Islam, politics, and social movements

This book is based on a conference held at the University of California in June 1981 to examine movements of social protest and political resistance in Muslim countries in the 19th and 20th century. The papers presented here include many of the original conference papers, revised for this publication, plus additional contributions. The conference was organized to attempt to situate historically the diverse responses of Islamic societies to changes they have undergone since 1750 and to explore the strengths and weaknesses of differing research strategies. The essays in this volume examine selected case studies of social movements in Islamic societies during the 19th and 20th century from different methodological perspectives. Two parts of the book deal with Africa. Part 2 examines the resistance of rural Muslim populations to European hegemony in the Maghreb and the Sudan (essays by P. Von Sivers, J. Clancy-Smith, F. Colonna, and J.O. Voll). Part 4 considers the subject of Islamic and working-class formation in Egypt in the 1940s and in contemporary Nigeria (essays by J. Beinin, E. Goldberg, and P. Lubeck).