A distinguished scholar of international politics clarifies what is widely misunderstood in the West: Islam and Islamism are not two words for the same thing Despite the intense media focus on Muslims and their religion since the tragedy of 9/11, few Western scholars or policymakers today have a clear idea of the distinctions between Islam and the politically based fundamentalist movement known as Islamism. In this important and illuminating book, Bassam Tibi, a senior scholar of Islamic politics, provides a corrective to this dangerous gap in our understanding. He explores the true nature of contemporary Islamism and the essential ways in which it differs from the religious faith of Islam.
Drawing on research in twenty Islamic countries over three decades, Tibi describes Islamism as a political ideology based on a reinvented version of Islamic law. In separate chapters devoted to the major features of Islamism, he discusses the Islamist vision of state order, the centrality of antisemitism in Islamist ideology, Islamism's incompatibility with democracy, the reinvention of jihadism as terrorism, the invented tradition of shari'a law as constitutional order, and the Islamists' confusion of the concepts of authenticity and cultural purity. Tibi's concluding chapter applies elements of Hannah Arendt's theory to identify Islamism as a totalitarian ideology.

Islamism and Islam

Politics & Social Sciences

Tibi, Bassam

Social Sciences

Yale University Press

This book is a monograph on Arab nationalism. Nation, nationalism and nation states are phenomena strange to Islamic history. However, since the Europeans have conquered the world and since the ensuing Europeanization of world order the Arab and Islamic Middle East has become a part of this modern world structured as an international system and subdivided into basic units organized as nation states. This book takes an effort at combining the structural study of history with the respective history of ideas and with international relations, as well, to integrate these approaches into a frame of reference for studying and explaining Arab nationalism.

Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry

History

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Arab nationalism: A critical enquiry

Politics & Government

St.Martin's Press

Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security

Few studies of Middle East wars go beyond a narrative of events and most tend to impose on this subject the rigid scheme of superpower competition. The Gulf War of 1991, however, challenges this view of the Middle East as an extension of the global conflict. The failure of the accord of both superpowers to avoid war even once regional superpower competition in the Middle East had ceased must give rise to the question: Do regional conflicts have their own dynamic? Working from this assumption, the book examines local-regional constraints of Middle East conflict and how, through escalation and the involvement of extra-regional powers, such conflicts acquire an international dimension. The theory of a regional subsystem is employed as a framework for conceptualising this interplay between regional and international factors in Tibi's examination of the Middle East wars in the period 1967-91. Tibi also provides an outlook into the future of conflict in the Middle East in the aftermath of the most recent Gulf War.

Asia

This book is relevant for the study of regional conflicts during and after the end of the Cold War. The focus of the major parts are inter-state wars in the period of 1967-1991. In the revised, updated and expanded new edition the author argues that the Gulf War would probably be the last inter-state war in the Middle East. The resort to the use of force would be mostly pursued by irregulars like Islamic fundamentalists (in Algeria, Egypt, the Occupied Territories) and ethnic nationalists (the Kurds). Thus the study of conflict in the Middle East would shift from the study of inter-state war to the study of the crisis of the nation-state incapable of dealing with the arising violence within its boundaries. The author argues that regional integration among the states and the industrial bolstering of the weak nominal nation-states in the Middle East would be the new needed pattern of security politics in the Middle East no longer restricted to dealing with military issues.

Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation State

Taking the perspective of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Tibi re-approaches the problem of social change in Islam, arguing that religions represent cultural systems that both influence and are influenced by religion.

Islam And The Cultural Accommodation Of Social Change

Reference

Routledge

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Books by Tibi, Bassam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tibi, Bassam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Islamism and Islam

Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry

Arab nationalism: A critical enquiry

Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry

Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security

Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security

Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation State

Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security

Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security

Islam And The Cultural Accommodation Of Social Change