An Islamic Response to Imperialism
An Islamic Response to Imperialism

Author: Nikki R. Keddie

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1983-04-20

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780520047747

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"Keddie has rendered a valuable service ... Afghani merits the attention of Western students of the contemporary international scene and the Muslim renaissance since he made the first significant attempt to answer the modern Western challenge to the Muslim world." ---Eastern World "Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), the well known religious reformer and political activist, led a busy and complex life full of obscure and clandestine ventures. . . . [Keddie] draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources. In part I an attempt is made to provide an accurate biography and a consistent analysis of Afghani. Part II co ntains translations of some of his most important writings. . . Although Afghani was concerned with the wide ranging need for Islamic reform, he devoted most of his life to the more urgent political problems confronting Muslims--problems arising out of their weakness in dealing with the Western Christian powers. Hence the tide of this book. The picture that emerges here confirms Afghani's long standing reputation as a defender of Muslim interests--not against borrowing European advances in science and technology, but against foreign political, economic, or military encroachment."--Middle East journal "Jamal ad-Din was a mysterious figure and most of the mysteries were of his own making . . . it has been left to Professor Keddie to apply the methods of the critical historian to the matter ... This book shows how successful she has been . . . there has emerged for the first time a credible picture of Jamal ad-Din's life . . . The second part contains translations of works by Jamal ad-Din himself, and these are valuable because most of them were written in Persian and have either not been easily available at all or else have been available only in Arabic translation. This is particularly true of the Refutation of the Materialists. "--International journal of Middle East Studies "For the first time a significant collection of the writings of al-Afghani are now available in English, and so, for the first time, this controversial figure has had more life breathed into him."--American Historical Review

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Author: Mahmood Mamdani

Publisher: Harmony

Published: 2005-06-21

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 038551591X

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In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.

Islam and Asia
Islam and Asia

Author: Chiara Formichi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1107106125

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An accessible, transregional exploration of how Islam and Asia have shaped each other's histories, societies and cultures from the seventh century to today.

Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam
Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam

Author: M. Moaddel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1137098481

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With resurgent interest in the Muslim world and in particular political Islam, this collection of translated essays by major Muslim thinkers from the Middle East and South Asia demonstrates the ongoing and contentious debate between modernizers seeking to adapt Western ways and fundamentalists who rejected them. From Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the nineteenth-century to Ayatollah Khomeini in the twentieth, the selections provide an opportunity to examine a diversity of Muslim thinkers thoughts on important topics like jurisprudence, politics, relations with the west, and women in their own words.

From the Ruins of Empire
From the Ruins of Empire

Author: Pankaj Mishra

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

Published: 2012-09-04

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0385676115

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The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a vast intellectual effort would be required. Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy. Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia and created the ideas which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century.

The 'West', Islam and Islamism
The 'West', Islam and Islamism

Author: Caroline Cox

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13:

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"The aim of this book is to encourage mutual understanding between the Islamic and Western worlds. The majority of Muslims are peaceable, law-abiding citizens. However, Muslim fundamentalists, described here as ""Islamists"", presents a challenge to the valu"

Desiring Arabs
Desiring Arabs

Author: Joseph A. Massad

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0226509605

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Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times