Western civilization tends to view secularism as a positive achievement. From this perspective, benefits of secularizing trends include the separation of church and state, the rule of law, and freedom from organized religion. In the Middle East, however, Islamic intellectuals increasingly cite Western-inspired secularism as the source of the region's social dislocation and political instability. While secularism in the West led to the spread of democratic values, in the Muslim world it has been associated with dictatorship, the violation of human rights, and the abrogation of civil liberties. This is an examination of the origins and growth of the movement to abolish the secularizing reforms of the 20th century by creating a political order guided by Shariah law. Contributors explain the Islamic rejection of secularism as a failed Western Christian ideal and also discuss how secularization was pioneered by those who thought Muslims could only advance politically by emulating Western practices, including the renunciation of religion.
AZZAM TAMIMI is Director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought and is a writer on Islam and Middle East Issues. JOHN L. ESPOSITO is Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, where he is also Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His publications include The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, Islam and Politics, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and The Oxford History of Islam.
-Campus Progress, "In Another Country, Herring responds to gaps that urban-centered studies have left opened in queer histories . . . Herring's work evidences a fierce commitment to existing queer metropolitan-migration narratives, favoring the backward, rustic and unfashionable, and embracing these stereotypes for their own subversively disruptive potentials. His quality content analysis and skillful ability to anticipate counter-arguments and avoid intellectual pitfalls keeps the reader on her toes."-Jaime Cantrell, Feminist Formations "Reading across the genres of literature, print and visual media, photography, and fashion, Scott Herring not only complicates the queer's move from rural to urban space, but also the ways in which queers in 'othered' spaces enact an anti-urbanism through their own 'rural stylistics.' Another Country is fierce!" -E. Patrick Johnson, author of "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South--An Oral History" "Scott Herring presents an exquisitely detailed road atlas of the complicated intersection between topography and destiny." -Alison Bechdel, author of "Fun Home" and "Dykes to Watch Out For" "Writers, artists, and activists have worked throughout the past century to imagine and materialize sustainable queer lives everywhere from Oregon to Pennsylvania, from Iowa to Alabama. Herring provides the definitive account of the myriad ways that LGBT people have constituted non-urban sites as vibrant and sexy spaces of resistance to hetero- and homonormativity, to compulsory consumerism, and to entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender, and ability. In so doing, Another Country redraws the map of contemporary queer studies." -Robert McRuer, author of "Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability"
