You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Everyday Jihad plunges us into the sprawling, heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which in the early 1990s became a site for militant Sunni Islamists. A place of refuge for Arabs hunted down in their countries of origin and a recruitment ground for young disenfranchised Palestinians, the camp--where sheikhs began actively recruiting for jihad--situated itself in the global geography of radical Islam. With pioneering fieldwork, Bernard Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, combining a literal interpretation of sacred texts with a militant interpretation of jihad, took root in this Palest...
A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest...
A groundbreaking assessment of the life and ideology of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential radical Muslim thinkers alive today.
Islamophobia is an escalating problem worldwide, arising from a convergence of right-wing populism, xenophobia, and the normalization of anti-Muslim scapegoating. A must-read for anyone concerned with the erosion of human and civil rights, Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism is the first to tackle these complex phenomena on a worldwide scale through empirically supported analysis by internationally renowned scholars.
Traces Abdallah Azzam's path from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan and explains why jihadism went global.
Drawing on first-hand interviews with rank and file members of Hezbollah, the author illuminates the inner workings of this Islamist terrorist group.
Examines the politics of civil society in modern Lebanon.
Tripoli, Lebanon's 'Sunni City' is often presented as an Islamist or even Jihadi city. However, this misleading label conceals a much deeper history of resistance and collaboration with the state and the wider region. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork and using a broad array of primary sources, Tine Gade analyses the modern history of Tripoli, exploring the city's contentious politics, its fluid political identity, and the relations between Islamist and sectarian groups. Offering an alternative explanation for Tripoli's decades of political troubles – rather than emphasizing Islamic radicalism as the principal explanation – she argues that it is Lebanese clientelism and the decay of the state that produced the rise of violent Islamist movements in Tripoli. By providing a corrective to previous assumptions, this book not only expands our understanding of Lebanese politics, but of the wider religious and political dynamics in the Middle East.
In Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon, Ward Vloeberghs explores Rafiq Hariri’s patronage and his posthumous legacy to demonstrate how religious architecture becomes a site for power struggles in contemporary Beirut. By tracing the 150 year-long history of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque – Lebanon’s principal Sunni mosque – and the subsequent development of the site as a commemoration venue, this account offers a unique illustration of how architecture, religion and power become discursively and visually entangled. Set in a multi-confessional society marked by social inequalities and political fragmentation, this interdisciplinary study analyses how architectural practice and urban reconfigurations reveal a nascent personality cult, communal mourning, and the consolidation of political territory in relation to constantly shifting circumstances.
An incisive narrative history of the Islamic State, from the 2005 master plan to reestablish the Caliphate to its quest for Final Victory in 2020 Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl’s plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq—part of stage five in al-Adl’s plan. Drawing on large troves of recently declassified documents captured from the Islamic State and its predecessors, counterterrorism expert Brian Fishman tells the story of this organization’s complex and largely hidden past—and what the master plan suggests about its future. Only by understanding the Islamic State’s full history—and the strategy that drove it—can we understand the contradictions that may ultimately tear it apart.