Muslim Zion
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 1849042764
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOriginally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.
Posts
Muslim Zion
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-09-30
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 0674074165
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel. A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam. Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.
Prisoner of Zion
Author: Scott Carrier
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2013-04-01
Total Pages: 151
ISBN-13: 1619022117
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn NPR journalist’s riveting exploration of religious fanaticism, terrorism, persecution, and confronting one’s own beliefs in a post 9/11 world. Soon after the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11 2001, it became clear that the United States would invade Afghanistan. Writer and This American Life producer Scott Carrier decided to go there, too. “In a series of remarkable essays, Carrier, raised among Mormons, noted similarities in the beliefs and practices of the Taliban and the Utah church, stressing the fundamentalist pledge of obedience to authority, and revelations and visions from God to a ‘Chosen people.’” Carrier needed to see and experience the Taliban for himself: who are these fanatics, these fundamentalists? And what do they want? (Publishers Weekly). Throughout these “engrossing stories of travel interspersed with historical vignettes and the author’s private struggles,” Carrier writes about his adventures—sometime harrowing, sometimes humorous, and always revealing—but also about the bigger problem. Having grown up among the resolute of the Salt Lake City church, he argues it will never work to attack the true believers head–on. The faithful thrive on persecution. Somehow, he thinks, we need to find a way—inside ourselves—to rise above fear and anger (Kirkus Reviews)
The Impossible Indian
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-09-28
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 0674068106
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a rare view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went beyond a nationalist agenda. Guided by his idea of ethical duty as the source of the self’s sovereignty, he understood how life’s quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
Author: Sergei Nilus
Publisher:
Published: 2019-02-26
Total Pages: 96
ISBN-13: 9781947844964
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is almost certainly fiction, but its impact was not. Originating in Russia, it landed in the English-speaking world where it caused great consternation. Much is made of German anti-semitism, but there was fertile soil for "The Protocols" across Europe and even in America, thanks to Henry Ford and others.
Islam After Liberalism
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 379
ISBN-13: 0190851279
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLeading scholars discuss how 'Islam' and 'liberalism' have been entwined historically and politically and how Muslims have thought about this longstanding relationship.
Landscapes of the Jihad
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011-04-27
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 0801459788
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict. Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity.Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.
In Ishmael's House
Author: Martin Gilbert
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-08-24
Total Pages: 403
ISBN-13: 0300170807
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“In this epic examination, [a] celebrated historian explores the evolution of Judaism and Islam through a lens of Middle Eastern stability.” (Publishers Weekly) The relationship between Jews and Muslims has been a flashpoint that affects stability in the Middle East with global consequences. In this eloquent book, Martin Gilbert presents a fascinating account of the hope and fear that have characterized these two peoples through the 1,400 years of their intertwined history. Harking back to the Biblical story of Ishmael and Isaac, Gilbert takes the reader from the origins of the fraught relationship—the refusal of Medina’s Jews to accept Mohammed as a prophet—through the ages of the Crusader reconquest of the Holy Land and the great Muslim sultanates to the present day. He explores the impact of Zionism in the early twentieth century, the clash of nationalisms during the Second World War, the mass expulsions and exodus of 800,000 Jews from Muslim lands following the birth of Israel, the Six-Day War, and the political sensitivities of the current Middle East. Ishmael’s House sheds light on a time of prosperity and opportunity for Jews in Muslim lands stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, with many instances of Muslim openness, support, and courage. Drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, Gilbert uses archived material, poems, letters, memoirs, and personal testimony to uncover the human voice of this centuries-old conflict. Ultimately Gilbert’s moving account of mutual tolerance between Muslims and Jews provides a perspective on current events and a template for the future. “A reliable source and a pleasure to read.” —Herman Wouk, Pulitzer prize winning author of The Caine Mutiny “Moving and important.” —The Independent
Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination
Author: Ebrahim Moosa
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2006-03-08
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 0807876453
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAbu Hamid al-Ghaz&257;l&299;, a Muslim jurist-theologian and polymath who lived from the mid-eleventh to the early twelfth century in present-day Iran, is a figure equivalent in stature to Maimonides in Judaism and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity. He is best known for his work in philosophy, ethics, law, and mysticism. In an engaged re-reading of the ideas of this preeminent Muslim thinker, Ebrahim Moosa argues that Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work has lasting relevance today as a model for a critical encounter with the Muslim intellectual tradition in a modern and postmodern context. Moosa employs the theme of the threshold, or dihliz, the space from which Ghaz&257;l&299; himself engaged the different currents of thought in his day, and proposes that contemporary Muslims who wish to place their own traditions in conversation with modern traditions consider the same vantage point. Moosa argues that by incorporating elements of Islamic theology, neoplatonic mysticism, and Aristotelian philosophy, Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work epitomizes the idea that the answers to life's complex realities do not reside in a single culture or intellectual tradition. Ghaz&257;l&299;'s emphasis on poiesis--creativity, imagination, and freedom of thought--provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectual renewal among Muslims, Moosa argues. Such a creative and critical inheritance, he concludes, ought to be heeded by those who seek to cultivate Muslim intellectual traditions in today's tumultuous world.
Islamic Imperialism
Author: Efraim Karsh
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2007-01-01
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 0300122632
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region's experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam's millenarian imperial tradition. The author explores the history of Islam's imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam's war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.
