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The actions and political rhetoric of the day seem to affirm the commitment of many Muslims to a more Islamic political, social, and economic order. But despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and its geopolitical significance, our understanding of the contemporary Islamic world has remained ...

The actions and political rhetoric of the day seem to affirm the commitment of many Muslims to a more Islamic political, social, and economic order. But despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and its geopolitical significance, our understanding of the contemporary Islamic world has remained astonishingly limited. More than half of the world's 800 million Muslims live in Asia, and yet most people continue to think of Islam as an essentially Arab phenomenon. This wide-ranging volume brings together previously unpublished writings by leading authorities on Islamic affairs to provide the fullest picture of the diverse roles played by Islam in Asian public life today. Central topics include how Islam is presented in the public life--government, national ideology, law, and political parties--of Asian Muslims, and the ways in which Islam influences both the domestic politics and foreign policies of Muslim countries today.

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they ...

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words. In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.