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“We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.”Newt Gingrich said the above words in reference to the recent “ground-zero mosque debate”, a heated media controversy which surrounded plans for the Park 51 Islamic Community Center to open in downtown Manhattan on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Assuming a necessary enmity between America and Islam, Gingrich’s claims seem rooted in the theory of a “Clash of Civilizations”. This theory envisions “the West” and “Islam” as diametrically opposed entities with no common values, and has become widely pervasive in informing much of post-9/11 America’s political and academic discourse. When chalked up against the social, cultural, and literary history of Islam, however, the Clash of Civilizations theory is a poor fit. For medieval Arabo-Islamic culture saw a vast rise of humanistic literature bearing a clear multi-civilizational influence. The Letters of the Goodwill Brothers of Basra constitute one of the most overlooked of these works. Composed by a group of 10th century Abbasid Muslim littérateurs, the 52 Letters draw parallels between the teachings of Islam and those of prior great wisdom traditions, including Indian and Ancient Greek wisdom, Judaism, and Christianity. Focusing on the way the Letters frame Islam in the context of perennial human wisdom, I show how this text is ultimately an irenic text aimed at promoting religious tolerance and cooperation in the tumultuous sectarian atmosphere of 10th century Abbasid Iraq. I argue ultimately that the irenic message of the Letters presents an alternative narrative to the Clash of Civilizations theory, a narrative of tolerance from the Islamic past by which our own society may benefit when it comes to the relationships between American Muslims and non-Muslims. / text

This thesis analyses economic change among the bedouin of northern Arabia by examining four factors: the trade in camels; intertribal raiding; large-scale attacks by the Akhwan (Ikhwan); and trade and smuggling. Many writers have assumed that the sale or hiring out of camels for transport by camel-herding tribes was their main source of income, and that the spread of modern transportation caused a decline in the demand for camels, resulting in lower prices for the animals and an economic crisis for the bedouin. The well-documented case-studies in this thesis demonstrate that this assumption is flawed. The bedouin economy was more complex than the portrayals in many sources, and the reasons for economic hardship and political decline among the camel-herding tribes are more varied. In the story of how the wheel overcame the camel, it is clear that while transportation technology had some effect, even more important were such factors as drought, the rise of new states, colonial policies, intertribal politics and the varied factors pulling nomadic peoples to become sedentary.

The academic literature on Islamist moderation offers several explanations for why some Islamist political movements are moderate and others radical. These theories focus on the movements' ideology, tactics, and internal democracy. Few accounts address, however, how an Islamist movement's relations with external powers influence this outcome. This paper finds that "moderation" reflects an Islamist movement's relationship of compliance or defiance with external powers rather than its essential organizational characteristics. In comparing the Moroccan Justice and Development Party (PJD) with the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, it explores why the United States has built good relations with the former but not with the latter. Employing approximately 20 interviews conducted with Islamists, U.S. diplomats, and Moroccan experts in 2009, I show that the PJD's compliance with U.S. foreign policy decisions and interests helps to shape perceptions that the movement is more moderate than its Egyptian counterpart, despite the two movements' similar ideology, tactics, and internal practices. / text

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Quels sont les modèles sexués prônés dans les discours islamiques par les acteurs religieux issus des courants fondamentalistes, conscientisateur des Frères Musulmans et néosalafiste, à Bruxelles? Préconisent-ils un rapport hiérarchique, complémentaire ou égalitaire entre la femme et l’homme ?<p>L’analyse genrée de ces discours propres à chacun de ces courants, permet-elle d’identifier des différences de représentation de « la femme musulmane » ?L’émergence d’une féminisation du discours islamique à Bruxelles, au sein du courant conscientisateur des Frères Musulmans engendre-t-elle une remise en question de ces représentations et la mise en exergue des rapports sociaux de sexe ?A partir d’une recherche de terrain, qui s’est étendue de septembre 2006 à mars 2011, nous répondons à ces questions à l’aide d’un corpus constitué de plus 60 discours issus des acteurs et actrices religieux des courants fondamentalistes à Bruxelles. Ce corpus peut prétendre à l’exhaustivité.<p><p> / Doctorat en Philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished