San Antonio College Library

"This book is a historical and sociological reading of the relation between Sunnis and Shias from the inception of the dispute for Mohammed's succession until today. It is divided in two parts. The first part offers a comprehensive history of the divide. It shows how Shiism was, during much of the Middle Ages, the main contestation ideology of the caliphate, but also how Sunnism and Shiism converged as Shiism progressively ceased to be an esoteric...

A study of anti-Semitism in the Middle East and its danger to not only Jews but also to the Western way of life examines the extent of the problem, the history of anti-Semitism, and its threat to global peace and security.

Can the contemporary Islamic finance movement be shown to meet the requirements of modern commerce? In the wake of the terrorist attacks on America the UN Security Council passed a resolution targeting transnational sources of terrorist funds. The United States and the International Monetary Fund are encouraging the governments of the Middle East to adopt policies of economic liberalism and a new type of capitalism, based on Islamic values and beliefs,...

This book profiles women who defied and changed the contours of women's lives from the eighth century to the mid-1950s. There is a widespread myth both outside and within Muslim contexts that women's struggles for rights is alien to those societies that embraced Islam and a misconception that the contemporary women's movement is exclusively rooted in Western concepts and struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Muslim contexts, this...

"In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther excavates the deep history of Americans' Islamophobic fixation on how Muslims should be governed, controlled, converted, and colonized, showing how these ideas shaped American foreign relations from the early republic to the end of the Armenian Genocide in 1921. Beginning with the Barbary Wars, Walther illuminates reactions to and involvement in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the efforts to protect Christians...

"Many in the West regard feminism and Islam as a contradiction in terms. However, this is a grave misconception as Margot Badran illustrates in this career-spanning collection of influential essays. Born of over three decades of work, Feminism in Islam traces the history and interaction of both secular and Islamic feminisms in Muslim societies since the nineteenth century." "Written by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, this landmark...

Chronicles the Muslim holy war against Christians, from the military invasions of the Dark Ages to today's random acts of terrorism.

A Georgetown University professor and well-known scholar of Islam, Esposito analyzes the current and future practice of Islam in this short but insightful volume. He surveys a number of topics, including identity issues for Muslims living in the West. Esposito highlights the world views of modern Muslim thinkers, such as Tariq Ramadan (Esposito modestly omits mention of his mentorship of some of these scholars). He tackles head-on the myth of Muslim...

The third volume in Thames & Hudson's celebrated series cataloguing the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, Carpets from Islamic Lands features more than forty of the finest classical carpets created in Egypt, Turkey, Persia, the Caucasus and India between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with several important pre-Islamic carpet fragments. Carpet and textile expert Friedrich Spuhler describes this spectacular collection in the context of the...