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A major study of environmentalism and Islam in practice and theory, with an historical overview that sets out future challenges, including reformulating the fiqh or Islamic legal tradition to take the ecological dimension seriously. In addressing this book to the one billion Muslims in the world it has the potential to reinvigorate the desire for environmental change in a community that is ignored at the planets peril. In arguing that modernity, consumerism and industrialisation need to be reth...

Based on substantial ethnographic, textual and archival research, this interesting book offers a new perspective on the anthropology of the western Indian Ocean. Writing in a clear, engaging style, and covering an impressive range of theoretical terrain, Simpson critically explores the relationships between people and things that give life to the region and drive shifting patterns of social change among Muslims in the highly-politicized state of Gujarat. Scholars of the Indian Ocean, Muslim soc...

The war in the Middle East is marked by a lack of cultural knowledge on the part of the western forces, and this book deals with another, widely ignored element of Islam-the role of dreams in everyday life. The practice of using night dreams to make important life decisions can be traced to Middle Eastern dream traditions and practices that preceded the emergence of Islam. In this study, the author explores some key aspects of Islamic dream theory and interpretation as well as the role and sig...

This book is not about suicide bombers. Tending one's fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, "sterile roads" and "seam zones"-bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.Not since the late Edward Said has there been such an articulate Arab voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In devastating detail, Saree Makdisi reveals how the "peace p...

American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 challenges the prevailing assumption that when we talk about "American and Muslim worlds", we are talking about two conflicting entities that came into contact with each other in the 20th century. Instead, this book shows there is a long and deep seam of history between the two which provides an important context for contemporary events -- and is also important in its own right. Some of the earliest American Muslims were the African slaves working in the...

This book explores the recent trend toward the transformation of religious symbols and practices into culture in Western democracies. Analyses of three legal cases involving religion in the public sphere are used to illuminate this trend: a municipal council chamber; a town hall; and town board meetings. Each case involves a different national context—Canada, France and the United States—and each illustrates something interesting about the shape-shifting nature of religion, specifically its flex...

As the world focuses on the conflict in Iraq, the most important political players in that country today are not the Sunni insurgents. Instead, they are Iraq's Shi'I majority - part of the Middle East's ninety million Shi'I Muslims who hold the key to the future of the region and the relations between Muslim and Western societies. So contends Yitzhak Nakash, one of the world's foremost experts on Shi'ism. With his characteristic verve and style, Nakash traces the role of the Shi'is in the strugg...

At all costs avoid blame. Such is the creed of dictators and politicians, tycoons and company chairmen, media celebrities and spin doctors the world over. But what about men at war, where the penalties for errors of judgement can be devastating? History is full of tales of those who have been wrongly castigated in the rush to find a culprit; only later, sometimes much later, when the real truth comes out, is the scapegoat exonerated.

The concept of jihad holds a prominent place in Islamic thought and history. Beyond its spiritual meanings, the term has historically been associated with the sweeping Arab-Believers conquests of the 7-8th century BCE. But given advances in our understanding of the historicity and chronology of the Qur'an and early Islamic texts, is it correct to identify jihad and Islam with violent conquest? In this book, Marco Demichelis explores the history of the concept of jihad in the early proto-Islam...

This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Euroce...

Jason Burke has produced the definitive account of Islamic militancy - revolutionising our understanding of Al-Qaeda, retelling its history from scratch and critically exploding the myths that form the very foundations of the 'War on Terror'. Fully updated with new material on Iraq and Afghanistan.

An extremely timely translation of a seminal text on the role of women in Muslim society by the early twentieth century thinker al Taher al-Haddad. Considered as one of the first feminist works in Arab literature, this book will be of considerable interest to scholars of an early "feminist" tract coming from a Muslim in Arab society. Awarded the 2008 "World Award of the President of the Republic of Tunisia for Islamic Studies"

In Europe's Ghost, Michael Radu reveals that Europe's identity crisis does not lie in past or present racism or in a variety of largely invented or anachronistic crimes, but in the self-inflicted renunciation of national traditions in favor of multiculturalism. In fact, most European elites see jihadism as nothing but a peculiar form of criminality, due to the social and economic problems inside Europe, rather than what it is: a peculiar form of warfare rooted in cultural developments imported f...