San Antonio College Library

Islamic fundamentalism has had a significant impact in nearly every corner of the world in recent years. Bassam Tibi, a widely recognized expert on Islam and Arab culture, offers an important and disquieting analysis of this particular synthesis of religion and politics. A Muslim and descendant of a famous Damascene Islamic scholar family, Tibi sees Islamic fundamentalism as the result of Islam's confrontation with modernity. The movement is unprecedented...

Islam is often portrayed, especially in Western media, as an alien, violent, hostile, and monolithic religion, whose adherents are intent upon battling nonbelievers throughout the world. Shattering the Myth demonstrates that these conceptions more accurately reflect the bias of Western reporters than they do the realities of contemporary Islam. Westerners are barraged by images of violence that usually originate from armed confrontations in one small...

One of the most important developments in the modern history of the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, bringing down dictators, sparking a civil war in Libya, and igniting a bloody uprising in Syria. Its long-term repercussions in Egypt and elsewhere remain unclear. In this book, the author explores the uprisings, offering rare insight into their origin, significance, and possible futures. As early as 2003, there...

Muslims have lived in the U.S. for centuries. Should the work of Islamist extremists be allowed to undermine their place in American society? This program captures a spirited discussion between Bill Moyers and Imam Zaid Shakir, who details his experiences as both a Muslim and an American in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In addition, Imam Zaid describes the structure and comprehensiveness of Islam, the compatibility of core Islamic and American values,...

Features literature about Islamism--the active affirmation and promotion of beliefs of an Islamic nature--aiming to explain the origins, values, and movements within the Islamic faith.

What is the meaning and scope of images today? Bombarded by thousands of images every day, what do we really see? In a constantly changing world, socially and politically engaged creators are searching for new ways to capture our attention. Filmmaker Helen Doyle has chosen the work of several artists and photographers who provoke us into looking deeper at the outside world and at ourselves.

"Omar Saif Ghobash was born in 1971 in the United Arab Emirates--the same year the country was founded--to an Arab father and a Russian mother. After a traumatizing experience losing his father to a violent attack in 1977, when he was only six years old, Ghobash began to realize the severe violence that surrounded him in his home country. As he grew older, eventually being appointed as the UAE Ambassador to Russia in 2008, he began to reflect on what...

A revelatory and game-changing narrative that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the modern history of the Islamic world. With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Flying in the face of everything we thought we knew, The Islamic Enlightenment becomes an astonishing and revelatory...