Coming out from Yale this month is Tarek Osman's Islamism. PW's review calls the book a "deliberate and lucid" account of the rise of Islamism as a political movement beginning in the 1920s. Osman (Egypt on the Brink), a political economist and contributor to Foreign Affairs and the BBC, focuses primarily on North African and eastern Mediterranean Arab nations as he explains the rise of Islamism, spending a lot of time on Nasserism, the rise and fall of pan-Arabism, and finally attempting to uncoil the different strands of Islamism that lead to and transformed during the 2011 "Arab Spring" that began in Tunisia.
Islamism follows a growing trend of academic publishers taking on books that explaining Islam to a Western audience--What is Islam? (Princeton); Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring (Oxford); Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Harvard). Osman's book, not as in-depth as some of the others, is a fine primer on the rise of Islamism as a political movement. In the end, Osman poses as many questions as he asks. With the rise of ISIS, continued settlement disputes within Israel, a worsening civil war in Syria, and a deepening cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, I expect Osman will be back soon with an update.
