Emrah Sahin

In his latest work, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani, Uganda-born political scientist at Columbia University, criticizes the attempts to explain terrorism exclusively in cultural terms, what he terms “Culture Talk.” He distinguishes between political Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, delineating the latter as a cultural phenomenon. He argues that political identities are not equivalent to cultural identities, and seeks to explain political terror through an examination of the particular political contexts in which it has developed. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim introduces an (...)

The September 11 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks shook the White House into a state of controlled panic and the nation into exhaustive asymmetric warfare. Worse, no one really knew if graver threats yet loomed. Led by George W. Bush’s itchy trigger finger and Dick Cheney’s nightmarish scenarios, this ignorance turned the ensuing counterterrorist war into a battle for the country’s soul. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is a well-documented and lucidly written testimony of how the Bush administration sacrificed the sacred habeas corpus. It will fascinate readers who were frustrated by the (...)

Fascism is a contested word. The average American associates it with everything from dictatorship, genocide, anti-Semitism, racism, eugenics, social Darwinism, and state capitalism to militarism and extreme nationalism. Scholars in the field do not reach a consensus either; they have agreed to use the word without agreeing on how to define it. Goldberg wryly observes that the more closely we study fascism, the less clear it becomes. In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell admitted that fascism has no explicit meaning—it merely signifies something undesirable. (...)

Following the rise of dissenting historians that decried the unfair treatment of the East, which culminated in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), the last three decades have ushered in more understanding among Western historians about the need to reconsider the way world history is written. Eminent anthropologist Jack Goody is one of the mavericks who has crossed over the mainstream intellectual creed that conceives the human past as something intrinsic to Western civilization. The Theft of History is his latest worthwhile attempt to confront the Eurocentric mindset, which has (...)

The ideological struggle between republicanism and
liberal democracy has been undergoing a profound
transformation in favour of the latter ever since the days
of Andrew Jackson, the first of the so-called People’s
Choice candidates. Now that the dust of the longest
campaign in American history has settled and sealed
victory for Barack Obama, the urge of American minds
to find out more about their next president may begin to
wane. If that were to happen it would underscore one
of the fundamental characteristics
of the American political tradition:
American voters tend to leave their
curiosity on the campaign trail and in
the ballot box.

In Democracy by the People: the Elusive Kerala Experience, M. P. Parameswaran, a former nuclear physicist and now Kerala’s leading alternative thinker and activist, accounts for the success of Kerala in participatory democracy and the arduous journey of development. Parameswaran, a global thinker and local actor, argues that the micro-development of Kerala (a region in south-west India) can set a model for similar projects in both India and the rest of the world. Democracy by the People examines how the Keralite neighborhood groups evolved into the formation of the Panchayat (...)

In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic offers the anecdotal epitomes of what living in socialist Eastern Europe meant for the people. “Growing up in Eastern Europe,” Drakulic writes, “you learn very young that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives.” Drakulic concentrates primarily on women’s lives and the particular burdens that scarcity in Eastern Europe has imposed on women. To her, the ultimate symbol of the failure of Communism is its inability to provide something so basic as (...)

The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago bemused visitors with its unique Middle Eastern Cairo Street. But the representation of Islam did not get a warm reception— the audience likened the Islamic call to prayer to the noise of a dogfight! Even in the twenty-first century, the Western media struggles to face reality: Muslims, far from being a mere sideshow, comprise a remarkably large part of those who immigrate to the West. Since the 1960s, Muslims in the West have progressed steadily from the realm of the “invisible—newcomers to new lands with little public voice of recognition— (...)

Revisiting York University Emeritus Professor Reginald Whitaker’s Double Standard, an authoritative study of Canadian Cold War immigration practices, is important to gain a historical perspective on post-9/11 Canadian immigration policies. Based on government papers and memoirs, Whitaker argues that the defining characteristic of Canadian immigration policies was secrecy. Though Canadian immigration policy from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War was much less “messianic” than that of the United States, in their quiet, understated way, Canadian officials shared many (...)