The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States

With the end of the Cold War and the unfolding of unprecedented acts of transnational terror on September 11, representing perhaps new civilizational cleavages, Islam has attained renewed prominence in Western political reflections. Too often viewed from ethnocentric or sensationalist perspectives, how is Islam, as a strategic entity, to be understood in contemporary world politics? The New Politics of Islamis a timely study of the international relations of Islamic states. In detailing both theory and practice, it both describes the idea of pan-Islamism from classical to post-caliphal times and analyzes the foreign-policy behavior of contemporary states - especially Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - from the colonial period to the global aftermath of September 11. With a concise and analytic style, the book engages one-by-one with the pressing questions of Islam's political theory, Islam's political geography, and Islam's political sociology. Critical of grand explanations,The New Politics ofIslamseeks to restore the scholarly balance between different perspectives on religion and realpolitik in the Middle East and South Asia. The primary empirical investigation of this book is centred on the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57-member international regime, sometimes referred to as the "Muslim United Nations," and its involvement in post-Cold War crises in the form of the Gulf War, the Palestine problem, the Balkan wars, the Chechnya campaign, and nuclearization in South Asia. In its subsequent theoretical deliberations on Islam and the postmodern condition,The New Politics of Islamreconstructs contemporary social-science understandings of how religious ideas and identities influence international politics in the Islamic world in a worthy attempt to move beyond the clash-of-civilizations paradigm. A necessarytour d'horizonfor the researcher and informed observer alike.