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The Islamic World in Ascendancy
In the view of Dr. Martin Sicker, it was with the emergence of Islam that the combination of geopolitics and religion reached its most volatile form and provided the ideological context for war and peace in the Middle East for more than a millennium. The conflation of geopolitics and religion in Islam is predicated on the concept of jihad (struggle), which may be understood as a crescentade, in the same sense as the later Christian crusade, which seeks to achieve a religious goal, the conversion of the world to Islam, by militant means. This equates to a concept of perpetual war with the non-Muslim world, a concept that underlays Muslim geopolitical thinking throughout the thousand-year peri...
The Pre-Islamic Middle East
Sicker explores the political history of the Middle East from antiquity to the Arab conquest from a geopolitical perspective. He argues that there are a number of relatively constant environmental factors that have helped condition-not determine-the course of Middle Eastern political history from ancient times to the present. These factors, primarily, but not exclusively geography and topography, contributed heavily to establishing the patterns of state development and interstate relations in the Middle East that have remained remarkably consistent throughout the troubled history of the region. In addition to geography and topography, the implications of which are explored in depth, religion...
Pondering the Imponderable
Pondering the Imponderable explores the philosophical and theological problems of God and their implications from a Judaic perspective including the attempts at knowing the unknowable and naming the unnamable that have been articulated over the course of some two millennia, as well as how the chasm between man and God is bridged through revelation and the implications of these ideas for the ultimate question of what takes place after death, resurrection, immortality of the soul, or transmigration or reincarnation. In discussing these issues, the non-specialized reader will be introduced to the vast corpus of rabbinic literature written over a period of some two millennia to the present day and to many works that have never been translated into English.
The Middle East in the Twentieth Century
Annotation Examines the geopolitical history of the Middle East in the twentieth century.
The Orthocratic State
Sicker argues that it is the achievement of orthocracy as the motivating concept of the state rather than democracy as its optimum form that is crucial for mankind in the 21st century, notwithstanding that the widespread adoption of substantive democracy may be the best currently conceivable means for reaching the goal of universal responsible statehood. In a critique of much modern political theory, Sicker reexamines the essential idea of the state as well as its purpose as understood from a variety of perspectives, a subject that has largely been neglected over the past several decades as a subject of interest to political theorists in the United States. He then considers the relationship ...
Reading Genesis Politically
Sicker asserts that the Mosaic canon, the Pentateuch, is first and foremost a library of essentially political teachings and documents, and that the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis set forth in essence a general Mosaic political philosophy. These writings take a unique mythopoeic approach to the construction of a normative political theory intended to undergird the idea of a mutual covenant between God and the people of Israel that is to be realized in history in the creation of the ideal society. It is with the elaboration of the political ideas reflected in these early chapters of Genesis that this book is concerned. For the modern reader, the biblical texts should be understo...
Between Man and God
Sicker presents a personal attempt to come to grips with the awesome question, Where was God at Auschwitz? and with it some of the related central issues of Jewish thought and belief. There is a tendency among many writers of contemporary work of theology to argue that the very fact of the Holocaust invalidates traditional Jewish theory and that its long-held ideas about God must therefore be revised radically. However, Jewish thinkers have long asked the equivalent of this troubling question, albeit in reference to other places and times in Israel's history and have offered possible answers, just as we do today. The big difference between then and now is not the enormity of the Holocaust, b...
Reflections on the Book of Numbers
Perusing this biblical book through a theopolitical prism, it may be seen that another unifying theme that courses through the diverse contents of this biblical work is that of molding the diverse tribes of the children of Israel into a functioning confederacy presided over by an increasingly strong central authority. For forty years, Moses wrestled with the problem of retaining the tribal structure of the children of Israel as a vehicle for the transmission of traditional teachings and values from the generation of the exodus to their descendants and, at the same time, attempting to restructure intertribal relationships within the confederacy by the nationalization and centralization of the evolving religion, focused on the Tabernacle and its rites that served as the adhesive that bound them to each other. What the narrative also illustrates is the challenge of exercising the effective central leadership essential to containing the centripetal social forces that tended to impede the transition from a tribal confederacy to a unified nation, a challenge that purportedly caused an eleven-day trip from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land to take thirty-eight years to complete.
Reshaping Palestine
Sicker examines the early stages of the process by which Palestine, an obscure and relatively miniscule backwater of the Ottoman Empire, became a critical factor in the history and convoluted politics of the modern Middle East. In doing this, he describes relevant aspects of the history of Palestine in the little known and poorly understood period from the Napoleonic intrusion in the Middle East to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings of British rule. Developments in this period are analyzed within the geopolitical context of the rivalries among the great European powers that were decisive factors in the modern history of the entire Middle East. During this period the emergence o...
