We are told that Western/Christian and Muslim/Arab civilizations are heading towards inevitable conflict. The demographics of the West remain sluggish, while the population of the Muslim world explodes, widening the cultural gap and all but guaranteeing the outbreak of war. Leaving aside the media's sound and fury on this issue, measured analysis shows another reality taking shape: rapprochement between these two civilizations, benefiting from a universal movement with roots in the Enlight...

One of the most important developments in the modern history of the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, bringing down dictators, sparking a civil war in Libya, and igniting a bloody uprising in Syria. Its long-term repercussions in Egypt and elsewhere remain unclear. Now one of the world's leading Islamic thinkers examines and explains it, in this searching, provocative, and necessary book.Time Magazine named Tariq Ramadan one of the most important inn...

This pioneering explanation of the Arab Spring will define a new era of thinking about the Middle East.In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a 'Delayed Defiance' - a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike - that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism. Sketching a new geograp...

Turkey has leapt to international prominence as an economic and political powerhouse under its elected Muslim government, and is looked on by many as a model for other Muslim countries in the wake of the Arab Spring. In this book, Jenny White reveals how Turkish national identity and the meanings of Islam and secularism have undergone radical changes in today's Turkey, and asks whether the Turkish model should be viewed as a success story or a cautionary tale. This provocative book traces ...

In 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic approach. In this book, M. Hakan Yavuz negotiates this ambivalence asking whether it is possible for a political party with a deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy or whether, as he contends, radical religious groups moderate their practices and ideologies when forced to ...

This hugely successful, ground-breaking book is the first introductory textbook on the Modern Middle East to foreground the urban, rural, cultural and gender histories of the region over its political and economic history. Distancing himself from more traditional modernising approaches, Ilan Pappé is concerned with the ideological question of whom we investigate in the past rather than how we investigate the past. Pappé begins his narrative at the end of the First World War with the Ottoma...

Prior to 2011, popular imagination perceived the Muslim Middle East as unchanging and unchangeable, frozen in its own traditions and history. In Life as Politics, Asef Bayat argues that such presumptions fail to recognize the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful change through everyday actions. First published just months before the Arab Spring swept across the region, this timely and prophetic book sheds light on the ongoing acts of protest, pract...

Just a few short years ago, the Turkish Model was being hailed across the world. The New York Times gushed that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) had "effectively integrated Islam, democracy, and vibrant economics," making Turkey, according to the International Crisis Group, "the envy of the Arab world." And yet, a more recent CNN headline wondered if Erdogan had become a dictator.In this incisive analysis, Cihan Tugal argues t...

As the Middle East descends ever deeper into violence and chaos, 'sectarianism' has become a catch-all explanation for the region's troubles. The turmoil is attributed to 'ancient sectarian differences', putatively primordial forces that make violent conflict intractable. In media and policy discussions, sectarianism has come to possess trans-historical causal power. This book trenchantly challenges the lazy use of 'sectarianism' as a magic-bullet explanation for the region's ills, focusin...

Examines the causes of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and also provides a reasoned approach as to what the future may hold. As the dust settled around the devastation of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, a host of questions emerged surrounding the attacks, the motives behind them and their future implications. In Two Hours that Shook the World Fred Halliday expands on the many socio-cultural, religious and political problems that have plagued the Middle East an...

The first major historical account of gender politics during the Nasser era, Revolutionary Womanhood analyzes feminism as a system of ideas and political practices, international in origin but local in iteration. Drawing connections between the secular nationalist projects that emerged in the 1950s and the gender politics of Islamism today, Laura Bier reveals how discussions about education, companionate marriage, and enlightened motherhood, as well as veiling, work, and other mea...

Some sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their "right of return." Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with "the catastrophe" of 1948 and their camps—inhabited now for four generations—as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mind...