Download or read book Freedoms Delayed written by Timur Kuran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to diverse indices of political performance, the Middle East is the world's least free region. Some believe that it is Islam that hinders liberalization. Others retort that Islam cannot be a factor because the region is no longer governed under Islamic law. This book by Timur Kuran, author of the influential Long Divergence, explores the lasting political effects of the Middle East's lengthy exposure to Islamic law. It identifies several channels through which Islamic institutions, both defunct and still active, have limited the expansion of basic freedoms under political regimes of all stripes: secular dictatorships, electoral democracies, monarchies legitimated through Islam, and theocracies. Kuran suggests that Islam's rich history carries within it the seeds of liberalization on many fronts; and that the Middle East has already established certain prerequisites for a liberal order. But there is no quick fix for the region's prevailing record of human freedoms.
Download or read book Freedom s Delay written by Allen Carden and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South. This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery’s demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation. Freedom’s Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts—political, literary, legal, moral, and social—made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Freedom’s Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man’s cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states’ rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden’s inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom’s Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom. With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public. Allen Carden is professor of history at Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, California. He is the author of Puritan Christianity in America: Religion and Life in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.
Download or read book Guant namo Diary written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed national bestseller, the first and only diary written by a Guantánamo detainee during his imprisonment, now with previously censored material restored. When GUANTÁNAMO DIARY was first published--heavily redacted by the U.S. government--in 2015, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was still imprisoned at the detainee camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, despite a federal court ruling ordering his release, and it was unclear when or if he would ever see freedom. In October 2016, he was finally released and reunited with his family. During his 14-year imprisonment, the United States never charged him with a crime. Now for the first time, he is able to tell his story in full, with previously censored material restored. This searing diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir---terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. GUANTÁNAMO DIARY is a document of immense emotional power and historical importance.
Download or read book Freedoms Delayed written by Timur Kuran and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freedoms Delayed is written for educated readers interested in the deep historical forces that account for the Middle East's poor record on basic human freedoms. It shows that the region's traditional institutions are critical to both understanding its political history and identifying its potential for liberalization on various fronts"--
Download or read book The Long Divergence written by Timur Kuran and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-11 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How religious barriers stalled capitalism in the Middle East In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind—in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions. Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life—including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies—all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history—will take generations to overcome. The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.
Download or read book Freedom s Captives written by Yesenia Barragan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom's Captives offers a compelling, narrative-driven history of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Colombian Pacific.
Download or read book For the Muslims written by Edwy Plenel and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A piercing denunciation of Islamophobia in France, in the tradition of Emile Zola At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming “There is a problem with Islam in France,” thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims have been strengthened by the backlash since the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, coming to represent a new ‘common sense’ in the political landscape, and we have seen a similar logic play out in the United States and Europe. Edwy Plenel, former editorial director of Le Monde, essayist and founder of the investigative journalism website Mediapart tackles these claims head-on, taking the side of his compatriots of Muslim origin, culture or belief, against those who make them into scapegoats. He demonstrates how a form of “Republican and secularist fundamentalism” has become a mask to hide a new form of virulent Islamophobia. At stake for Plenel is not just solidarity but fidelity to the memory and heritage of emancipatory struggles and he writes in defence of the Muslims, just as Zola wrote in defence of the Jews and Sartre wrote in defence of the blacks. For if we are to be for the oppressed then we must be for the Muslims.
Download or read book Islam Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment written by Ahmet T. Kuru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.
Download or read book Islam and Mammon written by Timur Kuran and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The doctrine of "Islamic economics" entered debates over the social role of Islam in the mid-twentieth century. Since then it has pursued the goal of restructuring economies according to perceived Islamic teachings. Beyond its most visible practical achievement--the establishment of Islamic banks meant to avoid interest--it has promoted Islamic norms of economic behavior and founded redistribution systems modeled after early Islamic fiscal practices. In this bold and timely critique, Timur Kuran argues that the doctrine of Islamic economics is simplistic, incoherent, and largely irrelevant to present economic challenges. Observing that few Muslims take it seriously, he also finds that its practical applications have had no discernible effects on efficiency, growth, or poverty reduction. Why, then, has Islamic economics enjoyed any appeal at all? Kuran's answer is that the real purpose of Islamic economics has not been economic improvement but cultivation of a distinct Islamic identity to resist cultural globalization. The Islamic subeconomies that have sprung up across the Islamic world are commonly viewed as manifestations of Islamic economics. In reality, Kuran demonstrates, they emerged to meet the economic aspirations of socially marginalized groups. The Islamic enterprises that form these subeconomies provide advancement opportunities to the disadvantaged. By enhancing interpersonal trust, they also facilitate intragroup transactions. These findings raise the question of whether there exist links between Islam and economic performance. Exploring these links in relation to the long-unsettled question of why the Islamic world became underdeveloped, Kuran identifies several pertinent social mechanisms, some beneficial to economic development, others harmful.
Download or read book Islam and Good Governance written by M. A. Muqtedar Khan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances an Islamic political philosophy based on the concept of Ihsan, which means to do beautiful things. The author moves beyond the dominant model of Islamic governance advanced by modern day Islamists. The political philosophy of Ihsan privileges process over structure, deeds over identity, love over law and mercy and forgiveness over retribution. The work invites Muslims to move away from thinking about the form of Islamic government and to strive to create a self-critical society that defends national virtue and generates institutions and practices that provide good governance.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 2011 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 194 countries and 14 territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.
Download or read book The Christian Origins of Tolerance written by Jed W. Atkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tolerance is usually regarded as a quintessential liberal value. This position is supported by a standard liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state, tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience and religion. Commitment to tolerance is independent of judgements about justice and the common good. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our understanding of tolerance's premodern origins and impoverishes present-day debates when many members of Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions, have reservations about liberal tolerance. Setting aside the standard liberal history, The Christian Origins of Tolerance recovers tolerance's beginnings in a forgotten tradition forged by North African Christian thinkers of the first five centuries CE in critical conversation with one another, St. Paul, the rival tradition of Stoicism, and the political and legal thought of the wider Roman world. This North African Christian tradition conceives of tolerance as patience within plurality. This tradition does not require the separation of religion and the secular state as a prerequisite for tolerance and embeds individual rights and the freedoms of conscience and religion within a wider theoretical framework that derives accounts of political judgement and patience from theological reflection on God's roles as a patient father and just judge. By recovering this forgotten tradition, we can better understand and assess the choices made by leading theorists of liberal tolerance, and as a result, think better about how to achieve peaceful coexistence within and beyond liberal democracies in a world in which many Christians and Muslims are sceptical of liberalism.
Download or read book Complete Works written by Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu and published by . This book was released on 1777 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Private Truths Public Lies written by Timur Kuran and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-16 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change. In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency. Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.
Download or read book Slavery and the Making of America written by James Oliver Horton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion volume to the four-part PBS series on the history of American slavery--narrated by Morgan Freeman and scheduled to air in February 2006--illuminates the human side of this inhumane institution, presenting it largely through the stories of the slaves themselves. Features 120 illustrations.
Download or read book The Mauritanian written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously published as Guantánamo Diary, this momentous account and international bestseller is soon to be a major motion picture The first and only diary written by a Guantánamo detainee during his imprisonment, now with previously censored material restored. Mohamedou Ould Slahi was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay in 2002. There he suffered the worst of what the prison had to offer, including months of sensory deprivation, torture and sexual assault. In October 2016 he was released without charge. This is his extraordinary story, as inspiring as it is enraging.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 1997 1998 written by Adrian Karatnycky and published by Transaction Pub. This book was released on 1998 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comparative Survey of Freedom is an institutional effort by Freedom House to monitor the progress and decline of political rights and civil liberties in 191 nations and 59 related territories. These year-end reviews of freedom began in 1955, when they were called the Balance Sheet of Freedom and, still later, the Annual Survey of the Progress of Freedom. This program was expanded in the early 1970s, and has appeared in Freedom Review since 1973. It has also been issued in a more developed context as a yearbook since 1978. Since 1989, the Survey project has been a year-long effort produced by regional experts, consultants and human rights specialists. The Survey derives its information from a wide range of sources. Most valued of these are the many human rights activists, journalists, editors and political figures around the world who keep us informed of the human rights situation in their countries. Throughout the year. Freedom House personnel regularly conduct fact-finding missions to gain more in-depth knowledge of the vast political transformations affecting our world. During these week-to-month-long investigations, we make every effort to meet a cross-section of political parties and associations, human rights monitors, religious figures, representatives of both the private sector and trade union movement, academics and journalists. During the past year. Freedom House staff traveled to numerous countries throughout most of the world's geographical and political regions. The Survey project team also consults a vast array of published source materials, ranging from the reports of other human rights organizations to often rare, regional newspapers and magazines. This year's Survey team includes: Adrian Karatnycky, Martin Edwin Anderson, Kristen Guida, Marshall Freeman Harris, Thomas R. Lansner, Arch Puddington, Leonard R. Sussman, and George Zarycky. The general editor of Freedom in the World is Roger Kaplan; the managing editor is Tara Kelly. This year's research coordinator was Charles Graybow.
