This is a detailed yet accessible guide to the way in which religion and politics interacted during the earliest years of Islam. It focuses on the period of the first four caliphs, untangling the crisis of sucession and the subsequent schism between the Sunni and Shi'i movements in Islam, and drawing on a combination of primary documents and scholarship in the field. It includes two appendices featuring original English translations of key source material.
In his first book since What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world. The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through thirteen centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States. While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award–winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.
Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents—the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it—are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization. These forces have increasingly tested Islam and Islamic civilization for validity, adaptability, and the ability to hold on to the loyalty of Muslims, says Ali A. Allawi in his provocative new book. While the faith has proved resilient in the face of these challenges, other aspects of Islamic civilization have atrophied or died, Allawi contends, and Islamic civilization is now undergoing its last crisis. The book explores how Islamic civilization began to unravel under colonial rule, as its institutions, laws, and economies were often replaced by inadequate modern equivalents. Allawi also examines the backlash expressed through the increasing religiosity of Muslim societies and the spectacular rise of political Islam and its terrorist offshoots. Assessing the status of each of the building blocks of Islamic civilization, the author concludes that Islamic civilization cannot survive without the vital spirituality that underpinned it in the past. He identifies a key set of principles for moving forward, principles that will surprise some and anger others, yet clearly must be considered.
Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents--the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it--are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization. These forces have increasingly tested Islam and Islamic civilization for validity, adaptability, and the ability to hold on to the loyalty of Muslims, says Ali A. Allawi in his provocative new book. While the faith has proved resilient in the face of these challenges, other aspects of Islamic civilization have atrophied or died, Allawi contends, and Islamic civilization is now undergoing its last crisis. The book explores how Islamic civilization began to unravel under colonial rule, as its institutions, laws, and economies were often replaced by inadequate modern equivalents. Allawi also examines the backlash expressed through the increasing religiosity of Muslim societies and the spectacular rise of political Islam and its terrorist offshoots. Assessing the status of each of the building blocks of Islamic civilization, the author concludes that Islamic civilization cannot survive without the vital spirituality that underpinned it in the past. He identifies a key set of principles for moving forward, principles that will surprise some and anger others, yet clearly must be considered.
Before the caliphate of the 'Uthman b. 'Affan, the Muslim community had grown from strength to strength in spite of a series of major crises--the Hirah, the death of the Prophet, the Riddah wars, the assassination of 'Umar by a Persian slave. But 'Uthman's reign ended in catastrophe. His inability to manage the social and political conflicts that were now emerging among various factions within the community led to his death at the hands of Muslim rebels. The consequences of this tragic event were bitter: not only a century of civil war, but also political and religious schisms of such depth that they have not been entirely healed even now. Most medieval Muslim historians told this story in an overtly partisan manner, but al-Tabari demands more of his readers. First of all, they must decide for themselves, on the basis of highly ambigous evidence, whether 'Uthman's death was tyrannicide or murder. But, more than that, they must ask how such a thing could have happened at all; what had the Muslims done to bring about the near-destruction of their community? Al-Tabari presents this challenge within a broad framework. For, even while the internal crisis that issued in 'Uthman's death was coming to a head, the wars against Byzantium and Persia continued. The first expeditions into North Africa, the conquest of Cyprus, the momentary destruction of the Byzantine fleet at the Battle of the Masts, the bloody campaigns in Armenia, the Caucasus, and Khurasan are all here, in narratives that shift constantly between hard reporting and pious legend. Muslim forces retain the offensive, but there are no more easy victories; henceforth, suffering and endurance will be the hallmarks of the hero. Most evocative in the light of 'Uthman's fate is the moving account of the murder of the last Sasanian king, Yazdagird III--a man betrayed by his nobles and subjects, but most of all by his own character.
Across the Muslim world today, if anything is self-evident across the Muslim world today it is that the Ummah is badly in need of reform. On this point it can be stated with confidence that Muslims are agreed. Poverty and injustice characterize the face of Muslim lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Pollution and corruption are the order of the day in the societies where the gulf between them and the developed countries of the world has never been wider. Politics in the Muslim world are all too often the politics of deprivation, and culture the culture of despair. “Crisis in the Muslim Mind” examines the intellectual and historical roots of the malaise that has encompassed the Ummah and threatens to efface its identity. Firs published in Arabic in 1991, this important work (in an abridged English translation) is designed to familiarize educated and concerned Muslims with the nature of the crisis confronting them, and to suggest the steps necessary to overcome it.
Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.
Showing that Muslim societies are facing a crisis that is more cultural than religious, this book focuses on cultural representations through which social life is experienced in the Muslim world. It brings a new theoretical framework to address the secularization process that is underway and the contradictions it entails. This volume will arouse a new debate on secularization and the relations between religion, culture and philosophy. The crisis Muslim societies are undergoing pertains to the culture and not to the Qur’an to the extent that people do not have access to the sacred in itself but only for oneself, meaning a cultural interpretation of the sacred. The Qur’an in itself is not an obstacle to secularization and modernization since any sacred text is experienced through culture. If we consider the European experience where secularization has first emerged, we see that culture has been transformed from medieval metaphysics to modern philosophy upholding a civic culture. Discussing secularization through cultural representation, this book launches new ideas that fill an important gap in the literature on secularization. It is a key resource for any readers interested in religious studies, philosophy and the anthropology of religion.
The book you must read to understand the Islamist crisis—and the threat to us all Robert R. Reilly’s eye-opening book masterfully explains the frightening behavior coming out of the Islamic world. Terrorism, he shows, is only one manifestation of the spiritual pathology of Islamism. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture. The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as: · Why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development · Why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world · Why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years · Why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon
Islamic Culture in Crisis examines efforts by intellectuals and leaders in the Islamic world to adapt to what Hichem Djait calls the "incredible novelty of modernity" that has come to Europe during the past 150 years. The chapters in the work are grouped into three sections, and were written by the author over a twenty-year period. Djait describes the different meanings of modernity, the crisis of Islamic culture in its encounter with modernity, similarities and differences between Arabs and Muslims and other cultures, the politics of the Arabs, and the force of democracy in the Islamic world. In the sphere of politics, the Arabs have been excluded from history for a very long time. Instead, Turks, Mongols, Berbers, Persians, and Caucasians have led the destinies of the Islamic world, a domain that had become politically fragmented. But history has overlooked the concrete developments of that time, although they were full of consequences for the lives of the people. Paradoxically, what remains are the spiritual, trans-historic elements: religion, culture, and science. Contrasting the achievements of other civilizations, both past and present, Djait demonstrates eloquently that Arabs and Muslims will not be able to connect with the modern world unless they are able to be inspired by a supreme ambition to further the causes of high culture-in knowledge, science, art, literature, and other spheres.
