Turkey Book Talk #268 – Faisal Devji, professor of global and imperial history at Balliol College, Oxford, on “Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam” (Yale University Press)
The book argues that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Islam stopped being primarily a religious movement focused on scripture and the divine, instead transforming into a modern ideological system like capitalism or communism. In countries including Turkey, that process paved the intellectual path for Islamism’s emergence as a political force, reshaping the trajectories of those states.
However, it also suggests that the limits of this transnational moment were reached long ago, and that we are now seeing the results of a crisis of political Islam in Turkey and elsewhere.
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Ahmet Kuru on Islam, authoritarianism and underdevelopment
September 29, 2020
Turkey Book Talk #125 – Ahmet Kuru, professor of political science at San Diego State University, on “Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison” (Cambridge University Press).
The book traces the causes of low socio-economic development in many Muslim-majority countries to the 11th century, when Kuru argues an alliance of orthodox Islamic scholars and military states started to hinder intellectual and economic creativity.
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