Charles Kurzman

The shah of Iran would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a 1978 CIA analysis. One hundred days later the shah was overthrown by a popular revolution. The CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. This book offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general.

The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran

This book contends that "Liberal Islam" is not a contradiction in terms, but rather a thriving tradition more than a century old and undergoing a revival within the last generation. This anthology presents the translated work of 32 Muslims who are concerned with the seperation of church and state, democracy, the condiditon of women, the rights of minorities, freedom of thought, and the future of human progress.

A Sourcebook

Liberal Islam

Modernist Islam was a major intellectual current in the Muslim world during the 19th and 20th centuries. Proponents of this movement typically believed that it was not only possible but imperative to show how modern values and institutions could be reconciled with authentically Islamic ideals. This sourcebook brings together a broad range of writings on modernist Islam from across the Muslim world. It makes available for the first time in English the writings of many of the activists and intellectuals who made up the early modernist Islamic movement. Charles Kurzman and a team of section editors, each specializing in a different region of the Islamic world, have assembled, translated, and annotated the work of the most important of these figures. With the publication of this volume, an English-speaking audience will have wider access to the literature of modernist Islam than did the makers of the movement themselves.

Modernist Islam, 1840-1940

Charles KURZMAN

Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898. Each chapter of this book focuses on a single angle of this story, covering all six cases by examining newspaper accounts, memoirs, and government reports.

Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy

Democracy Denied, 1905-1915

Assistant Professor of Sociology Charles Kurzman

The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, "The future was up in the air." Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to "think the unthinkable," in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.

Michaelle Browers

This book brings together scholars with expertise in modern Islamic thought and practice to evaluate the claim that we are witnessing something tantamount to an 'Islamic Reformation,' by assessing the character and impact of various reformist trends in the Middle East and North Africa. Each chapter also addresses the question of the appropriateness and usefulness of comparisions between 'Christian' and 'Islamic' or 'Western' and 'Eastern' reformations.

An Islamic Reformation?

Modernist Islam was a major intellectual current in the Muslim world during the 19th and 20th centuries. Proponents of this movement typically believed that it was not only possible but imperative to show how "modern" values and institutions could be reconciled with authentically Islamic ideals. This sourcebook brings together a broad range of writings on modernist Islam from across the Muslim world. It makes available for the first time in English the writings of many of the activists and intellectuals who made up the early modernist Islamic movement. Charles Kurzman and a team of section editors, each specializing in a different region of the Islamic world, have assembled, translated, and annotated the work of the most important of these figures. With the publication of this volume, an English-speaking audience will have wider access to the literature of modernist Islam than did the makers of the movement themselves.

Why are there so few Muslim terrorists? With more than a billion Muslims in the world-many of whom supposedly hate the West and ardently desire martyrdom-why don't we see terrorist attacks every day? Where are the missing martyrs? These questions may seem counterintuitive, in light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought around the world. But the scale of violence, outside of civil war zones, has been far lower than the waves of attacks that the world feared in the wake of 9/11. Terrorists' own publications complain about Muslims' failure to join their cause. The Missing Martyrs draws on government sources and revolutionary publications, public opinion surveys and election results, historical documents and in-depth interviews with Muslims in the Middle East and around the world to examine barriers to terrorist recruitment, including liberal Islam, revolutionary rivalries, and an inelastic demand for U.S. foreign policy. This revised edition, updated to include the self-proclaimed "Islamic State," concludes that fear of terrorism should be brought into alignment with the actual level of threat, and that government policies and public opinion should be based on evidence rather than alarmist hyperbole.

Charles Kurzman

About

Books

Join the club