Passion for Islam: Shaping the Modern Middle East: The Egyptian Experience

by Caryle Murphy

Overview

"Islam's revival is reshaping Egypt and other Arab countries in ways beyond violent politics. The yearning for personal solace, a just political system, indigenous lifestyles, and relevant theology all await satisfaction....Just as the Nile runs through Egypt for almost eight hundred miles, giving it life, so also the Straight Way, the way of Allah, runs through it, beckoning its people. The search by Egypt's Muslims for a modern understanding of the Straight Way is the essence of today's passion for Islam." -- from Chapter 1, "First Verses"

Written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, this authoritative and enthralling primer on the modern face of Islam provides one of the most comprehensive accountings for the roots of religious terrorism and Middle Eastern strife.
Over decades, a myriad of social, political, and religious factors has made today's Middle East a combustible region and has contributed to Islam's new power and turmoil. Passion for Islam uses one particular country, Egypt, as a lens through which to show how these forces play out across the area, allowing terrorism to gain a foothold.
Through the personal experiences and observations of individual Egyptians encountered during her five years as the Washington Post's Cairo bureau chief, veteran journalist Caryle Murphy explores how Islam's contemporary revival is unfolding on four different levels: "Pious Islam" highlights the groundswell of grassroots piety that has created more Islamic societies; "Political Islam" examines how Islamists, using both violent and peaceful means, are reshaping the region's authoritarian secular political order and redefining Islam's role in the public arena; "Cultural Islam" looks at Egyptian efforts to resist a ubiquitous Western culture by asserting an Islamic identity; "Thinking Islam" reveals how intellectuals are reexamining their theological heritage with the aim of modernizing Islam.
Representing years of exhaustive research, Passion for Islam also looks at how the tortured Israeli-Palestinian conflict has contributed to the region's religious ferment and political tumult. By revealing the day-to-day ramifications of all these issues through the eyes of Egyptian intellectuals, holy men, revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens, Passion for Islam brings an unparalleled vitality and depth to Western perceptions of Middle Eastern conflict.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743237437
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	10/22/2002
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	552 KB

About the Author

Caryle Murphy, winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, has been a Washington Post reporter for more than twenty years, serving twice as an overseas correspondent: first in South Africa and then in the Middle East. She covered Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, spending a month in the occupied emirate, and reported from Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. She currently covers religion for the Post and lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

	Introduction
1.	First Verses	3
2.	Withered Dreams and "Zucchini" by the Bushel	12
	Pious Islam
3.	Personal Awakenings	25
	Political Islam
4.	What Kind of Country Are We Going to Be?	41
5.	The Ghost	64
6.	Death of a Lawyer	99
7.	Education, Not Revolution	115
8.	Guilty of Practicing Democracy	136
9.	Middle Ground	152
	Cultural Islam
10.	A Culture of Our Own, or Madonna and Belly-Dancing Have to Go	167
	Faith and Modernity
11.	New Thinking in Islam	189
	People of the Book
12.	We Were Here First	235
13.	One Dream Fulfilled, Another Denied	252
	The Path Ahead
14.	The Promise and the Passion	275
	Notes	281
	Glossary	339
	Acknowledgments	341
	Index	343

Editorial Reviews

Murphy, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and former Cairo bureau chief for the Washington Post, puts Egypt at the center of the growth of Islamic extremism, because it "provides the ballast in Arab politics and diplomacy." Offering a vivid portrait of Egypt today, she attributes the spread of violent Islam to the interaction of three factors: a general reawakening of Islam, the reign of authoritarian governments in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Well-framed journalistic portrait by the Washington Post’s former Cairo bureau chief of a strategically important nation in a time of terror and turmoil.

Murphy offers a view of contemporary Egypt that amplifies such recent studies of Islamism and regional unrest as John L. Esposito’s Unholy War (p. 542) and Anton La Guardia’s War Without End (p. 546). Religious terrorism, he writes, has its roots in three historical developments: the general resurgence of pietist, fundamentalist Islam, in part as a reaction to encroaching Western culture; the failure of the international community to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the rise and continued existence of authoritarian governments in a region long troubled by poverty, inequality, and corruption. As Murphy wisely points out, when "citizens feel that they have lost control of their lives, they take refuge in the familiar and fundamental." The result has been hatred not just for the West, but also for the government of a country whose internal stability is a matter of extreme importance for the US, at least as long as the US remains dependent on oil imports. Murphy observes that tEgypt has been of two minds, or perhaps two faces, in the matter of Israel; though bound to peace accords, it has allowed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to serve as a distraction and safety valve to keep unrest away from its own doors, as all the while critics of Nasserite socialism and Egypt’s subsequent secular governments have urged that the Arab states are weak "because they had not built their nations on religion as the Zionist Jews had." Murphy’s account depicts an Egypt uncomfortably close to collapse, though full of devout Muslims who have nointerest in seeing their nation become another Iran or Afghanistan and are willing to struggle for the soul of Islam.

Lucid and solidly reported.

Kirkus Reviews

Lee H. Hamilton director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and former chairman, House Committee on International Relations Drawing on her vast experience living and reporting in Egypt, Caryle Murphy provides a sweeping account of Islam's powerful and complicated role in the Middle East. Passion for Islam illuminates the forces that have led to religious terrorism, and in doing so offers a vision for how these forces could be harnessed for peace and progress.

Judy Woodruff CNN Caryle Murphy takes us by the hand and introduces us to the people who are helping determine the future course of Islam. With her own passion for reporting and storytelling, she pulls us inside a world strange and forbidding to many Americans, but nevertheless vital for us to understand. She shows brilliantly how we have as much reason to hope for enlightenment and peace from the many corners of Islam as we do to fear more September 11ths.

Leslie H. Gelb president, Council on Foreign Relations In fine journalistic brushstrokes, Caryle Murphy lets you see how the Islamists would like to see themselves — in all their subtle varieties and degrees of piety and lethality. While I assign more to the Islamists than the author for creating their own ills and ours, Murphy brings us much closer to Muslim minds, otherwise often caricatured in the West.

Raghida Dergham columnist for Al-Hayat Rarely does a book on religion and politics combine such journalistic excellence, impeccable research, and compelling stories. Each paragraph is a frame of history told meticulously with courage, fairness, and innovation.

Richard W. Murphy senior fellow, Middle East Council on Foreign Relations This is a timely, solid, and highly readable account by Caryle Murphy of conflicts within Islamic intellectual and religious circles as their leaders seek to relate their faith to today's changing political and economic conditions. Their attempts to create a modern Islamic society have led to tensions with the Egyptian government. In relating Egyptian developments to those in the broader Arab world, she persuasively demolishes the conventional wisdom that Egypt is unique and that Islam is monolithic. This book provides altogether a valuable set of insights for readers interested in getting beyond the stereotypical descriptions of Islamic thought advanced by both friends and critics of Islam in recent years.

From the Publisher