A review of Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies, by Leonard Binder.
About the Author
Shaul Bakhash is Robinson Professor of Middle East History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (1990). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was an editor with Kayhan Newspapers in Tehran, and reported from Tehran for the Economist, the London Times, and the Financial Times.
The president of Tunisia’s Ennahdha party, Rached Ghannouchi, argues that the solution to extremism is more (not less) freedom and democracy, along with more moderate religious teachings.
Not only did the Algerian regime survive the “Arab Spring,” it hardly deviated from its normal methods of authoritarian governance—patronage, pseudodemocratization, and effective use of the security apparatus.
