This book examines the leading role of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in the United Nations relief program for Palestine Arab refugees in 1948-1950 in the Gaza Strip. Using archival data, oral histories, and biographical accounts, it provides a detailed look at internal decision-making in an early non-governmental organization.

Jocelyne Cesari examines the idea that Islam might threaten the core values of the West through testimonies from Muslims in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the US. Her book is an unprecedented exploration of Muslim religious and political life based on several years of field work in Europe and in the United States.

The continued prominence of Islam in the struggle for democracy in the Muslim world has confounded Western democracy theorists who largely consider secularism a prerequisite for democratic transitions. Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai offer a comprehensive view of the complex nature of contemporary political Islam and its relationship to democracy.

In the last two decades, Turkey has witnessed a variety of bordering interventions rooted in its problematisation as variously "transit," "destination," "European," "Muslim" and "safe." This book brings into focus seemingly disparate actors involved in such interventions, from the EU and international organisations to missionaries, security professionals and migrants themselves. It exposes how these actors depend upon the intersecting rationalities of managerialism, securitisation, humanit...

The Shi'a-Sunni conflict is one of the most significant outcomes arising from the Arab rebellions. Yet, there is little understanding of who is driving this tension and the underlying causes. By delving deeply into the historical factors leading up to the present-day conflict, The New Sectarianism sheds new light on how Shi'a and Sunni perceive one another after the Arab uprisings, how these perceptions have affected the Arab world, and why the dream of a pan-Islamic awakening was...

This book presents findings from research into one of the world's most influential Islamic movements, the Gülen Movement, from the perspective of social transformation through adult education. At the core of research questions lies how the movement enrolls volunteers from all walks of life and transforms them to adopt its aims at the expense of their individual ideals. The book reveals the socio-psychological mechanisms that make such transformation possible by looking at how followers int...

Introducing a framework to generate new conversations about inter-religious dialogue and create a community of religions, Shai Har-El argues that Islam and Judaism, sister religions, are closely related to one another with roots intertwined in the land, in the language, and in the memories of shared history.

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in Kuwait and throughout the Arabian Peninsula, this book explores what cultural elites in the Arab Gulf region have to say about women's political and cultural rights and how their faith is or is not related to their politics.

Against a background of weak and contested national identity and capricious interaction between religious affiliation and confessional politics, this book illustrates in detailed analysis this "comprehensive" project of Islamism according to its ideological and practical evolutionary change.

This book traces the rise of the political dynasty in the Middle East and, in the process, provides the context for the current Arab uprising. The author shows that a father-to-son transfer of power has no basis in Islam, and yet the idea of dynastic power became entrenched in the Middle East.

This book analyzes the evolution of the Hojjatiyeh movement in Iran, a semi-clandestine movement which emerged in the 1950s as an anti-Baha'i movement, went underground in the 1960s, and re-emerged openly after Iran's 1979 revolution with its members coming to occupy some of the highest echelon posts in Iranian politics

A study of the attempts by the US and EU to develop meaningful political relations with Islamist movements in the Middle East and Balkans. The contributors draw on extensive research on Islamist parties and movements and Western policy towards them over the past decade.