Islam and the Politics of Virtue

Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam. Sami Zubaida, Islam, The People and The State: Essays on Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East. Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings (eds.), Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity.     

Islam and Politics: Egypt,Algeria, and Tunisia

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my dear daughter, Amal, who died on May 8, 1994, of cancer and pneumonia at the age of 29, leaving behind two little children.     

Islam,Human Rights and Interfaith Relations: Some Contemporary Egyptian Perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores current discussions and debates on Islam, human rights and interfaith relations in Egypt through an analysis of the public statements and writings of various religious scholars and spiritual teachers and the textbooks used to teach Islam in public secondary schools. It is well known that Islamist perspectives have become mainstream in Egypt, a largely devout and socially conservative country that is also the source of most of the major Islamic trends and political ideologies that have impacted the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency in government-issued textbooks on Islam and in the population at large to equate Islam with democracy and human rights, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the contradictions between traditional interpretations of Islam and international human rights norms. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights is linked to the threat of terrorism, which is labeled un-Islamic. Among ordinary Egyptian Muslims, even those who support Islamist politics, there seems to be a new concern to eradicate Islamic extremism and more openness to unconventional Muslim approaches. The most liberal example of this is an association that teaches the unity of all religions from a somewhat Sufi perspective, promotes interfaith dialogue, and advocates reinterpreting the Shari'a to promote gender equality and equal human rights for all Egyptians.     

Neither Dowlati nor Khosusi: Islam,Education and Civil Society in Contemporary Iran

Private universities are a rapidly expanding form of education in Iran, and increasingly include Islam and the social sciences alongside the hard sciences too. What implications does the privatization of religious and social scientific knowledge have for the Islamic Republic? Scholarship has so far responded by looking at the ways in which the Iranian authoritarian state has monopolized religion, repressed the social sciences and hollowed out student activism. Complicating these arguments, this article provides a historical and institutional comparison of higher education in Iran in order to look at the evolving degree of autonomy of academic institutions and the ability of actors that operate within them to contribute to critical debate, social activism and novel discourse. The article proposes that while state universities and Islamic Azad suffer from politicization and control, a small set of privately owned “Islamic” universities is using its elite connections, financial independence and socio-pedagogical ties to the seminary and modern academia to secure enhanced levels of free debate and independent thinking.     

韩国的当代中国政治研究述评

迄今为止,还没有对韩国的中国政治研究状况做出评估。韩国的当代中国政治研究值得关注至少有以下三个理由:第一,韩中关系在过去十多年取得了非同寻常的扩展;第二,在中国学习的外国学生中,韩国留学生的数量最多;第三,尽管刚刚起步,越来越多的韩国学者在当代中国研究的主流英文期刊如《中国季刊》(The China Quarterly)和《中国杂志》(The China Journal)上发表文章。本文主要对三类学术成果进行