Covers Israel's policy toward Islamic institutions within its borders, 1948-2000.

In a world of multinational commerce, satellite broadcasting, migration, terrorism, and global arms dealing, what is said and how it is said in one society can no longer be isolated from what is said and how it is said in another. Debating Muslims focuses on Iranian culture, Shi'ite Islam, and Iranians in the United States, offering an experiment in postmodern ethnography and an invitation to think in a multifaceted way about Islam in the contemporary world.

For years, scholars hypothesized about what Islamists might do if they ever came to power. Now, they have answers: confusing ones. In the Levant, ISIS established a government by brute force, implementing an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tunisia's Ennahda Party governed in coalition with two secular parties, ratified a liberal constitution, and voluntarily stepped down from power. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's oldest Islamist movement, won power through free elections only to be ousted by a military coup. The strikingly disparate results of Islamist movements have challenged conventional wisdom on political Islam, forcing experts and Islamists to rethink some of their most basic assumptions. In Rethinking Political Islam, two of the leading scholars on Islamism, Shadi Hamid and William McCants, have gathered a group of leading specialists in the field to explain how an array of Islamist movements across the Middle East and Asia have responded. Unlike ISIS and other jihadist groups that garner the most media attention, these movements have largely opted for gradual change. Their choices, however, have been reshaped by the revolutionary politics of the region. The groups depicted in the volume capture the contradictions, successes, and failures of Islamism, providing a fascinating window into a rapidly changing Middle East. It is the first book to systematically assess the evolution of mainstream Islamist groups since the Arab uprisings and the rise of ISIS, covering 12 country cases. In each instance, contributors address key questions, including: gradual versus revolutionary approaches to change; the use of tactical or situational violence; attitudes toward the nation-state; and how ideology, religion, and political variables interact. For the first time in book form, readers will also hear directly from Islamist activists and leaders themselves, as they offer their own perspectives on the future of their movements. Islamists will have the opportunity to challenge the assumptions and arguments of some of the leading scholars of Islamism, in the spirit of constructive dialogue. Rethinking Political Islam includes three of the most important country cases outside the Middle East-Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan-allowing readers to consider a greater diversity of Islamist experiences. The book's contributors have immersed themselves in the world of political Islam and conducted original research in the field, resulting in rich accounts of what animates Islamist behavior.

Brings together prominent Muslim voices to debate the nature of moderate, as opposed to fundamentalist, Islam and what moderation means in both a theological and a geopolitical sense.

Using declassified documents from Israeli archives, Alisa Rubin Peled explores the development, implementation, and reform of the state's Islamic policy from 1948 to 2000. She addresses how Muslim communal institutions developed and whether Israel formulated a distinct "Islamic policy" toward shari'a courts, waqf (charitable endowments), holy places, and religious education. Her analysis reveals the contradictions and nuances of a policy driven by a wide range of motives and implemented by a diverse group of government authorities, illustrating how Israeli policies produced a co-opted religious establishment lacking popular support and paved the way for a daring challenge by a grassroots Islamist Movement since the 1980s. As part of a wider debate on early Israeli history, she challenges the idea that Israeli policy was part of a greater monolithic policy toward the Arab minority.

Conspicuously, Islam has become a key concern in most European societies with respect to issues of immigration, integration, identity, values and inland security. As the mere presence of Muslim minorities fails to explain these debates convincingly, new questions need to be asked: How did ¿Islam± become a topic? Who takes part in the debates? How do these debates influence both individual as well as collective ¿self-images± and ¿image of others±? Introducing Switzerland as an under-researched object of study to the academic discourse on Islam in Europe, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the objective by putting recent case studies from diverse national contexts into comparative perspective.--

A creative, out of the box approach to examining the validity of Christ's resurrection from the virtual perspectives of two religious heavyweights.