A couple of years ago, Mark LeVine, the occasionally blogging historian of the modern Middle East, published his latest book Heavy Metal Islam: Rock Religion and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, about the important heavy metal scene in the Middle East and related areas, a work which expanded on one of the examples [...]
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Lately I’ve been doing a chapter-by-chapter review of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World. Those chapter reviews are linked below for convenience, but first, I want to make a few comments about the book as a whole. Contrary to what critics, and not a few fans, of his blog might think, this is not a [...] The sixth and last chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World examines the United States’s relationship with Iran. The first part of the chapter is a look at Iran’s current political system, noting the ways in which anti-Iranian sentiments and fears are whipped up through distortions of evidence and even bizarre fantasies, such [...] My project to review Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World chapter by chapter is dragging on longer than I thought it would, but I hate leaving things unfinished, and so I soldier on. The fifth chapter, “Pakistan and Afghanistan: Beyond the Taliban,” is the one most outside of my expertise, for while I did [...] Most of the Iraq chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World will be nothing new to regular readers of his blog. The first part surveys different views of the war in the United States and the Arab world. In the U.S., the war is sold through “Islam Anxiety,” which Cole uses throughout [...] In reading the third and shortest chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, “The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha,” I was struck by something that wasn’t there. The point of this chapter is that Wahhabism does not cause terrorism, nor is Saudi Arabia the main exporter of anti-American violence in the region. [...] The second chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World tells the story of two organizations, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which are vastly different but yet too often conflated in American minds. He portrays the Muslim Brotherhood as a critical component of Egypt’s political landscape which the United States needs to engage if [...] |
Blake Hounshell (aka praktike), our co-founder and main man, is now managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. 
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