The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam
Simon Cottee
Oxford University Press (2015)
The Apostates is the first major study of apostasy from Islam in the western secular context. Drawing on life-history interviews with ex-Muslims from the UK and Canada, Simon Cottee explores how and with what consequences Muslims leave Islam and become irreligious. Apostasy in Islam is a deeply controversial issue and features prominently in current debates over the expansion of Islam in the West and what this means. Yet it remains poorly understood, in large part because it has become so politicized-with protagonists on either side of the debate selectively invoking Islamic theology to make claims about the ‘true’ face of Islam. The Apostates charts a different course by examining the social situation and experiences of ex-Muslims. Cottee suggests that Islamic apostasy in the West is best understood not as a legal or political problem, but as a moral issue within Muslim families and communities. Outside of Muslim-majority societies, ex-Muslims are not living in fear for their lives.
But they face and must manage the stigma attached to leaving the faith from among their own families and the wider Muslim community.
Simon Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at Kent University.
The Red Star and the Crescent: China and the Middle East
James Reardon-Anderson
C. Hurst & Company (Publishers) Limited (2018)
The Red Star and the Crescent provides an in-depth and multi-disciplinary analysis of the evolving relationship between China and the Middle East. Despite its increasing importance, very few studies have examined this dynamic, deepening, and multi-faceted nexus. James Reardon-Anderson has sought to fill this critical gap.The volume examines the ‘big picture’ of international relations, then zooms in on case studies and probes the underlying domestic factors on each side. Reardon-Anderson tackles topics as diverse as China’s security strategy in the Middle East, its military relations with the states of the region, its role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, the Uyghur question, and the significance and consequences of the Silk Road strategy. A comprehensive study of the changing forces driving one of the world’s most important strategic, economic and cultural relationships.
James Reardon-Anderson is Sun Yat-sen Professor of Chinese Studies and Dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Studies in Qatar. He is the author of five books on the history and politics of China, most recently Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644-1937 (2005).
Russia’s Muslim Heartlands: Islam in the Putin Era
Dominic Rubin
Hurst Publishers (2018)
Moscow has the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe. In 2015, some 2 million Muslim Muscovites celebrated the opening of the continent’s biggest mosque. One quarter of the Soviet population was ethnically Muslim, and today their grandchildren, living in the lands between Bukhara, Kazan and the Caucasus, once again have access to their historical traditions. But they also suffer the effects of civil war, mass migration and political instability. At the highest levels, Islam has been swept up into Russia’s broader search for identity, as the old question of eastern versus western takes on new force.
Dominic Rubin has spent the last three years interviewing Muslims across Russia, from Sufi shaykhs in Dagestan, new Muslim artists on the Volga and professionals in Kyrgyzstan to guest-workers commuting between Russia and Uzbekistan and Kremlin-sponsored muftis hammering out a new Russian Muslim ideology in Moscow. He discovers their family histories, their faith journeys and their hopes and fears, caught between roles as traditionalist allies in the new Eurasian Russia and as potential traitors in Moscow’s war on terror. This story of Islam adapting in a paradoxical landscape, against all odds, brings alive the human reality behind the headlines.
Dominic Rubin studied at Oxford and SOAS and is a professor of Religion and Philosophy at The Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He has lived in Russia for the last eleven years.
Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational Networks Between South Asia and the Gulf
Christophe Jaffrelot, Laurence Louer
Oxford University Press (2017)
South Asia is today the region inhabited by the largest number of Muslims—-roughly 500 million. In the course of the Islamisation process, which begaun in the eighth century, it developed a distinct Indo-Islamic civilisation that culminated in the Mughal Empire. While paying lip service to the power centres of Islam in the Gulf, including Mecca and Medina, this civilisation has cultivated its own variety of Islam, based on Sufism.
Over the last fifty years, pan-Islamic ties have intensified between these two regions. Gathering together some of the best specialists on the subject, this volume explores these ideological, educational and spiritual networks, which have gained momentum due to political strategies, migration flows and increased communications.
At stake are both the resilience of the civilisation that imbued South Asia with a specific identity, and the relations between Sunnis and Shias in a region where Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a cultural proxy war, as evident in the foreign ramifications of sectarianism in Pakistan. Pan-Islamic Connections investigates the nature and implications of the cultural, spiritual and socio-economic rapprochement between these two Islams.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute (London). Among his publications are India’s Silent Revolution (2003) and The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (2015). Laurence Louer is Associate Professor at Sciences Po (Paris), a Research Fellow at CERI and author of Transnational Shia Politics (2008) and Shiism and Politics in the Middle East (2012).
Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management
Michael Neuman, Fabrice Weissman
Médecins Sans Frontières (2016)
Much like the large commercial companies, most humanitarian aid organizations now have departments specifically dedicated to protecting the security of their personnel and assets. The management of humanitarian security has gradually become the business of professionals who develop data collection systems, standardized procedures, norms, and training meant to prevent and manage risks.
A large majority of aid agencies and security experts see these developments as inevitable - all the more so because of quantitative studies and media reports concluding that the dangers to which aid workers are today exposed are completely unprecedented. Yet, this trend towards professionalization is also raising questions within aid organizations, MSF included. Can insecurity be measured by scientific means and managed through norms and protocols? How does the professionalization of security affect the balance of power between field and headquarters, volunteers and the institution that employs them? What is its impact on the implementation of humanitarian organizations’ social mission? Are there alternatives to the prevailing security model(s) derived from the corporate world?
Building on MSF’s experience and observations of the aid world by academics and practitioners, the authors of this book look at the drivers of the professionalization of humanitarian security and its impact on humanitarian practices, with a specific focus on Syria, CAR and kidnapping in the Caucasus.
Michael Neuman is director of studies at MSF-Crash. He joined MSF in 1999, alternating between missions in the field and positions at MSF headquarters. From 2008- 2010, Neuman served on the board of directors of the French and US sections of MSF. He is co-editor of Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (2012).
Fabrice Weissman is Coordinator and a Director of Studies at MSF-Crash. Specialized in Sub-Saharan Africa, he has been working with MSF since 1995, and spent many years in the field. He is the editor of In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’: Violence, Politics and Humanitarian Action (2004), and co-editor of Humanitarian negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (2012).