Islam, Politics and Social Movements By Edmund Burke III and Ira M. Lapidus (eds.). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988, 332 pp.

Abstract

This book contains thirteen well-researched case studies on social move
ments in North Africa, India, the Middle East, and Iran. Each movement differs,
as the issues and concerns vary according to area. This diversity is made
manageable by a neat categorization taking into account geography, periodization,
and problematics, for example, and by the editors' clear explanation,
in the first part of the book, of how the articles are arranged. In the second part
are articles by Von Sivers, Clancy-Smith, Colonna, and Voll. Each author
analyzes resistance and millenarian movements in precolonial (i.e., nineteenthand
early twentieth-century) North Africa. Part three, with articles by Frietag,
Gilmartin and Swdenburg, deals with more contemporary issues, such as
Islam and nationalism in India and Palestine. Part four discusses labor move
ments in Egypt and northern Nigeria (Beinin, Goldberg, Lubeck), while part
five looks at the Iranian revolution and the mles of Imam Khomeini and Ali
Shari'ati in defining and inspiring it (Algar, Abrahamian, Keddie).
One of the main issues that must be addressed when dealing with social
movements in Islamic societies is whether they are really "Islamic" or whether
they just happen to be taking place in Muslim Societies. Lapidus, in his introductory
essay, brings out the main issues when he says that the movements are
studied "in order to explore their self-conception and symbols, the econofnic
and political conditions under which they developed, and their relation to
agrarian and capitalist economic structum and to established state regimes and
elites" (p. 3). The authors look at social, structural, and ideological features
without giving exclusive primacy to one or the other. Burke stresses this point.
In his article, he discusses methodological issues and places the studies in the
context of contemporary modes of analyses such as the "new cultural" and the
"new social history" methods inspired by E. P. Thompson and others. This
essay is an invaluable introduction to the case studies. Placing the movements
in the context of changes occurring in the Islamic world as well as in the context
of wider political and social events, the essay allows one to make comparisons
acmss the different areas covered in terms of popular culture, patterns
of collective action, the problem of Islam and secularism, and other aspects.
The articles range from the role of Islamic symbols (i.e., the mosque in
India) in articulating new political organizations designed to deal with the ...