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This article examines the ideals, principles, and operational mechanisms of democracy from Western and Islamic perspectives. Western powers, including the United States, indiscriminately promote Western secular democracy, but Islamic countries require a democratic framework that is developed within the context of their culture and faith.

Texts, writing, and print create new forms of communication, community, and authority. Their transformative influence pervades Middle Eastern and Muslim religious and political forms. Scholarly attention to them collapses conventional assumptions of a 'great divide' separating 'tribal' and urban, nonliterate and literate in the region. 'Textual' ethnography sheds light on phenomena as diverse as the continued significance of the genealogy of the Prophet's ancestors for representing Muslim tribal identities, the linkage between legal writing and the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry in Yemen, pamphlets and tracts in Islamic resistance to Marxist rule in Afghanistan, and the emergence of an Islamist anthropology. [writing, printing, Islam, politics, Middle East]

The relation between the state and society of Senegalese is balanced due to the importance of religion and culture in its social organization. Marabouts, leaders of Islamic Sufi orders, have large number of followers and play major roles in local and state administration. The rituals conducted, which elicit a huge response, form the pivot of social institutions and this brings unity and harmony in the politics of Senegal.

This article considers the future of Muslim political thought in the context of growing de-Islamization and the dominance of western institutions. The 'fundamentalist' theory of the Islamic state - total mobilization of Muslim societies under a universal state - is criticized as religiously an immanentist heresy, and politically a totalitarian nightmare. Proposed here is a way out of the moral and intellectual crisis in Islamic political thought through the principle of Shura - meaning that Muslims must evolve their own form of representative government. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The violent clashes between Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank last October, which quickly ripened into a new and sustained intifada, effectively ended the Oslo peace process [...]

Some Islamist groups call for a jihad against their perceived enemies, justifying acts of violence and armed struggle against them. Where Israel is concerned, HAMAS and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad [...]

RIAZ HASSAN [*, **] Institutional Configurations and Trust in Religious Institutions in Muslim Societies ABSTRACT Historical scholarship indicates that the institutional configurations of Islamic societies can be classified into two [...]