Product Description: The ties that bind Africa and the Gulf region have deep historical roots that influence both what Braudel called the longue durée and the short-term events of current policy shifts, market-based economic fluctuations, and global and local political vicissitudes...read more

Product Description: Pilgrimage, travel for learning, visits to shrines, exile, and labour migration shape the religious imagination and in turn are shaped by it. Some travel, such as pilgrimage, explicitly intended for religious purposes, has equally important economic and political consequences...read more

Product Description: This book shows how competing Islamic ideas and practices create alternative political and social realities in the Muslim majority regions of the Arab Middle East, Iran, South Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in ways that differ from the emergence of the public sphere in Europe.

Product Description: This second edition of a widely acclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media--fax machines, satellite television, and the Internet--and the new uses of older media--cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press--shape belief, authority, and community in the Muslim world...read more

Product Description: Based on a synthesis of the extensive research of Middle Eastern and Western scholars, this lively anthropological introduction to the Middle East and Central Asia explores the socio-political complexities of those regions and introduces students to the questions that have been, and are being, developed by scholars and writers concerned with the two regions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this updated paperback edition, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori explore how the politics of Islam play out in the lives of Muslims throughout the world. They discuss how recent events such as September 11 and the 2003 war in Iraq have contributed to reshaping the political and religious landscape of Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities elsewhere...read more

Product Description: "Readers will find fresh and thought-provoking studies: the differing approaches of the U.S. and the [former] Soviet Union to Middle East policy, Central Asia, and South Asia... provide grounds for self-criticism and the exploration of new directions...read more

Product Description: This intensive social biography of a rural Moroccan judge discusses Islamic education, the concept of knowledge it embodies, and its communication from the early years of colonial rule in twentieth-century Morocco to the present. The work sensitively combines the outlooks and perceptions of the author and those of the shrewd and reflective `Abd ar-Rahman, supplementing our knowledge of resurgent militant Islamic movements by describing other popularly supported Islamic attitudes toward the contemporary world...read more

Product Description: This book is one of the first comprehensive studies of Islam as locally understood in the Middle East. Specifically, it is concerned with the prevalent North African belief that certain men, called marabouts, have a special relation to God that enables them to serve as intermediaries and to influence the well-being of their clients and kin...read more