In Twelve Muslim Revolutions, Professor Kortepeter presents a broadly encompassing study of the medieval and modern history of the central lands of Islam over a period of centuries. Told in three parts: 1) Revolutions from pre-Islamic Arabia to the Ottoman Turks, 2) The imperial powers establishing footprints in the Middle East in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and 3) American presidents and their inability to fully comprehend the complexities of the Middle East since World War II. This narrative is told in a very personal manner, borne of on-the-ground experience in those lands, an essential read for anyone wishing to comprehend the story of the Middle East present, past and future. University students, scholars, and policy-makers alike will find Kortepeters insights equally compelling.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.

This book seeks to explain the political and religious factors leading to the economic reversal of fortunes between Europe and the Middle East.

At the height of the imperial age, European powers ruled over most parts of the Islamic world. The British, French, Russian, and Dutch empires each governed more Muslims than any independent Muslim state. European officials believed Islam to be of great political significance, and were quite cautious when it came to matters of the religious life of their Muslim subjects. In the colonies, they regularly employed Islamic religious leaders and institutions to bolster imperial rule. At the same time, the European presence in Muslim lands was confronted by religious resistance movements and Islamic insurgency. Across the globe, from the West African savanna to the shores of Southeast Asia, Muslim rebels called for holy war against non-Muslim intruders. Islam and the European Empires presents the first comparative account of the engagement of all major European empires with Islam. Bringing together fifteen of the world's leading scholars in the field, the volume explores a wide array of themes, ranging from the accommodation of Islam under imperial rule to Islamic anti-colonial resistance. A truly global history of empire, the volume makes a major contribution not only to our knowledge of the intersection of Islam and imperialism, but also more generally to our understanding of religion and power in the modern world.

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

A ground-breaking study of political transformations in non-Western societies, this book applies anthropological, sociological and political concepts to the recent history of Iran to explore the role played by a ritual theatrical performance (Ta’ziyeh) and its symbols on the construction of public mobilisations. With particular attention to three formative phases – the 1978–79 Islamic Revolution, the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, and the 2009 Green Movement – the author concentrates on the relations between symbols of the ritual performance and the public sphere to shed light on the ways in which the symbols of Ta’ziyeh were used to claim political legitimacy. Thus, the book elucidates how symbols and images of a ritual performance can be utilised by ‘tricksters’, such as political actors and fanatical religious leaders, to take advantage of the prolongation of a state of transition within a society, and so manipulate the public in order to mobilise crowds and movements to fulfil their own interests and concerns. An insightful analysis of political mobilisation explained in terms of a set of interrelated master concepts such as ‘liminality’, ‘trickster’ and ‘schismogenesis’, Power, Legitimacy and the Public Sphere integrates theoretical, empirical and ‘diagnostic’ perspectives in order to investigate and illustrate links between the public sphere and religious and cultural rituals. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and anthropology with interests in social theory, public mobilisations and political transformation.

The recent revival of interest in the Muslim world has generated numerous studies of modern Islam, most of them focusing on the Sunni majority. Shi'ism, an often stigmatized minority branch of Islam, has been discussed mainly in connection with Iran. Yet Shi'i movements have been extraordinarily effective in creating political strategies that have