This paper examines Tanzanian Muslims’ practical and discursive stances on AIDS in relation to the context in which they are produced. The AIDS problematic is interacting with lively debates, as for the last two decades Muslim reformists have been demanding revisions to ritual practice and a more restrictive application of Muslim social norms. The state-sponsored central organisation for Tanzan...

see Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). See also Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). On twentiethcentury reformist movements and political debates there is a vast literature; see, e.g., Richard P. ...

NOTE: apologies for the somewhat misleading title. This paper, a follow up to one presented at a History Workshop conference at Wits a few years ago, looks more at the outcome of these struggles than the process of struggle during the 1970s itself. In that earlier paper I argued that between 1973 and 1980 Black workers proved able to use the feeble state reformist structures in a changing indus...

Iranian moderates made significant gains in the country’s February 2016 legislative elections. The reformists won 85 out of 290 seats compared with 75 seats for the conservatives. However, the reformists represented in the new parliament have no historical continuity with the reformist camp of the former President Mohammad Khatami; those reformists who might challenge the supreme leaders ideolo...

Abstract International institutions underpinning the ‘liberal international order’ are increasingly contested by established Western powers. This article contributes to a better understanding of this novel challenge ‘from within’. We conceptualize four types contestation frames according (1) whether contesting states attribute source grievances specific practices or underlying principles an ins...