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Since the 1970s, Cairo has experienced tremendous growth and
change. Nearly three million people now live in new urban
communities characterized by unregulated housing, informal economic
activity, and the presence of Islamist groups. Salwa Ismail
examines the effects of these changes in Political Life in Cairo's
New Quarters. Working in Cairo, Ismail interviewed new quarter
residents, observed daily life in markets and alleyways, met with
local leaders, and talked with young men about their encounters
with the government. Rich in ethnographic detail, this work reveals
the city's new urban quarters as sites not only of opposition and
relative autonomy, but also under governmental surveillance and
discipline. In doing so, it situates the everyday within the
context of wider developments in Cairo: the decline of welfarism,
the shift to neoliberal government, and the rise of the security
state. Original and timely, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters
highlights the interplay of structural changes, state power, and
daily governance, and presents a fascinating analysis of urban
transformation and power struggles--as international forces meet
local communities in a major city of the global south. Salwa Ismail
is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter.
In an atmosphere of growing concern over the threat posed by
Islamist violence, political Islamism has become the most important
of geopolitical issues. In the process, it has been misrepresented.
Contrary to what many believe, Islamist movements are characterised
by their diversity. Revisiting the main arguments and explanations
that have been used over the past twenty years to understand
Islamist activism, moderate as well as militant, Salwa Ismail here
proposes a rethinking of Islamist politics. The phenomenon of
political Islam is determined by macro and micro-level changes in
the Muslim world, such as the retreat of the welfare state across
the Middle East, and the subsequent expansion in the role of
informal political activists in the popular neighbourhoods of such
cities as Algiers or Cairo. Ismail examines both levels to explain
the socio-economic and political settings out of which Islamism has
developed. Her focus is both the economic and political
environments that fomented Islamism, and the structures of Islamist
movements themselves (from their ideologies to their modes of
action). Looking at Islamism as a form of contestation politics,
Ismail offers a reassessment of its failures and successes -
limited, as it is, by its use of violence, but capable of real
mobilisation at a popular level. "Rethinking Islamist Politics"
will be vital reading for anyone seeking to understand such
spectacular expressions of Islamism as the September 11th attacks,
but also the everyday struggles of ordinary people which Islamism
embodies.
This text revisits the main arguments and explanatory frameworks
that have been used since the 1970s to understand Islamic activism,
moderate as well as militant and violent, and proposes a rethinking
of Islamist politics. Linking macro-level explanations to
micro-level analysis, it analyzes Islamist activism and militancy
in terms of the interplay of social formation and political
structures on the one hand, and network processes within the other.
Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his
successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to
maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail
examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through
violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how
the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as
apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political
subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule
and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime
and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life
experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the
internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule
of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their
routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life,
inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and
infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form
of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political
engagement, while also demanding of their action.
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An Islamic Reformation? (Hardcover, New)
Michaelle Browers, Charles Kurzman; Contributions by Fred Dallmayr, Dale F. Eickelman, Nader A. Hashemi, …
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R3,245
Discovery Miles 32 450
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Over the last two decades we have seen a vast number of books
published in the West that treat Islamic fundamentalism as a rising
threat to the western values of secularism and democracy. In the
last decade scholars began proclaiming an existent or emerging
"clash" between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or in the
case of Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad and "McWorld." More recently,
some western scholars have offered another interpretation. Focusing
on the work of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, these scholars
have begun to argue that what we are witnessing, in Islamic
contexts, is tantamount to a Reformation. An Islamic Reformation
attempts to evaluate this claim through the work of emerging and
top scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy,
anthropology, religion, history and Middle Eastern studies. The
overall goal of this volume is to question the impact of various
reformist trends throughout the Middle East. Are we witnessing a
growth in fundamentalism or the emergence of an Islamic
Reformation? What does religious practice in this region reflect?
What is the usefulness of approaching these questions through
Christian/Islamic and West/East dichotomies? Unique in its focus
and scope, An Islamic Reformation represents an emerging vanguard
in the discussion of Islamic religious heritage and practice and
its effect on world politics.
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