Debates on the relationship between Islam and the West rage on, from talk of clashing civilizations to political pacification, from ethical and historical perspectives to distrust, xenophobia and fear. Here Mohammad Salama argues that the events of 9/11 force us to engage ourselves fully, without preconditions, in understanding not just the history of Islam as a religion, but of Islam as a historical condition that has existed in relationship to the West since the seventh century. Salama compares the Arab-Islamic and European traditions of historical thought since the early modern period, focusing on the watershed moments that informed the two traditions' ideas of intellectual history and perceptions of one another. He draws attention to European intellectual history's entangled links with the Islamic philosophy of history, especially the complexities of orientalism and modernity. Recent critical reflections on the work of Ibn Khald?n confirm this intertwined and troubled relationship, reflecting major disparities and contradictions. At the same time, recent Arab writings on Europe's intellectual history reveal a struggle against erasure and intellectual superiority. Calling for a new understanding of the relationship between Islam and the West, Salama argues that Islam has played a major role in enabling and positioning various paths of Western historiography at crucial moments of its development, leaving palpable imprints on Islamic historiography in the process. He proposes an answer to a fundamental question: how to make sense of the mechanics of production in Arab-Islamic and Western historiographies, or how to identify the ways in which they have both failed to make sense of themselves and of each other in an increasingly disenchanted postnationalist world. Spanning an impressive array of recent writings on these themes as well as older foundational texts in both traditions - including al-Tabar?, Ibn Khald?n, Hegel, al-Jabart?, Toynbee, Foucault, Edward Said, and Hourani - this book is both timely and crucial for all those interested in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Western and Islamic philosophies of history, modernity, and the relationship between Islam and the West.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

"It provides an account of the criticism of religion by key Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Lessing, Hume, and Kant. This is followed by an analysis of how the Romantic thinkers, such as Rousseau, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher, responded to these challenges. For Hegel, the views of these thinkers from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism tended to empty religion of its content. The goal that he sets for his own philosophy of religion is to restore this lost content. " -- back cover.

This book presents Ibn Khaldūn's anticipatory sociology of civilisations and power. Half a millennium before the birth of modern sociology in the West, Ibn Khaldūn—scholar, political counsellor, and Malikite judge—wrote a revolutionary sociological-philosophical treatise, the Muqaddima. This book places his broad, complex, and refined treatise against the background of the Islamo-Greek culture of his time and analyses its main sociological, but also philosophical, historical, and scientific perspectives. Finally, thanks to its "universalisable" core, the author recontextualizes the teachings from the Muqaddima to reveal the deep insights it provides into the society, politics and law of contemporary liberal and multicultural civilisations. A deeper reception of Ibn Khaldūn's perspective is not only important in understanding the Arab contribution to social theory, social history and philosophy, but also diversifies the sociological project beyond the Euro-American standpoint. Given its interdisciplinary appeal, the book addresses a wide readership of students and scholars in sociology, the sociology of law, philosophy of law, philosophy of history, political philosophy, history of civilisations, political sociology, and Arabic studies.

Recent outbursts sparked by a viral video and controversial cartoons powerfully illustrate the passions and sensitivities that continue to surround the depiction of the seventh-century founder of Islam. The Lives of Muhammad delves into the many ways the Prophet’s life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, Kecia Ali shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent. Since the nineteenth century, two separate streams of writing, one hagiographic and the other polemical, have merged into a single, contentious story about the life of Muhammad. Protestant missionaries, European Orientalists, Indian and Egyptian modernists, and American voices across the spectrum, including preachers, scholars, Islamophobes, journalists, academics, and new-age gurus, debated Muhammad’s character and the facts of his life. In the process, texts written symbolically came to be read literally. Muhammad’s accomplishments as a religious and political leader, his military encounters with Meccans and Medinan Jews, and—a subject of perennial interest—his relationships with women, including his young wife Aisha, are among the key subjects writers engaged, repurposing early materials for new circumstances. Many of the ideas about Muhammad that Muslims embrace today—Muhammad the social reformer, Muhammad the consummate leader, Muhammad the ideal husband—arose in tandem and in tension with Western depictions. These were in turn shaped by new ideas about religion, sexuality, and human accomplishments.

The Emotions in the Classics of Sociology stands as an innovative sociological research that introduces the study of emotions through a detailed examination of the theories and concepts of the classical authors of discipline. Sociology plays a crucial role emphasizing how much emotional expressions affect social dynamics, thus focusing on the ways in which subjects show (or decide to show) a specific emotional behaviour based on the social and historical context in which they act. This book focuses the attention on the individual emotions that are theorized and studied as forms of communication between subjects as well as magnifying glasses to understand the processes of change in the communities. This volume, therefore, guides the readers through an in-depth overview of the main turning points in the social theory of the classical authors of sociology highlighting the constant interaction between emotional, social and cultural elements. Thus, demonstrating how the attention of the emotional way of acting of the single subject was already present in the classics of the discipline. The book is suitable for an audience of undergraduate, postgraduate students and researchers in sociology, sociology of emotions, sociology of culture, social theory and other related fields.

A history of urban modernity in Cairo through cinema which"makes us see makes us see the movies in a whole new way" (Chris Berry, King’s College London) The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo’s urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for Egypt’s film industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the nineteenth century. The “reel” city—imagined, perceived, and experienced—provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and allows for an interrogation of the “real” city as it encountered modernity over the course of a century. Bringing together chapters by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South. Contributors Ahmed H. AbdelAzim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Khaled Adham, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany Kinda AlSamara, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley, USA Doaa Al Amir, October 6th University, Cairo, Egypt Mirette Aziz, Misr International University, Egypt Muhammad Emad Feteha, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt Farah Gendy, Raef Fahmi Architects, Cairo, Egypt Hala A. Hassanien, Architect, Wasl, Cairo, Egypt Tayseer Khairy, Arab Academy for Science Technology & Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt Mariam Marei, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt Ameer Saad, Architect, Dar Al-Handasa, Cairo, Egypt Heba Safey Eldeen, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt Mohammad Salama, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA Nour Sobhi, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt Sherin Soliman, Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt

In contemporary history, a much-debated issue has been whether European nations have a common identity and what relevance the European Union has for a shared definition of Europeanness. The present book examines the link between historical conceptions of Europe and the contestations over Turkey’s compatibility with the European Union during the 2000s.

Conceived as both a vehicle to national prestige and as a civilizing mission, the second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own. The resultant networks of anthropological inquiry, however, did not have this effect. Rather, they opened pathways to political and intellectual independence framed in the language of social science, and in the process upended the colonial political system and reshaped the nature of human inquiry in France. While still unequal, French colonial rule in Africa revealed the durability and strength of non-European modes of thought. In this influential new study, historian Douglas W. Leonard examines the political and intellectual repercussions of French efforts to understand and to dominate colonial Africa through the use of anthropology. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, these French thinkers sowed the seeds of colonial destruction.

Syed Hussein Alatas and Critical Social Theory: Decolonizing the Captive Mind offers a variety of historical, religious, and philosophical perspectives into the significance of Syed Hussein Alatas’ life and thought today.