The I.B.Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East

The I.B.Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East PDF Author: Fatma Müge Göçek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 075563943X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
What we understand by the 'Middle East' has changed over time and across space. While scholars agree that the geographical 'core' of the Middle East is the Arabian Peninsula, the boundaries are less clear. How far back in time should we go to define the Middle East? How far south and east should we move on the African continent? And how do we deal with the minority religions in the region, and those who migrate to the West? Across this handbook's 52 chapters, the leading sociologists writing on the Middle East share their standpoint on these questions. Taking the featured scholars as constitutive of the field, the handbook reshapes studies on the region by piecing together our knowledge on the Middle East from their path-defining contributions. The volume is divided into four parts covering sociologists' perspectives on: · Social transformations and social conflict; from Israel-Palestine and the Iranian Revolution, to the Arab Uprisings and the Syrian War · The region's economic, religious and political activities; including the impact of the spread of Western modernity; the effects of neo-liberalism; and how Islam shapes the region's life and politics · People's everyday practices as they have shaped our understanding of culture, consumption, gender and sexuality · The diasporas from the Middle East in Europe and North America, which put the Middle East in dialogue with other regions of the world. The global approach and wide-ranging topics represent how sociologists enable us to redefine the boundaries and identities of the Middle East today.

The I.B.Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East

The I.B.Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East PDF Author: Fatma Müge Göçek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 075563943X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Get Book Here

Book Description
What we understand by the 'Middle East' has changed over time and across space. While scholars agree that the geographical 'core' of the Middle East is the Arabian Peninsula, the boundaries are less clear. How far back in time should we go to define the Middle East? How far south and east should we move on the African continent? And how do we deal with the minority religions in the region, and those who migrate to the West? Across this handbook's 52 chapters, the leading sociologists writing on the Middle East share their standpoint on these questions. Taking the featured scholars as constitutive of the field, the handbook reshapes studies on the region by piecing together our knowledge on the Middle East from their path-defining contributions. The volume is divided into four parts covering sociologists' perspectives on: · Social transformations and social conflict; from Israel-Palestine and the Iranian Revolution, to the Arab Uprisings and the Syrian War · The region's economic, religious and political activities; including the impact of the spread of Western modernity; the effects of neo-liberalism; and how Islam shapes the region's life and politics · People's everyday practices as they have shaped our understanding of culture, consumption, gender and sexuality · The diasporas from the Middle East in Europe and North America, which put the Middle East in dialogue with other regions of the world. The global approach and wide-ranging topics represent how sociologists enable us to redefine the boundaries and identities of the Middle East today.

Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics

Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134121776
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description


Stability and Change in the Modern Middle East

Stability and Change in the Modern Middle East PDF Author: Kjetil Selvik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857719661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking book, aimed at new generation of students, Stig Stenslie and Kjetil Selvik provide a new introduction to the contemporary Middle East, using topical questions about stability and change as a way of interrogating the politics, economics and history of the region. How have regimes from North Africa to the Gulf perpetuated themselves in spite of the weakness of the Western-style state, the Islamist trend, and the destabilising effects of war and terrorism? What strategies have states used to control their societies, and how have both states and societies adapted over time? Both an accessible reference resource and a thought-provoking analysis, Stability and Change in the Modern Middle East introduces the key theoretical concepts for understanding the region and the freshest thinking on debates surrounding them, and brings the empirical material in to sharp focus through its unique thematic approach.

The Paradox of Islamic Finance

The Paradox of Islamic Finance PDF Author: Ryan Calder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691258325
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
How the booming Islamic finance industry became an ultramodern hybrid of religion and markets In just fifty years, Islamic finance has grown from a tiny experiment operated from a Volkswagen van to a thriving global industry worth more than the entire financial sector of India, South America, or Eastern Europe. You can now shop with an Islamic credit card, invest in Islamic bonds, and buy Islamic derivatives. But how has this spectacular growth been possible, given Islam’s strictures against interest? In The Paradox of Islamic Finance, Ryan Calder examines the Islamic finance boom, arguing that shariah scholars—experts in Islamic law who certify financial products as truly Islamic—have made the industry a profitable, if controversial, hybrid of religion and markets. Critics say Islamic finance merely reproduces conventional interest-based finance, with the shariah scholars’ blessing. From an economic perspective, they are right: the most popular Islamic products act like conventional interest-bearing ones, earning healthy profits for Islamic banks and global financial heavyweights like Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. Yet as Calder shows by delving into the shariah scholars’ day-to-day work, what seem like high-tech work-arounds to outsiders carry deep and nuanced meaning to the scholars—and to the hundreds of millions of Muslims who respect their expertise. He argues that shariah scholars’ conception of Islamic finance is perfectly suited to the age of financialization and the global efflorescence of shariah-minded Islam.

Beyond Islam

Beyond Islam PDF Author: Sami Zubaida
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857718649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In this magisterial work, Sami Zubaida draws on a distinguished career's worth of experience trying to understand the region to address the fundamental question in Middle East studies: what is the Middle East? He argues, controversially, that to see it through the prism of Islam, as it is conventionally viewed, is to completely misunderstand it. Many of what we think of as the 'Islamic' characteristics of the region are products of culture and society, not religion.To think of Islam itself as an essential, anti-modern force in the region rather than something shaped by specific historical-economic processes is, Zubaida argues, a mistake. Instead, he offers us an alternative view of the region, its historic cosmpolitanism, its religious and cultural diversity, its rapid adoption of new media cultures, which reveals a multi-faceted and complex region teeming with multiple identities. Wide-ranging, erudite and powerfully argued, Zubaida's work will be essential reading for future generations of students of this fascinating region.

Handbook of Middle East Politics

Handbook of Middle East Politics PDF Author: Shahram Akbarzadeh
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1802205632
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This Handbook uses a comprehensive study of political institutions, social movements and external pressures to offer nuanced study of politics in the Middle East. Foremost scholars on the Middle East examine key themes such as political change, regional rivalry and authoritarianism, making this collection very timely and relevant as an authoritative source.

Global Shaping and Its Alternatives

Global Shaping and Its Alternatives PDF Author: William K. Carroll
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9781551930435
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Global Shaping and its Alternatives offers a unique series of reflections on the connections between market capitalism, the politics of alternatives, and the cultural elaboration of social change. It argues that there is a need for an alternative explanatory framework on globalization - one that rejects fatalism and highlights the dynamic roles of states, NGOs, local fractions of capital, democrative movements and gendered social relations. Without understanding how global shaping is taking place and how it affects human life across the globe, there can be no transformational possibility for humanizing our conditions of existence.

Secularism Confronts Islamism

Secularism Confronts Islamism PDF Author: Mohammad Affan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000532003
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book provides in-depth examination of the recent confrontation between Islamists and secularists in Egypt and Tunisia. Presenting a new approach to understand Islamism and secularism, the research addresses the variables that could affect the outcome of transitional negotiations. The secularist-Islamist conflict proved to be a major hindrance for democratisation and a main source of political instability in the Middle East. During the Arab Spring, disputes between both political trends sparked shortly after getting rid of their common enemy: the autocratic rulers. First, they disagreed on how to lead the transitional period. Then, polarisation grew deeper with the political competition in the parliamentary and presidential elections and the ideological disagreements during the drafting of the constitution. Eventually, this conflict put Tunisia at a verge of civil strife in the summer of 2013 and led to collapse of the transitional process in Egypt after the military coup. Examining the causes of the conflict between the secularists and the Islamists during the transitional period, the work provides new insights from the Arab Spring experience. Updating the transition literature, the book is a key resource to academics and students interested in democratization theory and Middle East politics.

Exchange Ideologies

Exchange Ideologies PDF Author: Paul Anderson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Exchange Ideologies documents the social world of Aleppo's traders before the destruction of the city, exploring changing conceptions of commerce in Syria. Syria's traders have been seen as embodying a timeless culture of "the bazaar," or an ahistorical Islamic culture of trade. Other accounts portray them as venal figures, motivated only by profit, and commerce as a purely instrumental pursuit. Rejecting both approaches, Paul Anderson traces the diverse social structures, and notions of language, through which Aleppo's merchants understood and construed commerce and the figure of the merchant during a period of economic liberalization in the 2000s. Rather than seeing these social structures and representations as expressions of a timeless bazaar culture, or as shaped only by Islamic tradition, Exchange Ideologies relates them to processes of politically managed economic liberalization and the Syrian regime's attempts to ensure its own survival in the midst of change. In doing so, Anderson provides an account of economic liberalization in Syria as a social and cultural process as much as a political and economic one.

Foreign Aid in the Middle East

Foreign Aid in the Middle East PDF Author: Beáta Paragi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
What do we mean by 'gifts' in International Relations? Can foreign aid be conceptualized as a gift? Most foreign aid transactions are unilateral and financially unreciprocated, yet donors expect to benefit from them.Previous research dealing with foreign aid has analyzed the main donor motives and interests in providing financial support. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the invisible political or social 'exchange' taking place between recipient countries and donors when a grant agreement is signed. Focusing on Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel - the main beneficiaries of Western foreign aid – the book uses gift theories and theories of social exchange to show how international social bonds are shaped by foreign aid and in what ways recipient countries are obliged to return the 'gift' they receive. Foreign aid is a means of buying 'stability' or 'democracy' in the region but Beata Paragi is interested here to understand the actual feasibility of Western assistance. Looking at the context of the Arab Spring, the book examines how aid impacts on a recipient country's domestic political events such as war, the quest for self-determination, the struggle against occupation and the fight for dignity. An original contribution to Middle East Studies and International Relations, the research presents an alternative interpretation of foreign aid and show how external funds interact with local developments and realities.