Download or read book Arab Fall written by Eric Trager and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood win power so quickly after the dramatic "Arab Spring" uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year reign in February 2011? And why did the Brotherhood fall from power even more quickly, culminating with the popular "rebellion" and military coup that toppled Egypt's first elected president, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013? In Arab Fall, Eric Trager examines the Brotherhood's decision making throughout this critical period, explaining its reasons for joining the 2011 uprising, running for a majority of the seats in the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections, and nominating a presidential candidate despite its initial promise not to do so. Based on extensive research in Egypt and interviews with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and cadres including Morsi, Trager argues that the very organizational characteristics that helped the Brotherhood win power also contributed to its rapid downfall. The Brotherhood's intensive process for recruiting members and its rigid nationwide command-chain meant that it possessed unparalleled mobilizing capabilities for winning the first post-Mubarak parliamentary and presidential elections. Yet the Brotherhood's hierarchical organizational culture, in which dissenters are banished and critics are viewed as enemies of Islam, bred exclusivism. This alienated many Egyptians, including many within Egypt's state institutions. The Brotherhood's insularity also prevented its leaders from recognizing how quickly the country was slipping from their grasp, leaving hundreds of thousands of Muslim Brothers entirely unprepared for the brutal crackdown that followed Morsi's overthrow. Trager concludes with an assessment of the current state of Egyptian politics and examines the Brotherhood's prospects for reemerging.
Download or read book Putting Islam to Work written by Gregory Starrett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-03-26 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. In Putting Islam to Work, Gregory Starrett focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced. During the twentieth century new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, Gregory Starrett demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam that are based in the market, the media, and the school.
Download or read book The Crisis of Islam written by Bernard Lewis and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-03-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first book since What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world. The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through thirteen centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States. While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award–winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.
Download or read book Counting Islam written by Tarek Masoud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does Islam seem to dominate Egyptian politics, especially when the country's endemic poverty and deep economic inequality would seem to render it promising terrain for a politics of radical redistribution rather than one of religious conservativism? This book argues that the answer lies not in the political unsophistication of voters, the subordination of economic interests to spiritual ones, or the ineptitude of secular and leftist politicians, but in organizational and social factors that shape the opportunities of parties in authoritarian and democratizing systems to reach potential voters. Tracing the performance of Islamists and their rivals in Egyptian elections over the course of almost forty years, this book not only explains why Islamists win elections, but illuminates the possibilities for the emergence in Egypt of the kind of political pluralism that is at the heart of what we expect from democracy.
Download or read book Defining Islam for the Egyptian State written by Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The important issue of state-religion relationship in the Middle East is investigated through a sophisticated analysis of state fatwas and of the public and institutional role of the Egyptian State Mufti from 1895 to present.
Download or read book Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism written by Dalia F. Fahmy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The liberatory sentiment that stoked the Arab Spring and saw the ousting of long-time Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak seems a distant memory. Democratically elected president Mohammad Morsi lasted only a year before he was forced from power to be replaced by precisely the kind of authoritarianism protestors had been railing against in January 2011. Paradoxically, this turn of events was encouraged by the same liberal activists and intelligentsia who’d pushed for progressive reform under Mubarak. This volume analyses how such a key contingent of Egyptian liberals came to develop outright illiberal tendencies. Interdisciplinary in scope, it brings together experts in Middle East studies, political science, philosophy, Islamic studies and law to address the failure of Egyptian liberalism in a holistic manner – from liberalism’s relationship with the state, to its role in cultivating civil society, to the role of Islam and secularism in the cultivation of liberalism. A work of impeccable scholarly rigour, Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism reveals the contemporary ramifications of the state of liberalism in Egypt.
Download or read book No God but God written by Geneive Abdo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-24 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shrouded in mystery, the Islamic presence in the Middle East evokes longstanding Western fears of terrorism and holy war. Our media have consistently focused on these extremes of Islam, overlooking a quiet yet pervasive religious movement that is now transforming the nation of Egypt. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, No God But God opens up previously inaccessible segments of Egyptian society--from the universities and professional sectors to the streets--to illustrate the deep penetration of "Popular Islamic" influence. Abdo provides a firsthand account of this peaceful movement, allowing its moderate leaders, street preachers, scholars, doctors, lawyers, men and women of all social classes to speak for themselves. Challenging Western stereotypes, she finds that this growing number of Islamists do not seek the violent overthrow of the government or a return to a medieval age. Instead, they believe their religious values are compatible with the demands of the modern world. They are working within and beyond the secular framework of the nation to gradually create a new society based on Islamic principles. Abdo narrates fascinating accounts of their methods and successes. Today, for example, university students meet in underground unions, despite a state ban. In addition, sheikhs have recently used their new legislative power to censor books and movies deemed to violate religious values. Both fascinating and unsettling, Abdo's findings identify a grassroots model for transforming a secular nation-state to an Islamic social order that will likely inspire other Muslim nations. This model cannot be ignored, for it will soon help organized Islamists to undermine secular control of Egypt and potentially jeopardize Western interests in the Arab world.
Download or read book The Caliphate of Man written by Andrew F. March and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?
Download or read book What Went Wrong written by Bernard Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-24 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life. In this intriguing volume, Bernard Lewis examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to understand why things had changed--how they had been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. Lewis provides a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil. He shows how the Middle East turned its attention to understanding European weaponry and military tactics, commerce and industry, government and diplomacy, education and culture. Lewis highlights the striking differences between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures from the 18th to the 20th centuries through thought-provoking comparisons of such things as Christianity and Islam, music and the arts, the position of women, secularism and the civil society, the clock and the calendar. Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis is one of the West's foremost authorities on Islamic history and culture. In this striking volume, he offers an incisive look at the historical relationship between the Middle East and Europe.
Download or read book The Peasants of the Fayyum written by Yossef Rapoport and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Islamic society was overwhelmingly a society of peasants, and the achievements of Islamic civilization depended, first and foremost, on agricultural production. Yet the history of the medieval Islamic countryside has been neglected or marginalized. Basic questions such as the social and religious identities of village communities, or the relationship of the peasant to the state, are either ignored or discussed from a normative point of view. This volume addresses this lacuna in our understanding of medieval Islam by presenting a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside. Dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, Abu 'Uthman al-Nabulusi's Villages of the Fayyum is as close as we get to the tax registers of any rural province. Not unlike the Domesday Book of medieval England, al-Nabulusi's work provides a wealth of detail for each village which far surpasses any other source for the rural economy of medieval Islam. It is a unique, comprehensive snap-shot of one rural society at one, significant, point in its history, and an insight into the way of life of the majority of the population in the medieval Islamic world. Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition of this work and the first translation into a European language. By opening up this key source to scholars, it will be an indispensable resource for historians of Egypt, of administration and rural life in the premodern world generally, and of the Middle East in particular.
Download or read book A Portrait of Egypt written by Mary Anne Weaver and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the likelihood of Egypt's secular society being overthrown in favor of a militant Islamic regime, and what effect that would have on the rest of the Arab world.
Download or read book The Muslim Brotherhood written by Barbara Zollner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most influential Islamist organisations today. Based in Egypt, its network includes branches in many countries of the Near and Middle East. Although the organisation has been linked to political violence in the past, it now proposes a politically moderate ideology. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood during the years of al-Hudaybi’s leadership, and how he sought to steer the organization away from the radical wing, inspired by Sayyid Qutb, into the more moderate Islamist organization it is today. It is his legacy which eventually fostered the development of non-violent political ideas. During the years of persecution, 1954 to 1971, radical and moderate Islamist ideas emerged within the Brotherhood’s midst. Inspired by Sayyid Qutb’s ideas, a radical wing evolved which subsequently fed into radical Islamist networks as we know them today. Yet, it was during the same period that al-Hudaybi and his followers proposed a moderate political interpretation, which was adopted by the Brotherhood and which forms its ideological basis today.
Download or read book Islam Is a Foreign Country written by Zareena Grewal and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.
Download or read book Domestic Constraints on South Korean Foreign Policy written by Scott A. Snyder and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays support the argument that strong and effective presidential leadership is the most important prerequisite for South Korea to sustain and project its influence abroad. That leadership should be attentive to the need for public consensus and should operate within established legislative mechanisms that ensure public accountability. The underlying structures sustaining South Korea’s foreign policy formation are generally sound; the bigger challenge is to manage domestic politics in ways that promote public confidence about the direction and accountability of presidential leadership in foreign policy.
Download or read book An American Woman Living in Egypt written by Cheri Berens and published by . This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cheri Berens had been conducting field research throughout Egypt and had settled into married life with her Egyptian husband when the Arab Spring began. Quickly recognizing that western media was concealing the truth, Cheri began documenting the events that were taking place. Never-ending violent protests caused chaos to distract the public while the Muslim Brotherhood censored and arrested members of the media, disabled the Supreme Court, removed judges, and began changing the constitution. Police were demonized in order to remove them, and once removed, police were replaced with members of Islamist militias. The national anthem and saluting the flag were banned. Egyptian history was removed from textbooks and replaced with Islamic History. Only an Islamic identity was acceptable to the Muslim Brotherhood. Through personal experiences, Cheri unfolds a fascinating story of a foreign culture and illustrates how Egypt's culture was being systematically removed and replaced with Islam. Though the final process was implemented in a matter of months, the foundation of takeover had been long laid. The Muslim Brotherhood had placed activists inside universities and the Islamification began by altering the minds of Egypt's youth. Giving historical insights to better understand what took place, Cheri exposes the Arab Spring for what it was--including U.S. involvement. Within weeks after Barack Obama was elected president, the State Department held an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. Muslim Brotherhood Youth attended this Summit and were trained to implement a false flag event to be used as a pretense for removing the government. Also at this Summit were representatives from CNN, MSNBC and other mainstream media, as well as Facebook and Google. Fake news and social media propaganda assisted the implementation of the Islamic takeover. Jam-packed with explosive information about U.S. involvement, Cheri fully demonstrates why there is a similar crisis lurking subversively inside America and exposes Islam for the devious system of takeover that it is.
Download or read book The Muslim Brotherhood written by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt, and what it means for the Islamic world Following the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood achieved a level of influence previously unimaginable. Yet the implications of the Brotherhood's rise and dramatic fall for the future of democratic governance, peace, and stability in the region are disputed and remain open to debate. Drawing on more than one hundred in-depth interviews as well as Arabic-language sources never before accessed by Western researchers, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham traces the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from its founding in 1928 to the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the watershed elections of 2011-2012. Highlighting elements of movement continuity and change, Wickham demonstrates that shifts in Islamist worldviews, goals, and strategies are not the result of a single strand of cause and effect, and provides a systematic, fine-grained account of Islamist group evolution in Egypt and the wider Arab world. In a new afterword, Wickham discusses what has happened in Egypt since Muhammad Morsi was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood fell from power.
Download or read book Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism written by John Calvert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-22 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an influential Egyptian ideologue credited with establishing the theoretical basis for radical Islamism in the post colonial Sunni Muslim world. Lacking a pure understanding of the leader's life and work, the popular media has conflated Qutb's moral purpose with the aims of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He is often portrayed as a terrorist, Islamo-Fascist, and advocate of murder. This book rescues Qutb from misrepresentation, tracing the evolution of his thought within the context of his time. An expert on social protest and political resistance in the modern Middle East, as well as Egyptian nationalism, John Calvert recounts Qutb's life from the small village in which he was raised to his execution at the behest of Abd al-Nasser's regime. His study remains sensitive to the cultural, political, social, and economic circumstances that shaped Qutb's thought-major developments that composed one of the most eventful periods in Egyptian history. These years witnessed the full flush of Britain's tutelary regime, the advent of Egyptian nationalism, and the political hegemony of the Free Officers. Qutb rubbed shoulders with Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, and Abd al-Nasser himself, though his Islamism originally had little to do with religion. Only in response to his harrowing experience in prison did Qutb come to regard Islam and kufr (infidelity) as oppositional, antithetical, and therefore mutually exclusive. Calvert shows how Qutb repackaged and reformulated the Islamic heritage to pose a challenge to authority, including those who claimed (falsely, he believed) to be Muslim.
