Political Islamism

22 Sep 2004 11:14

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This is a tremendously important subject, and I won't even pretend to adequate coverage.

Topics: Western support, covert and overt; and oil-sheikdom support; and traditional mass media; and VCRs, cassettes, desktop publishing, etc.; and urbanization; and ethnic tensions; among engineers, especially students; and Christian creationism and fundamentalism. (That last is prompted by the fact that in the early '90s I saw Turkish mosques selling American creationist pamphlets, sometimes, but not always, with the Jesus-as-God bits blacked out. One has awful visions of a fundamentalist international...)

See also: Afghanistan; Iran; Islam; Millenarianism; Terrorism

Recommended:
• Ibrahim Abu-Rabi`, Intellectual Origins of the Islamic Resurgence in the Arab World [Well, half-recommended. This book is mostly an exposition of the thoughts of some of the pioneering Islamist writers, with an emphasis on the works of Qutb. It's not a particularly well-written or, I have to say, astute analysis of their works, but if you're looking for a summary of what these people thought (which is not the same as what their contemporary followers think, of course), this is certainly much quicker than going to the primary sources; also, it's not in Arabic. Suffers somewhat from a conflation of the Islamic world with the Arab world, which is too common among both Arabs and western Arabists...]
• Gilles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam [Good review by Jeremy Harding]

Half-recommended:
• Timur Kuran, Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicament of Islamism [Blurb, including link to chapter 1. My reaction.]

To read:
• Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection
• Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Islamic Fiannce: Law, Economics, and Practice ["Islamic finance exists mainly as a form of rent-seeking legal-arbitrage"; blurb]
• Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam
• Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, "Engieers of Jihad" [PDF. Via Henry Farrell, who summarizes.]
• Fawaz A. Gerges
  • America and Political Islam : Clash of Cultures Or Clash of Interests? [1999]
  • The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global [2005]
  • Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy [2006]
• Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia [Blurb, ch 1.]
• Philip N. Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam
• Gilles Kepel
  • Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe
  • Prophet and Pharoah
  • The War for Muslim Minds
• Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse [Blurb. I haven't read this, yet, but it's striking to me from the table of conents how the area under discussion progressively narrows from the Islamic world to the Near East...]
• Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan [1994. Online]
• Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah
• Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder