The Arabist

The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

Haenni's new book

I'd like to take a moment to plug Patrick Haenni's new book, L'Islam de marché: L'autre révolution conservatrice (Market Islam: The other conservative revolution), which has just been announced. Haenni, a Swiss researcher who worked on his PhD in the Cairo district of Imbaba, when journalists and academics nicknamed it "the Islamic Republic of Imbaba" because it had such as large Gamaa Islamiya contingent, is doing important work on the new, often neo-liberal, forms of Islamism that have been emerging over the past decade. He is also a great expert on the rise of Muslim televangelists like Amr Khaled. This book seems to tackle both these topics, as the blurb says:
In the face of more widespread interpretations, a new Islamism is beginning to emerge that is ever better adapted to the market and globalization, much less overtly political but as conservative as ever. Seducted by management literature, focused on the individual and readily consumerist, it combines modernity and tradition to form a fundamentalism that has many affinities with American fundamentalist movements. Between the two universalisms--the French and the American--it is the second that this postmilitant Islamism chooses. From Casablanca to Cairo, Patrick Haenni analyses its rise through various social and cultural manifestations: moralistic literature, pious talk shows, dress codes, "women's salons", music, new practices of repentance...
Update: There is a lot more information (in French) about the book here.