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The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism initiates a dialogue between the discourse of three of the most discussed figures in the history of the Sunni Islamic movement—Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Osama bin Laden—and contemporary debates across religion and political theory, providing a crucial foundation upon which to situate current developments in world politics. Redressing the inefficiency of the terms in which the debate on Islam and Islamism is generally conducted, the book examines the role played by tradition, modernity, and transmodernity as major "symbolic scenarios" of Islamist discourses, highlighting the internal complexity and dynamism of Islamism. By uncovering forms of know...
This book examines the history of the Palestinian Left by focusing on the trajectory of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during its declining phase. Relying on a substantial corpus of primary sources, this study illustrates how the PFLP’s political agency contributed to its own marginalisation within the Palestinian national movement. Following the 1982 eviction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Lebanon, the bases of the PFLP’s opposition to Fatah’s primacy in the national movement were jeopardised. This book argues that the PFLP’s «loyalty» to the PLO institutional and political framework prevented the formulation of a real counterhegemoni...
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.
All the components needed to construct an Arab lobby exist; the significant Arab Diaspora in the US, the historic strategic relationship between Arab Gulf States and the US, and the Gulf’s economic wealth. However, lobbying is alien to Arab culture and largely absent from its political landscape. To achieve a fair and objective assessment of Arab Gulf lobbying it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the prevailing Arab Gulf political culture that shapes it. The Arab Lobby and the US provides a timely contribution to this understanding. Studying attempts by Arab Gulf states to effectively lobby the US government, it explores aspects of their lobbying behaviour in order to identi...
Mediterranean in Dis/order reveals the connection between space and politics by examining the role that space has played in insurgencies, conflicts, uprisings, and mobilities in the Mediterranean region. With this approach, the authors are able to challenge well-established beliefs about the power structure of the state across different disciplines (including political science, history, sociology, geography, and anthropology), and its impact on the conception, production, and imagination of space in the broader Mediterranean. Further, they contribute to particular areas of studies, such as migration, political Islam, mobilization, and transition to democracy, among others. The book, infusing...
The Middle East and Globalization discusses past and contemporary political, societal, economic, and cultural trends in the Middle East against the background of comprehensive theories of globalization. The chapters draw on a shared methodological approach, looking at the fractures and horizons of globalization that are shaping the Middle East.
In Reading Islam Fabio Vicini offers a journey within the intimate relations, reading practices, and forms of intellectual engagement that regulate Muslim life in two enclosed religious communities in Istanbul. Combining anthropological observation with textual and genealogical analysis, he illustrates how the modes of thought and social engagement promoted by these two communities are the outcome of complex intellectual entanglements with modern discourses about science, education, the self, and Muslims’ place and responsibility in society. In this way, Reading Islam sheds light on the formation of new generations of faithful and socially active Muslims over the last thirty years and on their impact on the turn of Turkey from an assertive secularist Republic to an Islamic-oriented form of governance.
The first English-language scholarly book to provide an overview of the Angela Merkel's career and influence.
Focusing on the processes of political socialisation and democratisation that took place in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book brings together specialists who propose the need to rethink the contemporary history of democracy in Spain to build a new narrative. To do so, the authors go down to the local level, where they are able to trace a political culture that forged the foundations of a process of political "modernization" much more complex than what conventional historiography has conveyed, even though it was not always transferred institutionally to the national level. The idea of a rural Spain that was backward, apolitical, violent and unprepared for democrac...
The Sociology of Islam provides an accessible introduction to this emerging field of inquiry, teaching and debate. The study is located at the crucial intersection between a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. It discusses the long-term dynamics of Islam as both a religion and as a social, political and cultural force. The volume focuses on ideas of knowledge, power and civility to provide students and readers with analytic and critical thinking frameworks for understanding the complex social facets of Islamic traditions and institutions. The study of the sociology of Islam improves the understanding of Islam as a diverse force that drives a variety of social and political arrangements. Delving into both conceptual questions and historical interpretations, The Sociology of Islam is a transdisciplinary, comparative resource for students, scholars, and policy makers seeking to understand Islam’s complex changes throughout history and its impact on the modern world.