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Turi Munthe's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Turi Munthe recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Turi Munthe's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into...

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Recommended by Turi Munthe, and 1 others.

Turi MuntheI threw this in not because I agree with it, but because it’s a book that represents the different terms in which the West is now beginning to think about the 21st century’s big themes. And what a relief: no more Islam vs Modernity, far less ‘evil Muslims’, a real quietening of the cultural discourse that invented these fake ideas of a monolithic ‘West’ or ‘East’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Modernity’. Kagan... (Source)

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2
In a Western world suddenly acutely interested in Islam, one question has been repeatedly heard above the din: where are the Muslim reformers? With this ambitious volume, Tariq Ramadan firmly establishes himself as one of Europe's leading thinkers and one of Islam's most innovative and important voices. As the number of Muslims living in the West grows, the question of what it means to be a Western Muslim becomes increasingly important to the futures of both Islam and the West. While the media are focused on radical Islam, Ramadan claims, a silent revolution is sweeping Islamic communities in... more
Recommended by Turi Munthe, and 1 others.

Turi MuntheYes, the lead thinker in Europe in terms of where Islam is going is Tariq Ramadan. He’s a brilliant and controversial academic and philosopher who lectures worldwide and has been banned in the certain places including the US. He’s also the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of Muslim Brotherhood, the first great socio-political movement campaigning to give Islam a central role in the forcefully... (Source)

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3
At a time in our post-9/11 world when fundamentalist forces appear to dominate Islam, a vibrant and consequential discourse has emerged from many prominent writers seeking to change the direction of Muslim thought. This timely volume, representing a broad cross-section of this reformist trend in countries ranging from Malaysia to Algeria and Morocco, brings together the writings of thirteen of the most renowned and influential Muslim thinkers alive today. Individually and collectively, they argue for reforms in Islamic theology and jurisprudence and for reinterpretations of popular notions of... more
Recommended by Turi Munthe, and 1 others.

Turi MuntheIt’s hard to talk about this without generalising but I think we see Islam becoming more popular and social and less political. There’s also been a great deal of really sophisticated new thinking about how Islam fits in the post-9/11 world. The New Voices of Islam by Mehran Kamrava is a useful anthology of the new-reform Muslim thinkers who have extremely interesting and open ideas about where... (Source)

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4
The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against westernization rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been... more
Recommended by Turi Munthe, and 1 others.

Turi MuntheIslam and Modernity are two of the most contested academic and political concepts around. No serious thinkers today talk about a single ‘Islam’, speaking instead in terms of multiple ‘Islams’. And the same goes for definitions of ‘modernity’. Scholars would throw the debate out immediately on those grounds, but I think the problem remains. Precisely because the debate is so contested, it has been... (Source)

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5

Jihad

The Trail of Political Islam

The late twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an unexpected and extraordinary phenomenon: Islamist political movements. Beginning in the early 1970s, militants revolted against the regimes in power throughout the Muslim world and exacerbated political conflicts everywhere. Their jihad, or "Holy Struggle," aimed to establish a global Islamic state based solely on a strict interpretation of the Koran. Religious ideology proved a cohesive force, gathering followers ranging from students and the young urban poor to middle-class professionals.After an initial triumph with the Islamic... more
Recommended by Jason Burke, Turi Munthe, and 2 others.

Jason BurkeKepel is one of the best-known French experts on Islamic militancy. And the French, for a variety of reasons, have produced much of the best analysis of Islamic militancy over the years, pre- and post-9/11. It is partly due to their own history and partly due to their interest in social sciences. It is also partly due to government investment very early on. (Source)

Turi MuntheGilles Kepel is another brilliant French academic who again demonstrates the excellent sociological work of the French in this area. The idea behind this book was to explain where and how the ideas of Jihad originated. Kepel deals with a shorter sweep of history than Roy but gives an excellent overview of the movements that created political Islam. He is particularly interesting from late 1970s... (Source)

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