islam and politics

Discusses how the Palestinian people have resisted the political changes of their country.

The typical terrorist follows four steps: alienation from the dominant culture, sometimes due to joblessness and discrimination; a turn to petty crime; religious awakening and radicalization; and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country to train for jihad. Why do these people choose terrorism? This question has pressing relevance in today's world. The author is a widely respected international scholar of radical Islam and has spent years studying the path towards radicalism. In this book he offers a framework for both understanding contemporary terrorism and for taking steps to combat it.

By all measures, the late twentieth century was a time of dramatic decline for the Islamic world, the Ummah, particularly its Arab heartland. Sober Muslim voices regularly describe their current state as the worst in the 1,400-year history of Islam. Yet, precisely at this time of unprecedented material vulnerability, Islam has emerged as a civilizational force strong enough to challenge the imposition of Western, particularly American, homogenizing power on Muslim peoples. This is the central paradox of Islam today: at a time of such unprecedented weakness in one sense, how has the Islamic Awakening, a broad and diverse movement of contemporary Islamic renewal, emerged as such a resilient and powerful transnational force and what implications does it have for the West? In One Islam, Many Muslims Worlds Raymond W. Baker addresses this question.

As a young boy, Awais Reza's family moved from Indian Kashmir to Lahore in Pakistan after Partition. Now middle-aged, Awais is a shopkeeper in the Anarkali Bazaar. Married, with three sons, he looks back on his journey from idealistic young nationalist to increasingly watchful and anxious member of the mercantile class at the heart of Pakistani life. Awais's eldest son has drifted, but returned to help his father run the shop; the middle one is involved in radical Islamist politics; and the youngest is a law student who believes that a secular future is Pakistan's last and only hope. Their lives unfold against an increasingly turbulent and violent background as suicide bombers enter the life of urban Lahore with devastating consequences. Haroon K. Ullah's portrait of a middle class family oppressed by a state falling apart around them shows that Radical Islam is confronted not only in distant mountain passes by the armed forces, but most personally and tellingly across the kitchen table as families like the Rezas debate their future.

Traces the history of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan; discusses how the leaders of the movement interpret the principles of Islam; and examines the influence of the Taliban in the competition among Western countries and companies to build oil and gas pipelines in Asia.

Examines the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81--during which over fifty Americans were held captive by Iranian militants for 444 days--and the events that led to it, comparing America's actions in the Middle East in the 1970s and early 1980s with its actions there in the early twenty-first century.

Shahan Mufti can trace his family history back fourteen hundred years to the inner circle of the prophet Muhammad and can relate the stories of his ancestors, many of whom served as judges and jurists in the sharia courts of South Asia for many centuries. He is able to capture the larger story of Pakistan, the world's first Islamic democracy that once promised to bridge Islam and the West, and is now in danger of crumbling under historical and political pressure, and why Pakistan's destiny matters to us all.