim world from medieval Iran and Egypt to contemporary Yemen and Morocco, and involving multiple disciplinary approaches.

L'invention du droit musulman : Genèse et diffusion du positivisme juridique dans le contexte normatif islamique

Abstract: C'est un truisme de dire que la notion de " droit musulman " est une categorie sociale. Il est sans doute plus etonnant et irritant d'ajouter qu'il s'agit d'une construction scientifique ayant servi a comprendre le phenomene de la normativite dans les societes musulmanes. Ce phenomene existait bel et bien avant que la science orientaliste ne s'y interesse, mais pas la categorie. Pourtant, de nos jours, cette notion est devenue si naturelle et politisee, aussi bien pour les musulmans que pour les non-musulmans, que certains parmi les premiers prennent comme une provocation le fait d'en mettre en question la genese. Dans ce texte nous proposons neanmoins de considerer le developpement et la propagation de cette nouvelle facon, tout d'abord occidentale, d'appeler pour la comprendre la normativite islamique. Nous abordons aussi brievement la maniere dont cette notion a ete integree et diffusee dans les societes musulmanes actuelles. L'enseignement et les recherches ont largement contribue a la diffusion de cette vision positiviste de la normativite islamique, de meme, bien sur et surtout, que la pratique legislative et judiciaire des Etats post-coloniaux.

Jihad and Islam in World War I : studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s “Holy war made in Germany”

Abstract: The proclamation of Jihad by the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople, after the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I, made the headlines. This book investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation in addition to its effects in the wider Middle East − both among the Arabs and the Turks, and among Sunni Muslims as well as Shi’ites. It brings to light the German hopes for and British fears of a worldwide uprising of Muslims in the colonial empires at that time. Moreover, it scrutinises the fierce academic debates caused by the Jihad proclamation, in which the 1915 manifesto of Leiden Islam scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (“Holy War Made in Germany”) played a key role.

萨义德的“Orientalism”释义

Abstract: 萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society

Abstract: In this nearly outstanding work, the author describes in elegant detail the legal, educational, and administrative workings of Ibb, a small city in Yemen, in the 19th and 20th centuries. I had not heard of Ibb before, but will not now forget it. How nice to go to Ibb, I thought while reading the book, to sit under the tree and listen to the qadi (judge), or to discuss fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) with the Mufti in his halls. What a pleasant place it seems to be, a still functioning, organic, classical Islamic town. Brinkley Messick is a powerful observer. The underpinnings of life in Ibb are extensively, yet tastefully, examined, as is Ibb's setting in the larger context of Yemen. Many interesting personages are introduced in these pages, and Messick writes of them with sympathy and familiarity. Particularly intriguing is his description of fiqh manuals and their uses. These are the many basic handbooks of the madhhabs (interpretations of the shari'a based on the work of the early signal scholars of Islam). They are semantic and linguistic jewels, condensations and distillations of practical Islam, as it has until recently been known. These works are expounded in commentaries and are still used in traditional education throughout the Islamic world. In fact, there can be no detailed transmission of the knowledge and teachings of practical Islam without them. During the Spanish Inquisition (1478), while the Muslims of Spain were being "ethnically cleansed," as it were, these manuals were the one type of literature the beleaguered Muslims continually produced and preserved, written in their Eljamiado script and language. Many contemporary authors write tiresomely "about" Islamic topics, as from an isolated, distant, and elevated vantage point. Because of the ubiquitousness of this approach, one might think it the normal way of dealing with the subject. For a perspicacious reader, however, such works never answer the questions of how or why. All things Islamic are to some degree out of sync with what is thought to be normal in our Western perspective. True understanding requires more audacious intellectual approaches. Messick has achieved such an approach. Although it is a bit short on the why, this book's strong suit is how Islam actually works in a specific setting. It is the best description in English I have come across of how Islam is taught, learned, and put to use in a real location. Further, the author humanizes his subjects. The players are met in their formal roles, as they would like to be met, rather than as abstractions, dates, and figures. The flow of l9th-20th century Yemeni history is nicely represented in these pages. The reader is treated to an outline of the formation of Yemen as it came to be, concentrating on the special intellectual personalities and events that built the institutions that made pre-Ottoman Yemen what it was. The imperialism of the Ottomans in the Islamic world was unlike that of the British and French, whose machinations were to sink the traditional ship of classical Islam. …

The Practice of Love, Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire

Abstract: In this spirit she recommends the shifi to a 'nomadic' understanding of the subject as alone able to resist the potential 'microfascism' of all 'hegemonies' whatever their size, and however local. Such nomadic shifts, she argues 'designate a creative sort of becoming; a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge'. They also, one might argue, make it difficult to see how you would defend any positive form of hegemony or constructive solidarity (where does it leave, for example, the politics of the neo-Gramscians and advocates of 'radical democracy'?). Braidotti clearly intends to entice us with this vision of the territories and transgressions opened up to the 'nomadic' subject, and makes a number of astute points in the course of its elaboration. But overall I found these essays rather flatly written and repetitious in their argument. A little more self-irony and some more exacting editing would have considerably added to the pleasures of this particular voyage of discovery.