Henry Munson

The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence

Turkish politics due precisely to military tutelage. However, the author of this book offers a new perspective for the readership. The author uses archives from newspapers, parliamentary sessions, and legal documents between 1960 and 1983 to reveal that AKP’s political predecessors, such as the National Outlook Movement and conservative Muslim figures – for example, renowned Turkish poet and author Necip Fazil Kısakurek – made public declarations to affirm the necessity of the military coup d’états (pp. 90, 115) for the future of the Turkish state. It is a prominent contribution of the book, as the author argues that a large spectrum of the Turkish intelligentsia, from left wing to right wing, as well as conservative religious groups, affirmed the necessity of the military coup d’état, and in so doing they have contributed to a constant reproduction of militarist discourse via internalizing the military’s influence. The author limits his research period from 1960 to 1983. The year of 1960 is a milestone for Turkish politics since it is the year that the first military coup d’état occurred in Turkey. Moreover, after 1983 the military tutelage in Turkish politics entered into a trend of decline due to parliamentary elections and this trend has continued until the present. Since 1983, the militarization of Turkish politics has experienced various dynamics, such as armed conflict against the Kurdish insurgency, the rise of political Islam, and the end of the Cold War. However, if one would like to grasp the contemporary pattern of the militarist discourse both in the public and political life of Turkey, Ali Balcı’s Militarist State Discourse in Turkey 1960–1983 is an essential starting point to understand the historically seeded roots of militarism in the country.

Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises

practical engagement’ (p. 4). This aim is certainly an achievable one, since the collected articles are of fine quality. However, as it is always the case with collected reprints (which all of the chapters are) or ‘essential readings’, there is always the question of whether the selection taken is indeed of really essential pieces. However, it is certainly not the place of a review to begin a discussion of who should be in and who should be out. In this particular case there are, however, two additional problems. The first is that many of the chapters are reprints from the Review of Faith and International Affairs. Due to that, the chapters greatly vary in terms of their length and theoretical approach. The other problem is one common to most of the recent studies in this field: the attachment to mainstream Western political opinion – that is, for example, the focus on religious freedom – and mainstream scholarship. The former is not surprising, since most of those studies are focused on US foreign policy. The latter is a general problem leading, eventually, to theoretical grievances and shortcomings. Religion, for example is, by and large, taken as a monolithic concept. In other words, religion is treated as an actor. Religion, however, is never religion. Not so in theological or sociological terms and also not in terms of political science. At least implicitly, the editors – and the single chapters alike – do agree on the consequences of such a one-size-fits-all approach: ‘the only thing worse than ignoring religion is to approach it in an ill-informed way’ (p. 8) – that is true for believers and analysts alike.

Iraq's Dysfunctional Democracy

nations of fascism in the 1960s typically focused, of course, on analyses of economic sociology, social structure, and political economy: it is from these sociological frameworks that the dominant focus on class structures arose. As class has lost importance as a unit of analysis, however, the sociological imperative has also acquired a somewhat reduced purchase, and it has been replaced by a diffuse brand of cultural anthropology, whose explanatory status (as mentioned) is neither fully articulated nor persuasively justified. The abandonment of explanatory sociological methods appears between the lines of this volume as a great weakness in contemporary research on fascism. Indeed, the volume – for all its particular merits – is marked by striking sociological vacuity, and it cries out for a renewed sociological reconstruction of fascist politics: that is, for a line of sociological interpretation that is able to incorporate detailed analyses and cultural phenomena within a synthetic explanatory matrix, yet that also considers fascism from a standpoint that is not fully determined by principles of class motivation. Notably, one representative of the older generation of fascism scholars, Adrian Lyttelton, reflects tellingly in this volume that a ‘new sociological approach’ to fascism, studying ‘the reception and conditioning of fascism in its host societies’ would be of benefit (p. 277). This reviewer agrees strongly with this sentiment. An approach of this kind might – in equal measure – involve a rejection of both class and culture as dominant units of analysis. It might instead focus on the integrative strength of institutions, the potency of legal order, the construction of rights, and the objective differentiation of society as a whole as prisms for examining the structural propensity of societies to convert to fascism and sustain fascist governments. The quest for a new sociological paradigm is implied in many parts of this book. However, the book also makes clear that this paradigm has not yet been discovered.

Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism

Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism. New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, viiD281 pp.,

Religion and power in Morocco

60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0195314489. Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, xD216 pp.,

Islam and revolution in the Middle East

55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 8018 8776 5. Sarah Iles Johnston, ed., Ancient Religions. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004, xiD266 pp.,

Islam, nationalism and resentment of foreign domination

19.95 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 674 02548 6. H.G.M. Williamson, ed., Understanding the History of Ancient Israel. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, xxD432 pp.,

The house of Si Abd Allah : the oral history of a Moroccan family

99.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 19 726401 0. Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, xD275 pp.,

Religion and violence

69.95 (hardback), ISBN 1 4039 7567 1. Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion. Imposing Faith and Legitimacy. London, Equinox, 2007, 181 pp.,

Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice

65 (hardback), ISBN 9781845532857,