Books in the Religion and Global Politics series

Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu examine the relationship between religion and politics in ten former communist Eastern European countries, showing church-state relations in the new EU member states through study of political representation for church leaders, governmental subsidies, registration of religions by the state, and religious instruction in public schools.

Inside the Muslim Brotherhood provides a comprehensive analysis of the organization's identity, organization, and activism in Egypt since 1981. It also explains the Brotherhood's durability and its ability to persist in spite of regime repression and exclusion over the past three decades.

Specifically designed for third- and fourth-year students, Religion and Global Politics uses case studies from the US, India, and Latin America, as well as theoretical concepts to explore the relationship between religion and world order.

This book surveys the growth and development of Islam in Malaysia from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, investigating how Islam has shaped the social lives, languages, cultures and politics of both Muslims and non-Muslims in one of the most populous Muslim regions in the world. Khairudin Aljunied shows how Muslims in Malaysia built upon the legacy of their pre-Islamic past while benefiting from Islamic ideas, values, and networks to found flourishing statesand societies that have played an influential role in a globalizing world.

Rather than merely "surviving" Soviet rule, Islam in Central Asia shaped, and was shaped by, the social and political context of Communism. Relying on recently declassified Central Asian archival sources, most of them never seen before by historians, Soviet and Muslim offers a radical new reading of Islam's resilience and evolution under atheist rule.

This comparative ethnography explores Islamic revival movements in France and India, home to the largest numbers of Muslim minorities in Western Europe and Asia. Parvez provides an in-depth view into how Muslims in two cities struggle to improve their lives as denigrated minorities, amid national crises of secular democracy.

Containing Balkan Nationalism focuses on the Bulgarian movement for recognition of the independent status of their national church from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, with the effect of tearing apart mixed Greek-Bulgarian-Serbian Orthodox communities.

Using Iran as a case study, Ghobadzadeh investigates the paradoxes of the Islamic state ideal. He develops the seemingly oxymoronic term "religious secularity" and uses it to describe the Islamic quest for a democratic secular state.

Hilal Elver offers an in-depth study of the escalating controversy over the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves. Examining legal and political debates in Turkey, several European countries including France and Germany, and the United States, Elver shows the troubling exclusion of pious Muslim women from the public sphere in the name of secularism, democracy, liberalism, and women's rights.

David Tittensor offers a groundbreaking new perspective on the Gulen movement, a Turkish Muslim educational activist network that emerged in the 1960s and has grown into a global empire with an estimated worth of $25 billion

In One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds Raymond Baker addresses the main paradox of the Islamic world today: the fact of its emergence as a civilizational force strong enough to contend with the West, in the midst of its unprecedented material vulnerability.

In the post-communist era democracies in Eastern Europe will be determined by many factors. The Orthodox and Roman and Greek Catholic churches have imposed their views through political engagement and the Romanian Orthodox has sought to consolidate its position of national Church, the book examines the relationship between church and state.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of Islamic political identity in Turkey. This title argues that, since Kemal Ataturk's death in 1938, Turkey has been moving away from his militant secularism and experiencing 'a quiet Muslim reformation'. It offers an account of the 'soft coup' of 1997, and argues that it plunged Turkey into a legitimacy crisis.

An introduction to the thought of Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi, the political activist who heads Tunisia's banned Islamist political opposition to the contemporary authoritarian regime. He is the leader of a school in modern Islamic political thought that advocates democracy and pluralism.

Reporting from the heartland of Yugoslavia in the 1970s, Washington Post correspondent Dusko Doder described "a landscape of Gothic spires, Islamic mosques, and Byzantine domes." A quarter century later, this landscape lay in ruins. In addition to claiming tens of thousands of lives, theformer Yugoslavia's four wars ravaged over a thousand religious buildings, many purposefully destroyed by Serbs, Albanians, and Croats alike, providing an apt architectural metaphor for the region's recent history. Rarely has the human impulse toward monocausality--the need for a single explanation--been in greater evidence than in Western attempts to make sense of the country's bloody dissolution. From Robert Kaplan's controversial Balkan Ghosts, which identified entrenched ethnic hatreds as the drivingforce behind Yugoslavia's demise to NATO's dogged pursuit and arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the quest for easy answers has frequently served to obscure the Balkans' complex history. Perhaps most surprisingly, no book has focused explicitly on the role religion has played in the conflicts thatcontinue to torment southeastern Europe. Based on a wide range of South Slav sources and previously unpublished, often confidential documents from communist state archives, as well as on the author's own on-the-ground experience, Balkan Idols explores the political role and influence of Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholic, and YugoslavMuslim religious organizations over the course of the last century. Vjekoslav Perica emphatically rejects the notion that a "clash of civilizations" has played a central role in fomenting aggression. He finds no compelling evidence of an upsurge in religiousfervor among the general population.Rather, he concludes, the primary religious players in the conflicts have been activist clergy. This activism, Perica argues, allowed the clergy to assume political power without the accountability faced by democratically-elected officia

This book presents a detailed analysis of the Islamic principle of wasatiyyah, or moderation, exploring its meaning and scope in both the Qu'ran and Hadith and applying it to contemporary issues such as justice, women's rights, environmental and financial balance, and globalization.

This collection of essays explores the complex relationship between religion and multiculturalism and the role of the state and law in the creation of boundaries.

Answering the Call explores the triumphant return of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the critical decade of the 1970s. It paints a portrait of a veteran leadership that attracted the cadres of a vibrant student movement pursuing Islamic activism following its disillusionment with Nasserism.

This collection of essays explores the complex relationship between religion and multiculturalism and the role of the state and law in the creation of boundaries.

Vali Nasr argues that the state itself plays a key role in embedding Islam in the politics of Muslim countries. The turn to Islam, argues Nasr, is a facet of the state's drive to establish hegemony over society and expand its power and control. He focuses on the cases of Malaysia and Pakistan to demonstrate his thesis.