Download or read book Ancient Religions Modern Politics written by Michael Cook and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Islam is more political and fundamentalist than other religions Why does Islam play a larger role in contemporary politics than other religions? Is there something about the Islamic heritage that makes Muslims more likely than adherents of other faiths to invoke it in their political life? If so, what is it? Ancient Religions, Modern Politics seeks to answer these questions by examining the roles of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity in modern political life, placing special emphasis on the relevance—or irrelevance—of their heritages to today's social and political concerns. Michael Cook takes an in-depth, comparative look at political identity, social values, attitudes to warfare, views about the role of religion in various cultural domains, and conceptions of the polity. In all these fields he finds that the Islamic heritage offers richer resources for those engaged in current politics than either the Hindu or the Christian heritages. He uses this finding to explain the fact that, despite the existence of Hindu and Christian counterparts to some aspects of Islamism, the phenomenon as a whole is unique in the world today. The book also shows that fundamentalism—in the sense of a determination to return to the original sources of the religion—is politically more adaptive for Muslims than it is for Hindus or Christians. A sweeping comparative analysis by one of the world's leading scholars of premodern Islam, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics sheds important light on the relationship between the foundational texts of these three great religious traditions and the politics of their followers today.

Download or read book What is Political Islam written by Jocelyne Cesari and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Présentation de l'éditeur : "The debate continues unabated: Is political Islam decipherable through the tenets of the Islamic tradition-or is it a tool of secular actors who shrewdly misuse religious references? Is it an expression of modernity, or a return to the past? Eschewing these dichotomies, Jocelyne Cesari demystifies the continuous process of interaction between secular and religious actors and institutions that is at the core of political mobilization in the name of Islam. Cesari traces the origins of political Islam to the inception of the modern nation-state, revealing the decisive role of secular nationalist rulers in its creation. In the process, she puts to rest the myth that there has been a lack of modernization in the Muslim world-and shows how that myth has proven dangerous. Ranging from Senegal to Egypt, from Indonesia to Iraq, her analysis provides a much needed corrective to the "conventional wisdom." "

Download or read book Islam and Politics 3rd edition written by Peter Mandaville and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an accessible and comprehensive account of political Islam in the contemporary world. Providing a broad introduction to all major aspects of the interface of Islam and politics it combines an accessible style with sufficient depth for the academic classroom. Drawing on insights from comparative politics and Islamic studies, this book explains the complex interaction between Islam, society, the state, and processes of globalization. Preserving the previous editions’ strong focus on key concepts from Islamic history as they relate to contemporary political Islam, this new edition includes coverage of important developments and updated country overviews from the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Features include: Two new case studies on Southeast Asia and Europe. Exploration of the origins and development of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and various regional affiliates of the global Salafi-Jihadi movement. Coverage of contemporary debates about radicalization and violent extremism. Examination of questions of Islam’s compatibility with democracy; the role of women; and Islamic perspectives on violence and conflict. Discussion of major theoretical debates in the literature on political Islam, the debate on Islamic exceptionalism and whether Islamist politics can be understood using the conventional tools of comparative political science and International Relations. These updates ensure the book remains the single best introduction to the topic of political Islam for students and scholars, foreign policy professionals and the general reader.

Download or read book Islam s Political Culture written by Nasim Ahmad Jawed and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political dimension of Islam in predivided Pakistan (1947-1971), one of the first new Muslim nations to commit itself to an Islamic political order and one in which the national debate on Islamic, political, and ideological issues has been the most persistent, focused, and rich of any dialogues in the contemporary Muslim world. Nasim Jawed draws on the findings of a survey he conducted among two influential social groups—the ulama (traditional religious leaders) and the modern professionals—as well as on the writings of Muslim intellectuals. He probes the major Islamic positions on critical issues concerning national identity, the purpose of the state, the form of government, and free, socialist, and mixed economies. This study contributes to an enhanced understanding of Islam's political culture worldwide, since the issues, positions, and arguments are often similar across the Muslim world. The empirical findings of the study not only outline the ideological backdrop of contemporary Islamic reassertion, but also reveal diversity as well as tensions within it.

Download or read book Islam and the Foundations of Political Power written by Ali Abdel Razek and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The translation of an essay first published in Egypt in 1925, which took the contemporaries of its author by storm. At a time when the Muslim world was in great turmoil over the question of the abolition of the caliphate by Mustapha Kamal Ataturk in Turke

Download or read book Islam the State and Political Authority written by A. Afsaruddin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expert essays in this volume deal with critically important topics concerning Islam and politics in both the pre-modern and modern periods, such as the nature of government, the relationship between politics and theology, Shi'i conceptions of statecraft, notions of public duty, and the compatibility of Islam and democratic governance.

Download or read book Modern Islamic Political Thought written by Hamid Enayat and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-06-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revival and power of religious feelings among Muslims since the Iranian revolution presents a complicated and often perplexing picture of the politics of modern Islam. What are the ideas which have influenced the direction of these trends? Here, Hamis Enayat provides an answer by describing and interpreting some of the major Islamic political ideas, especially those expressed by Iranians and Egyptians, as well as thinkers from Pakistan, India, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. He examines the political differences between the two main schools in Islam - Shi'ism and Sunnism. Also covered in the book is: the concept of the Islamic state; and the Muslim response to the challenge of alien and modern ideologies such as nationalism, democracy and socialism - as well as notions of Shi'i modernism.

Download or read book Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East RLE Politics of Islam written by Metin Heper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent resurgence of Islam in the Middle East is a far more complex phenomenon than is often suggested by those analyses which reduce recent developments in the area to no more than an intensification of religiosity. Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East challenges that perception of the contemporary Middle East. It explores the nature of the Islamic revival and attempts to establish the original impulse behind particular instances of Islamic resurgence. It also examines the degree to which religious institutions have served as a mechanism for expressing secular demands and frustrations and investigates to what extent politics is a functional alternative to religion. First published in 1984.

Download or read book The Future of Political Islam written by Graham E. Fuller and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-05-12 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham E. Fuller brings a lifetime of experience in the Muslim world to shed light on how common, even universal, political behavior takes on a distinctively Islamic guise in the Muslim world. By examining the social, economic and political context, he explains that the struggle between the fundamentalists and liberals will determine the future of political Islam. This sweeping survey of trends in the Muslim world, from Morocco to the Philippines, explores the diversity of Islamic political activity and makes clear that Islamic political movements represent a broad spectrum of outlook and behavior. Whether traditional or liberal, these movements have become an important vehicle for the concerns, aspirations and grievances of vast numbers of Muslims worldwide and are a natural outgrowth of Muslim history. Fuller contends that while political Islam is the dominant intellectual current, a focus on radicalism and extremism blinds us from another trend: liberal political Islam. The issues are not what is Islam, but what Muslims want, and not whether Islam will play a central role in politics, but which Islam. As Islam has become the vocabulary for political and social expression, it has come to serve various agendas.

Download or read book Awakening Islam written by Stéphane Lacroix and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.

Download or read book Schooling Islam written by Robert W. Hefner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line. Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education.

Download or read book The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam written by Omid Safi and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleventh and twelfth centuries comprised a period of great significance in Islamic history. The Great Saljuqs, a Turkish-speaking tribe hailing from central Asia, ruled the eastern half of the Islamic world for a great portion of that time. In a far-r

Download or read book Young Islam written by Avi Max Spiegel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the competition for young recruits is creating rivalries among Islamists today Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. Young Islam takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support—a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting visions of Islam itself. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among rank-and-file activists in Morocco, Avi Spiegel shows how Islamist movements are encountering opposition from an unexpected source—each other. In vivid and compelling detail, he describes the conflicts that arise as Islamist groups vie with one another for new recruits, and the unprecedented fragmentation that occurs as members wrangle over a shared urbanized base. Looking carefully at how political Islam is lived, expressed, and understood by young people, Spiegel moves beyond the top-down focus of current research. Instead, he makes the compelling case that Islamist actors are shaped more by their relationships to each other than by their relationships to the state or even to religious ideology. By focusing not only on the texts of aging elites but also on the voices of diverse and sophisticated Muslim youths, Spiegel exposes the shifting and contested nature of Islamist movements today—movements that are being reimagined from the bottom up by young Islam. The first book to shed light on this new and uncharted era of Islamist pluralism in the Middle East and North Africa, Young Islam uncovers the rivalries that are redefining the next generation of political Islam.

Download or read book Islam And Democracy written by Fatima Mernissi and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Islam compatible with democracy? Must fundamentalism win out in the Middle East, or will democracy ever be possible? In this now-classic book, Islamic sociologist Fatima Mernissi explores the ways in which progressive Muslims--defenders of democracy, feminists, and others trying to resist fundamentalism--must use the same sacred texts as Muslims who use them for violent ends, to prove different views. Updated with a new introduction by the author written in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Islam and Democracy serves as a guide to the players moving the pieces on the rather grim Muslim chessboard. It shines new light on the people behind today's terrorist acts and raises provocative questions about the possibilities for democracy and human rights in the Islamic world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of the Middle East today, Islam and Democracy is as timely now as it was upon its initial, celebrated publication.

Download or read book The Politics of Islamic Law written by Iza R. Hussin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

Download or read book Political Islam written by Nazih Ayubi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studying six Islamic states in detail, Ayubi encompasses innovative material on sex and the family, and on the emerging alternative economic and social networks of Islamic banks, schools, and hospitals in those states.

Download or read book Muslim Politics written by Dale F. Eickelman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere. As they examine the role of women in public life and Islamic perspectives on modernization and free speech, the authors probe the diversity of the contemporary Islamic experience, suggesting general trends and challenging popular Western notions of Islam as a monolithic movement. In so doing, they clarify concepts such as tradition, authority, ethnicity, pro-test, and symbolic space, notions that are crucial to an in-depth understanding of ongoing political events. This book poses questions about ideological politics in a variety of transnational and regional settings throughout the Muslim world. Europe and North America, for example, have become active Muslim centers, profoundly influencing trends in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. The authors examine the long-term cultural and political implications of this transnational shift as an emerging generation of Muslims, often the products of secular schooling, begin to reshape politics and society--sometimes in defiance of state authorities. Scholars, mothers, government leaders, and musicians are a few of the protagonists who, invoking shared Islamic symbols, try to reconfigure the boundaries of civic debate and public life. These symbolic politics explain why political actions are recognizably Muslim, and why "Islam" makes a difference in determining the politics of a broad swath of the world.