Turi Munthe's Top Book Recommendations

Turi MuntheI threw this in not because I agree with it, but because it’s a book that represents the different terms in which the West is now beginning to think about the 21st century’s big themes. And what a relief: no more Islam vs Modernity, far less ‘evil Muslims’, a real quietening of the cultural discourse that invented these fake ideas of a monolithic ‘West’ or ‘East’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Modernity’. Kagan... (Source)

Turi MuntheYes, the lead thinker in Europe in terms of where Islam is going is Tariq Ramadan. He’s a brilliant and controversial academic and philosopher who lectures worldwide and has been banned in the certain places including the US. He’s also the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of Muslim Brotherhood, the first great socio-political movement campaigning to give Islam a central role in the forcefully... (Source)

Turi MuntheIt’s hard to talk about this without generalising but I think we see Islam becoming more popular and social and less political. There’s also been a great deal of really sophisticated new thinking about how Islam fits in the post-9/11 world. The New Voices of Islam by Mehran Kamrava is a useful anthology of the new-reform Muslim thinkers who have extremely interesting and open ideas about where... (Source)

Turi MuntheIslam and Modernity are two of the most contested academic and political concepts around. No serious thinkers today talk about a single ‘Islam’, speaking instead in terms of multiple ‘Islams’. And the same goes for definitions of ‘modernity’. Scholars would throw the debate out immediately on those grounds, but I think the problem remains. Precisely because the debate is so contested, it has been... (Source)

Jason BurkeKepel is one of the best-known French experts on Islamic militancy. And the French, for a variety of reasons, have produced much of the best analysis of Islamic militancy over the years, pre- and post-9/11. It is partly due to their own history and partly due to their interest in social sciences. It is also partly due to government investment very early on. (Source)

Turi MuntheGilles Kepel is another brilliant French academic who again demonstrates the excellent sociological work of the French in this area. The idea behind this book was to explain where and how the ideas of Jihad originated. Kepel deals with a shorter sweep of history than Roy but gives an excellent overview of the movements that created political Islam. He is particularly interesting from late 1970s... (Source)