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'Ideologies need enemies to thrive, religion does not'. Using the Sahel as a source of five comparative case studies, this volume aims to engage in the painstaking task of disentangling Islam from the political ideologies that have issued from its theologies to fight for governmental power and the transformation of society. While these ideologies tap into sources of religious legitimacy, the author shows that they are fundamentally secular or temporal enterprises, defined by confrontation with other political ideologies-both progressive and liberal-within the arena of nation states. Their objectives are the same as these other ideologies, i.e., to harness political power for changing national societies, and they resort to various methods of persuasion, until they break down into violence. The two driving questions of the book are, whence come these ideologies, and why do they-sometimes-result in violence? Ideologies of Salafi radicalism are at work in the five countries of the Sahel region, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, (Northern) Nigeria and Senegal, but violence has broken out only in Mali and Northern Nigeria. Using a theoretical framework of ideological development and methods of historical analysis, Idrissa traces the emergence of Salafi radicalism in each of these countries as a spark ignited by the shock between concurrent processes of Islamization and colonization in the 1940s.

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas --religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning -- as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line. Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education

The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria -- a work of literature as trigger for political crisis & polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar's fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time & outlook in the Arab world. Adapted from the source document.

Der Autor versucht, dem westlich geprägten Beobachter islamischer Politik die Rolle des Islam als autonome politische Kraft verständlich zu machen und auf grundlegende Unterschiede zum Verhältnis von Christentum und Politik hinzuweisen