Religion : Islam

With the War on Terror and the perceived clash between the West and Islam being a highly topical issue in world politics today, this book is a radical piece of counter-intuitive thinking on the clash of civilizations theory and global politics. more...

Price: $39.95

Features an anthropological analysis of historical narratives that illuminate regional notions of cosmological kingship, cosmopolitan notions of Islamic law and mysticism, and global notions of the modern bureaucratic state. more...

Price: $69.95

In November of 2002, the Justice and Development Party swept to victory in the Turkish parliamentary elections. Because of the party's Islamic roots, its electoral triumph has sparked a host of questions both in Turkey and in the West: Does the party harbor a secret Islamist agenda? Will the new government seek to overturn nearly a century of secularization stemming from Kemal Ataturk's early-twentieth-century reforms? Most fundamentally, is Islam compatible with democracy? In this penetrating work, M. Hakan Yavuz seeks to answer these questions, and to provide a comprehensive analysis of Islamic political identity in Turkey. He begins in the early twentieth century, when Kemal Ataturk led Turkey through a process of rapid secularization and crushed Islamic opposition to his authoritarian rule. Yavuz argues that, since Ataturk's death in 1938, however, Turkey has been gradually moving away from his militant secularism and experiencing "a quiet Muslim reformation." Islamic political identity is not homogeneous, says Yavuz, but can be modern and progressive as well as conservative and potentially authoritarian. While the West has traditionally seen Kemalism as an engine for reform against "reactionary" political Islam, in fact the Kemalist establishment has traditionally used the "Islamic threat" as an excuse to avoid democratization and thus hold on to power. Yavuz offers an account of the "soft coup" of 1997, in which the Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment overthrew the democratically elected coalition government, which was led by the pro-Islamic Refah party. He argues that the soft coup plunged Turkey into a renewed legitimacy crisis which can only be resolved by the liberalization of the political system. The book ends with a discussion of the most recent election and its implications for Turkey and the Muslim world. Yavuz argues that Islamic social movements can be important agents for promoting a democratic and pluralistic society, and that the Turk more...

Price: $65.00

Provides a fresh and contemporary introduction to the philosophies and doctrines of Islam. This book traces the development of religious knowledge in Islam, from the pre-modern to the modern period. It explores the influences of Islamic Art and Culture, and the Islamic texts of the Qur'an, and hadith, as well as Sufism, Islamic laws, and politics. more...

Price: $26.95

This study assimilates diverse interpretations of the origins of the Middle East conflict. The collection presents the most recent developments in the conflict's historiography and a critical reassessment of Israel's past. more...

Price: $36.95