Muslimistan

This book compares Islamic and Western political formulations. The author shows that political Islam offers a serious alternative to the dominant political system and ideology of the West.

Sabet argues that rather than leading to a “Clash of Civlizations” or the assimilation of Islam into the Western system, a positive process of interactive self-reflection between Islam and liberal democracy is the best way forward.

Beginning this process, Sabet highlights key concepts of Islamic political thought and brings them into dialogue with Western modernity. The resulting synthesis is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Islamic and Middle Eastern politics, political theory, comparative politics and international relations.

D Tyrer

Casual observers could be forgiven some bewilderment at the array of groups competing for the attentions of Muslim youth; if ‘radicals’ appear to generate the most column inches, they are rivaled by some of the proliferating ‘moderate’ organisations currently heralded as saviours of British Islam despite often being no less cultish in their overtones. New players on this crowded political terrain can afford few risks if they are to carve out any unique political vision or identity of their own and achieve credible, widespread appeal. Under these circumstances, an organisation founded by Muslim women to recognise Muslim political agency and challenge Islamophobia should normally be welcomed, particularly if, like British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), it is led by experienced and established figures staunch in their opposition to racism. But the group’s launch at the Royal Society of Arts (1st May 2008) failed to attain the level of attention achieved by the Quilliam Foundation just a week earlier, and one must wonder whether some of the risks taken in the organisation of the launch were just a little too great, and too early in BMSD’s lifespan, to enable it to carve out its niche.

MUSLIM YOUTH: CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES & EXPECTATIONS
Organised Jointly: AMSS UK and the University of Chester.
Venue: Chester University, UK, 15-17 August 2008

The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite patriot, a social entrepreneur working in the third sector (and of course he did great social works like setting up a school, an orphanage and many other institutions in building up his unique community in Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth century), larded with Brownite-style explicit invocations of Britishness. Seen by the new eponymous foundation as a “forebearer” for British Islam, (a retrieval that should not be “blurred” by the complications of the great postwar migrations from the Commonwealth,) Quilliam’s name is invoked “to help foster a genuine British Islam, native to these islands, free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world”.

he Transatlantic Task Force on Immigration and Integration composed of senior or retired European and American politics has issued a report this month, “Integrating Islam: A New Chapter in ‘Church-State’ Relations”. Reports come and go and often get ignored but what caught my eye about this particular briefing was an unusual clarity of expression and bluntness.

By Yakoub Islam

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