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06 June 2016

The Impossible Islamic State? (3)

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Rachid Ghannouchi, right, the leader of the Ennahda party in Tunisia, and Abdelfattah Mourou, the vice president, on Friday at the party’s congress. On Monday, Mr. Ghannouchi won re-election with 800 of 1,058 ballots cast. Credit Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
We now come full circle in this trilogy on the “impossible Islamic state.” Two months have elapsed since the second installment and only a couple of weeks ago a dramatic event took place that “puts the icing on the cake” in a way that I could never have anticipated. Ghannouchi himself in his opening speech to his party’s (Ennahda) Tenth…
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05 April 2016

The Impossible Islamic State? (2)

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Jocelyne Cesari discusses her new book, "The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State" in the CGIS South on Tuesday (photo by Shunella Grace Lumas). She is Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK, Senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center on Religion, Peace and World Affairs. She teaches on contemporary Islam at the Harvard Divinity School and directs the Harvard interfaculty program “Islam in the West” hosted at the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program.
In the first installment of this blog we looked at Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State (2013) and in following the assessment of two reviewers, Lama Abu-Odeh and Andrew March, we felt Hallaq helpfully highlighted some of the challenges of pressing traditional Islamic legal norms into the service of a modern nation-state. On the other hand, his rather rigid and dogmatic…
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16 March 2016

The Impossible Islamic State? (1)

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Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible Islamic State: Islam, Politics, and Morality’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Translating Ghannouchi’s book (“The Public Freedoms in the Islamic State”), as I stated before, has forced me to delve into political theory. Keep in mind that if you want to get a handle on the contemporary islamist movement in all its variety, you will have to think about issues related to the modern nation-state and democracy. My title here comes…
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04 January 2016

Comparative Politics: From Juntas to Democracy

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From an article (9/1/15): “A New Year in Egypt: The Significance of President Sisi’s Speech.” Sisi was addressing the leading Islamic scholars at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, calling for an “Islamic revolution.” At one point he said, “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!”
Now using the 2008 edition of Ghannouchi’s book (The Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, Damascus), I’m behind in my translation (plenty of changes, plus new material), but I’m still close to three quarters done. Also, it’s plunged me into political theory – hence this blog! Keep reading – this is more fascinating than you might think. I’m using a…
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