The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World. By Mohammed Ayoob. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 232p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 636-637
Author(s):  
Andrew Flibbert
1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (02) ◽  
pp. 210-211

Late May, 1979, has been targeted as the release date of data from a pre-presidential pilot study conducted under the supervision of its Board of Overseers by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan. The pilot study is a direct outgrowth of a number of research conferences—on issue voting, party identification and response to leadership—held by the Board during the academic year of 1977–78. The conferences brought together some 60 scholars from across the nation in several locations for the purpose of advising the Board and the Center in preparation for the 1980 presidential study made possible by a long-term national resource grant from the National Science Foundation (for earlier reports on these conferences, seePS, Spring, 1978, pp. 240–242, andPS, Summer, 1978, pp. 342–343). The pilot study was recommended by a smaller group of scholars assembled in Ann Arbor in August, 1978, for the purpose of integrating the many suggestions for future electoral and related research received from the conference participants and from an equal number of other scholars who, because of limited resources, could not be invited to the conferences (for a report on the August workshop, seePS, Fall, 1978, pp. 504–505).


2021 ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
Nader Hashemi

This chapter focuses on the problem of misunderstanding religious politics in the Arab-Islamic world. The goal is to advance an objective historical and comparative framework for interpreting this subject. Two key themes that have been central to John Esposito’s scholarship are examined: the secular bias in modernization theory and the need for a historical and contextual understanding of the many faces of political Islam. To advance this argument, Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions will be utilized, focusing on his discussion of Algeria and political Islam. It is argued that Walzer offers a typical liberal reading of this topic that upon examination is ideologically biased and analytically distorting. Ironically, his earlier writings on religion and politics provide a more useful interpretive framework for understanding the rise of religious politics in our contemporary world.


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