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.

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

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.