Since the beginning of the 21st century, the news of many media outlets have been full with the stories about Islamic fundamentalism. However, at the same time, there has been a counterargument against this way of media coverage of Islam, which argues that “Islam per se should not be confused with the extremism”. Then, what is exactly the main stream within Islam, or in other words, who are the moderate faction in Islam, which are different from the extremists. Moreover, what kind of thoughts do moderate Muslims have and how do they put their ideas into practice? As a matter of fact, the reality of the unextreme “majority” has not been studied well. Taking into consideration the fact that one fourth of the world population is Muslims, it can be said that researching on the main stream is an urgent task.
Islamic Moderate Trend Research Group — setting the feature of the moderate faction as "central, main" — will examine those movements from the perspective of modernization of intellectual resourcing, and describe diversity of thoughts and practices of them.
The research group, as a part of its activities — along with its research and analyses efforts — tries to build a new information system that would not help only the experts of the Middle East and Islam, but also would be useful for the researchers of other genres and areas.
Aiming to establish an intellectual infrastructure, which has been one the goals that this research group has been promoting for many years, given the current issues of the Islamic World, becomes even more important task.
【Main Research Themes】
Islamic Moderate Trend Research Group — setting the feature of the moderate faction as "central, main" — will examine those movements from the perspective of modernization of intellectual resourcing, and describe diversity of thoughts and practices of them.
The research group, as a part of its activities — along with its research and analyses efforts — tries to build a new information system that would not help only the experts of the Middle East and Islam, but also would be useful for the researchers of other genres and areas.
Aiming to establish an intellectual infrastructure, which has been one the goals that this research group has been promoting for many years, given the current issues of the Islamic World, becomes even more important task.
【Main Research Themes】
- Contemporary Scatter plot of the Islamic revival movements
- Thoughts of the moderate main stream, and their strategies
- Organizations, movements and international network of the moderate main stream
- Dynamic transformation of the relationship between the state and the intellectuals of the moderate main stream
- Modernization of intellectual resource of the moderate main stream
- Media, information environment, communication of the moderate main stream in Islam
- Consensus and issues in dispute of the modern Islamic Jurisprudence
- Confrontation axis between the moderate main stream and the extremists
- The theory of the moderate main stream ummah and diplomatic strategies of the Islamic countries
- Cooperation between the moderate main stream intellectuals of Islamic countries and non-Islamic countries
- Conceptualizing the theory of civilized Islam and its prospectus
- Islamic Moderate Trends Research Group: Leader
- KOSUGI Yasushi (Professor and Director, Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University / Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University)
- Islamic Moderate Trends Research Group: Co-Researchers
- SUECHIKA Kota (Professor, Department of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University)
- CHIBA Yushi (Associate Professor, Faculty of Intercultural Communication, Komatsu University)
- YAMAO Dai (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University)
- YAMANE So (Professor, Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University; Part-time Lecturer, ASAFAS, Kyoto University)
- YOKOTA Takayuki (Associate Professor, School of Information and Communication, Meiji University)
- Islamic Moderate Trends Research Group: Research Collaborators
- KURODA Ayaka (Associate Professor, Asia-Japan Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University)
- SATO Marie ((Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University)
- SUNAGA Emiko (Project Researcher, Uehiro Project for the Asian Research Library, The University of Tokyo)
- HORINUKI Koji (Senior Researcher, JIME Center, The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan)
- YAMAMOTO Kensuke (Leturer at University of Shizuoka, School of International Relations)
- WATANABE Shun (Researcher, JIME Center, The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan)
