Modern Arab Journalism offers a new outlook in studying Arab news media. It approaches its subject from an innovative angle, asking a series of key questions: * How is Arab journalism different from or similar to journalism in other countries? * What defines the tasks of journalists? * Who has access to this field? * How is power distributed inside the field of Arab journalism? * When were the media programs launched at Arab universities and what characterizes them? Although the field of Arab journalism has received tremendous attention from the public as well as journalistic circles around the world in recent times, this book presents the first detailed exploration of the area, opening up a new research agenda and challenging the concepts taken for granted in Arab media scholarship. Key Features: * Includes discussion of neglected issues such as globalisation and Arab media * Reviews Arab scholars' work in the area * Presents a challenging discussion about the role of Arab media in the public sphere * Offers a detailed case study of the reporting of the Iraq War in 2003

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant and enduring Sunni Islamist organization of the contemporary era. Its roots lay in the Middle East but today it is both a local and global movement. Under the slogan that "Islam is the solution" the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideologues have impacted on the political evolution of the region. The Muslim Brotherhood is variously regarded as a true force for moderation among Islamists or a facade behind which lies a terroristic fundamentalist threat which could undermine global security agendas. The Arab Spring has brought the Muslim Brotherhood to the fore of regional politics once more. The face of the Brotherhood and its ambitions are slowly being realised as state-based power is re-ordered across the Middle East.

The book will examine the genesis and evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East with chapters devoted to specific cases and localities where the Brotherhood and its ideas have made and are making important impacts on society, the state and politics. Within these chapters the author will assess in detail the dynamics of particular themes of Islamist politics associated with the Brotherhood such as democracy, equality, pan-Islamism, radicalism, violence, reform, the Palestine issue and gender. This will reveal an evolutionary trend within the movement since its founding in Egypt in 1928 to its manifestation as the largest Sunni Islamist movement in the Middle East in the 21st century. Drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with the leaders and cadres this book presents an evolving standpoint of a newly resurgent movement that is significantly organised to take the opportunities for power and electoral competition offered by the Arab Spring.

The book will also question whether the Muslim Brotherhood can demonstrate to its sceptics that an accommodation with democracy and the presence of a secular trend within the region can be made. The book will also be the first study to deal with the ascension to power, through the ballot box, of the Muslim Brotherhood (including in its localised forms) in the Palestinian territories, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere to analyse the impact of this in terms of Western policy debates on whether and how they should engage with this manifestation of political Islam.

The Kurdish Movement in Turkey's growing alliance with Islam One of the fault lines of Turkish politics traditionally has been the divide between religious and secular movements. However, as Zeki Sarigil argues, the secular Kurdish movement in Turkey has increasingly become aligned with Islam. As a result, Islam has become part of the movement's political discourse, strategies and actions. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics traces the evolving relations between the leftist, secular Kurdish movement and Islam, from an apathetic and/or antagonistic attitude in the 1970s and 1980s to an increasingly Islam-friendly approach in the 1990s to an attitude of accommodation and the rise of Kurdish-Islamic synthesis in the early 2000s. Based on 104 interviews in several provinces in Turkey (primarily Ankara, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tunceli) between 2011 and 2015 as well as ethnographic data, public opinion surveys and statements from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Kurdish leaders, Sarigil shows how the secular Kurdish movement increasingly has been endorsing Islam and Islamic actors. The reasons for this Islamic opening are global, national, and local; Sarigil demonstrates that a group of strategic and ideological factors have encouraged and/or forced Kurdish leaders to redraw symbolic and social boundaries of the movement. Namely, with the end of the Cold War support for Marxist ideas collapsed, creating increasingly more favorable responses towards religion. In addition, the movement's need to expand its social basis and popularity; electoral politics; and legitimacy struggles against rival political actors were other major factors, which triggered the Kurdish movement's boundary expansion (i.e. its Islamic opening). The study also shows that the Kurdish boundary making was not without any tension or contestation. The boundary expansion by Kurdish ethnopolitical elites triggered both internal and external boundary contestations. The movement's embrace of Islam on a more widespread level has major ramifications for politics in Turkey and in the region. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics has important insight into the PKK, modern Turkish and Islamic societies and highlights the increasing role of Islam in global politics.

"Saddam Hussein and Islam, 1968-2003, " offers an intellectual history of the Bathi Party from the 1940s through 2003. Amatzia Baram focuses on the transition from its early insistence on "unity, freedom, and socialism" to its Islamization by the time it was toppled by U.S. forces in 2003, a change largely impelled by the need to rally Iraqis against Iran during their war of 1980-88. Baram reveals signs that Saddam Hussein himself became some sort of born-again Muslim, though these signs are inconclusive.

Sources include open source material but also internal secret files and highly classified audiotapes of Saddam Hussein that were made available to researchers at the Conflict Records Research Center at National Defense University and some documents at the Hoover Institution.

This first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato's Timaeus considers the role of Galen of Pergamum (129-c. 216 CE) in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit for epistemic authority - the right to define and explain natural reality. Aileen Das situates Galen's work on disciplinary boundaries in the context of medicine's ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as superior knowers of the cosmos vis-a-vis doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities.

Although the position of Saudi women within society draws media attention throughout the world, young Saudi men remain part of a silent mass, their thoughts and views rarely heard outside of the Kingdom. Based on primary research across Saudi Arabia with young men from a diverse range of backgrounds, Mark C. Thompson allows for this distinct group of voices to be heard, revealing their opinions and attitudes towards the societal and economic transformations affecting their lives within a gender-segregated society and examining the challenges and dilemmas facing young Saudi men in the twenty-first century. From ideas and beliefs about, identity, education, employment, marriage prospects and gender segregation, as well as political participation and exclusion, this study in turn invites us to reconsider the future of Saudi Arabia as a globalized kingdom.

Alone among the world's religions, Islam is not just surviving but flourishing. Yet many people know little about Islam and regard its continuing attraction as something of a mystery. In this book, Du Pasquier, an award-winning Swiss journalist, provides a thorough introduction to Muslim belief, history and culture. He deals not only with topical issues, such as 'fundamentalism' and the status of Muslim women, but provides an overview of the Qur'an, the Prophet, Islamic history, and the nature of Muslim art and literature. Unbiased yet passionate, the book offers an 'unveiling' which must be heeded if the present mutual incomprehension between East and West is to be overcome.

WINNER OF THE BRITISH-KUWAIT FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY PRIZE This book presents general readers and specialists alike with a broad survey of Islamic political thought in the six centuries from the rise of Islam to the Mongol invasions. Based on a wide variety of sources, it seeks to bring out the enormous scope and high level of historical (and, in some cases, contemporary) interest of medieval Muslim thinking on this subject. The author aims to make Islamic political thought easier for modern readers to understand by relating it to the contexts in which it was formulated, analysing it in terms familiar to the reader, and, where possible, comparing it with medieval European and modern thought. Guiding the reader through this complex history on a tour of one of the great civilizations of the pre-modern world, the book brings out the fascinating nature of medieval Islamic political thought, both in its own right and as the background to political thinking in the Muslim world today. Key Features * Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field * All concepts have been glossed and all persons, events and historical developments have been identified or summarised, both on first encounter and in the index (where the number of the page containing the gloss will be emboldened) * Specialists are addressed in the footnotes; non-specialists are free to skip these and read an uncluttered text

This book explores the myriad diversities of South Asian Islam from a historical perspective attuned to the lived practices of Muslims in various portions of South Asia, outside of Urdu, Persian, or Arabic language perspectives. These perspectives are, in some cases taken both from literal regions rarely noticed within discussions of South Asian Islam, such as Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. In other contributions the perspectives draw on historiographic interventions about the role of fakirs in South Asian history, qasbahs in South Asian history, and the role of Aligarh students within the Pakistan movement. As a collection of voices aimed at stimulating debate about the range and diversity of South Asian Islam, the book probes meanings and markers of categories like "Indic," "Islamicate," and "local" or "global" Islam within the context of South Asia. Relevant to debates in the history of South Asia as well as Islamic studies, this collection will serve as a reference point for discussions about South Asian Islam as well as the nature and role of vernacularization as a cultural process. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam's beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

Toward an Islamic Reformation is an ambitious attempt to modernize Islamic law, calling for reform of the historical formulations of Islamic law, commonly known as Shari'a that is perceived by many Muslims to be part of the Islamic faith. As a Muslim, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is sensitive to and appreciative of the delicate relationship between Islam as a religion and Islamic law. Nevertheless, he considers that the questions raised here must be resolved if the public law of Islam is to be implemented today. An-Na'im draws upon the teachings and writings of Sudanese reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha to provide what some have called the intellectual foundations for a total reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of Islamic public law.

For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.

By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.

The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost.

"Nakba" brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.

Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles

This book discusses recent trends and issues in the scholarly study of the Qur'an and its exegesis. The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented development in qur'anic studies in terms of both the number of volumes that have been produced and the wide range of issues covered. It is not an exaggeration to say that the field of qur'anic studies today has become the 'crown' of Islamic studies. In this book, scholars of diverse approaches critically engage with the Qur'an and its exegesis, including questions about the milieu in which the Qur'an emerged, the Qur'an's relation to the biblical tradition, its chronology, textual integrity, and its literary features. In addition, this volume addresses recent scholarship on tafsir (qur'anic exegesis), including thematic interpretation, diacronic and syncronic readings of the Qur'an. Various approaches to understanding the Muslim scripture with or without tafsir are also discussed.

This collection is a study of Islamic thought and institutions that represents a critical introduction to the system of Islamic belief and practice from a social science perspective, emphasizing the global nature of Islam in the twentieth century.
With a new introduction and index, the collection will prove an invaluable reference tool and teaching aid.

These essays, written over a period of thirty years, crystallise Professor Issawi's insights on Arab civilisation. They cover a wide variety of subjects: cultural and demographic history, economics, and politics -- from the seventh century to the present. About half the book is devoted to the formative period of classical Islamic civilisation; the other half is devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These views give an idea of the size complexity, and structure of a vast, ancient, and modern civilisation.

In Lahore, Pakistan, Faizan Peerzada resisted being relegated to a dark corner by staging a performing arts festival despite bomb attacks. In Senegal, wheelchair-bound Aissatou Cisse produced a comic book to illustrate the injustices faced by disabled women and girls. In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his journalists struggled to put out their paper, El Watan (The Nation), the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated their offices and killed eighteen of their colleagues. In Afghanistan, Young Women for Change took to the streets of Kabul to denounce sexual harassment, undeterred by threats. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Abdirizak Bihi organized a Ramadan basketball tournament among Somali refugees to counter the influence of Al Shabaab. From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers often risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries.

But this global community of writers, artists, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, activists, and educators of Muslim heritage remains largely invisible, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other.

A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism, Karima Bennoune draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews to illuminate the inspiring stories of those who represent one of the best hopes for ending fundamentalist oppression worldwide."

The "Hizmet" ("Service") Movement of Fethullah Gulen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gulen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. In Gulen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that the Gulen Movement should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. Hendrick draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the U.S. for his study. He argues that the movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a "post political" turn in twenty-first century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular.

Political Islam has often been compared to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas--and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts--John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong. Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise. Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.

This book shows how ethnography can create a greater understanding of Islam in particular social contexts. Islam is stereotypically presented as a monolithic civilisation that has stifled the emergence of cultural pluralism and individual freedom. In contrast, this volume showcases the diversity and plurality of Muslim societies. The contributors reflect on how the ethnographic method allows the description, representation and analysis of the social and cultural complexity of Muslim societies in the discourse of anthropology. It shows the benefit of using ethnography as a method to engage with and relate to specific real-world examples. It includes case studies on rituals and symbols in Syria, Tunisia, Damascus, Algeria, Britain, Pakistan, Brazil and Lebanon. It covers practices such as veiling, students' religious practices, charitable activities, law and scholarship in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Yemen.

Winner, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qur'an itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry's Qur'anic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions. The Literary Qur'an mobilizes the Qur'an's formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qur'anic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. Engaging with the Arab-Islamic tradition of adab-a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as social and moral comportment-El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding form and praxis alike, The Literary Qur'an stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. The book places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraibi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Mahmud al-Mas'adi, al-Tahir Wattar, Muhammad Barrada). Theorizing the Qur'an as a literary object, process, and model, this interdisciplinary study blends literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices.

Gulen's vision for the future is an inspiring hope, where peace and justice are maintained in the world. This is a promise in the divine revelation for the 'righteous', who are expected to be the driving force in reaching this goal. Attaining this rank, however, requires that they be ordained with certain qualifications and virtues as once manifested to the highest degree in Islamic civilisation. In this book, Gulen reminds us of these virtues, and shows the path that those lofty souls have followed in the past, leaving behind exceptional models.

Since 2001, two dominant worldviews have clashed in the global arena: a neoconservative nightmare of an insidious Islamic terrorist threat to civilized life, and a jihadist myth of martyrdom through the slaughter of infidels. Across the airwaves and on the ground, an ill-defined and uncontrollable war has raged between these two opposing scenarios. Deadly images and threats-from the televised beheading of Western hostages to graphic pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, from the destruction wrought by suicide bombers in London and Madrid to civilian deaths at the hands of American occupation forces in Iraq-have polarized populations on both sides of this divide. Yet, as the noted Middle East scholar and commentator Gilles Kepel demonstrates, President Bush's War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East-enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden's call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt-neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's philosophical explorations covered nearly the entire spectrum of twelfth-century beliefs. Beginning his career as a skeptic, he ended it as a scholar of mysticism and orthodoxy. "The Niche of Lights," written near the end of his illustrious career, advances the philosophically important idea that reason can serve as a connection between the devout and God. Al-Ghazali argues that abstracting God from the world, as he believed theologians did, was not sufficient for understanding. Exploring the boundary between philosophy and theology, "The Niche of Lights" seeks to understand the role of reality in the perception of the spiritual.

In this book Franco Cardini examines the ideas, prejudices, disinformation and anti-information that have formed and coloured Europe's attitude towards Islam. Encompassing 1500 years of ideological interchange and armed conflict, he retells the mutual histories of East and West and examines how and why misunderstanding has occurred

The author focuses primarily on the Islam of the Mediterranean (Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa) with which Europeans came into contact over a long period, but stresses that Islam should not be treated as homogenous. The book concludes with a consideration of the role of Islam within Europe today, a role that is growing yet remains contested.

The sacred and the revered, the divine and the musealised, relics have long been integral to Islamic practice. Wahhabisation has cast a modernist spectre over celebrated traditions such as the visiting of shrines and pilgrimages to the birthplaces of beloved religious figures, yet these rituals continue to thrive. In this issue of Critical Muslim, we look at footprints ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, to Adam and to Jesus. We pay our respects to Sufi saints, who may or may not be Islamicised versions of the Buddha, and we ask whether tradition is nothing more than a relic of times gone by. About Critical Muslim: A quarterly publication of ideas and issues showcasing groundbreaking thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a rapidly changing, interconnected world. Each edition centers on a discrete theme, and contributions include reportage, academic analysis, cultural commentary, photography, poetry, and book reviews.