Encounters At The Edge Of The Muslim World

This unique work provides the only sustained political history of independent Kyrgyzstan, explaining events in the context of its society and the broader international order. Drawing on three decades of personal encounters with ordinary citizens and leading public figures, Eugene Huskey takes readers on a journey through the unlikely birth and tumultuous development of Central Asia’s most open society. Starting with the heady, romantic first days of independence and moving through the popular uprisings and inter-ethnic violence of recent years, he chronicles the struggles of a new state to establish a democratic order and to find its place in the international community, while caught between China, the Middle East, and the Russian world. At the center are the very human stories of leaders and citizens trying to navigate the transition from communism, where identities, property, and the rules of the political game were constantly in dispute. With citizens of independent Kyrgyzstan stripped of their Soviet identity, the book illustrates how alternative loyalties based on kinship, geography, statehood, and religion competed for prominence in ways that often complicated the new country’s political, social, and economic development.

"The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.

In Varieties of Muslim Experience, anthropologist Lawrence Rosen explores aspects of Arab Muslim life that are, at first glance, perplexing to Westerners. He ranges over such diverse topics as why Arabs eschew portraiture, why a Muslim scientist might be attracted to fundamentalism, and why the Prophet must be protected from blasphemous cartoons. What connects these seemingly disparate features of Arab social, political, and cultural life? Rosen argues that the common thread is the importance Arabs place on the negotiation of interpersonal relationships—a link that helps to explain actions as seemingly unfathomable as suicide bombing and as elusive as Quranic interpretation. Written with eloquence and a deep knowledge of the entire spectrum of Muslim experience, Rosen’s book will interest not only anthropologists and Islamicists but anyone invested in better understanding the Arab world.

Based on Graeme Wood's unprecedented access to supporters, recruiters, and high-ranking members of the most infamous jihadist group in the world, The War of the End of Times is a riveting, fast-paced deep dive into the apocalyptic dogma that informs the group's worldview, from the ideas that motivate it, to the "fatwa factory" that produces its laws, to its very specific plans for the future. By accepting that ISIS truly believes the end is nigh, we can understand its strategy-and predict what it will do next.

Papers presented in a seminar held from Oct. 4-6, 1997 in Islamabad.

Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, Lawrence Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world that challenges existing stereotypes. Using a diverse range of illustrative case studies, Rosen draws previously unseen linkages across time, regions, and cultures.