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 incentives created by competitive elections in a number of Muslim-majority countries are fueling a political trend that roughly resembles the rise of Christian Democracy in twentieth-century Europe
Is the field of Middle East studies as badly flawed as some critics charge? A fair-minded look at the last 10 or 15 years of research suggests otherwise.