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Aqa Musa Naghiev Karbala'i (1849–1919)—an oil magnate from Baku and a significant figure in the modern history of Baku and Azerbaijan—and his multiple identities are the focus of this article. Alongside his National-Azerbaijani identity, Naghiev's religious identity was divided between the Shi'i Muslim and Bahá'í identities. The circumstances in which Naghiev was born and raised, and lived, especially during his adulthood—as a Shi'i who had converted to the Baha'i faith, living among the majority Shi'i Muslim population who were generally alien to Baha'is—dictated, at times, the need to carefully maneuver between these two religious identities. The Baha'i principle of hikmat provided Naghiev with the appropriate means for this during his lifetime. The problem, however, is in the way his identity has been engineered and presented in Azerbaijan's national historical consciousness as an Azerbaijani-Muslim, concealing his Baha'i religious identity, in spite of his public activities for Baha'is and the Baha'i community, which included financing the building of the Baha'i Spiritual Assembly in Baku (Ruhanie) and being the chairman of its management committee. In this article, I explain this complex picture of Naghiev's multiple identities through the use of primary (documents from national and private archives, and interviews) and secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Introduction to this Special Issue on '"Love Jihad": Sexuality, Reproduction and the Construction of the Predatory Muslim Male' provides a theoretical overview and suggests an analytical lens for how to understand "Love Jihad" and related notions of Islamization through marriage, sexuality, and reproduction. We define "Love Jihad" as the notion that Muslim men intentionally and strategically allure and entrap non-Muslim women with the intent to marry and convert them to Islam as part of an Islamization project. We suggest a two-fold understanding of the concept of "Love Jihad". First, the concept needs to be understood as a globalizing trope, originating from India and spreading to a wide range of cultural and national contexts across the world. Second, we propose to understand the specific term "love jihad" beyond its referential specificity, and thereby broadening it into an analytical concept for exploring related concepts (such as "sexual jihad" and "demographic jihad"), as well as related notions of Muslim men as sexual predators (in certain geographical settings known as "rapefugees"). We therefore include in our analysis related notions such as Islamic womb fare, "grooming", "The Great Replacement", and "unethical conversion" in marriage where they relate to flows of gendered nationalist imaginaries of the Muslim "Other". The aim of this Introduction—as well as the Special Issue—is to contribute to the study of Islamophobia as a global phenomenon and to deepen our understanding of the gendered imaginaries of anti-Muslim nationalist formations across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the transnational flows of constructions of the hypersexualized Muslim male through a comparative analysis of love jihad in India and the specter of grooming gangs in the UK. While the former is conceived as an act of seduction and conversion, and the latter through violent rape imaginaries, foregrounding both of these narratives are sexual, gender, and family dynamics that are integral to the fear of demographic change. Building upon these narratives, this study analyzes how influential women in Hindu nationalist and European/North American far-right milieus circulate images, videos, and discourses on social media that depict Muslim men as predatory and violent, targeting Hindu and white girls, respectively. By positioning themselves as the daughters, wives, and mothers of the nation, these far-right female influencers invoke a sense of reproductive urgency, as well as advance claims of the perceived threat of, and safety from, hypersexualized Muslim men. This article illustrates how local ideological narratives of Muslim sexuality are embedded into global Islamophobic tropes of gendered nationalist imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]