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Political Islamists contend that Islam is a complete way of life, encompassing rules and regulations, not only for spiritual and moral uplift, but also for establishing and maintaining political, economic, social and other systems. This was the first of twenty basic principles that Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stated in a treatise he wrote to explain the understanding of Islam held by his movement. Al-Banna believed that the main role of his movement, and of Islamists in general, was to re-establish those aspects of the comprehensive Islamic religion which had been lost or destroyed before, during or after the colonial era. The establishment of Islamic banks in the second half of the twentieth century could be seen as a practical application of the ideological view that Islam contained within it an alternative means of running economic and financial affairs. The ties between Islamic banks and Islamic movements have not, however, been as strong as might be expected. This chapter examines the role played by the Islamists in the early history of the Jordan Islamic Bank (JIB), as well as the ongoing relationship and kinds of interaction between Islamists and both the JIB and the Arabic Islamic Bank. It also discusses the economic agenda of the Islamic Action Front Party, including the economic agenda of Islamist activists in professional organisations and other aspects of civil society.

This introductory chapter argues that despite the numerous accounts of the political history of Umayyad al-Andalus, its relationship to the Jewish and Christian communities under its rule can be viewed only from scattered evidence in the Arabic–Islamic literary sources. Given the limitations of literary sources, the book turns to early Andalusi and Maghribi Maliki legal texts for evidence that could contribute to a deeper understanding of life in al-Andalus. It presents an examination of Islamic legal texts as sources for understanding intercommunal relations in a legal and historical context. The chapter discusses the conceptualization, expression, and imposition of boundaries by rulers, judges, and jurists, and looks at boundary testing as a mechanism for the transmutation and the continuity of regular social practices.

This chapter looks at the social and cultural transformation of al-Andalus, and considers what the Arabic–Islamic legal texts and the Latin martyrologies reveal about cultural change, interfaith marriage, and conversion. It presents an overview of the physical integration of communities, as well as descriptions of settlement patterns, in situating the dynamics of intercommunal relations in an evolving and transformative social space. The determination of the fuqaha'—Islamic jurists—to protect Islam from corruption generally made them suspicious of close contact with non-Muslims, along with the demographic, cultural, and social developments that facilitated increased communication, interaction, and personal interdependence during the ninth and early tenth centuries.

This chapter examines the Islamic parties discourse during and post Arab Spring. The landslide victory of most Islamic parties in post Arab Spring elections in Egypt and Tunisia took many observers by surprise and revealed the popularity of the parties in these countries. The study of their discourse offers a good understanding of the dialectical relationship between these parties and the wider public. It also examines their discourses in the context of conflict and social change. The focus in this chapter is on Al-Nahda and the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Tunisia and Egypt respectively. A CDA approach, mainly Fairclough’s framework of language and social change, has been adopted for the analysis of the data, which has been collected from speeches, statements and slogans made by leaders of the two parties.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the general theme of the book. It discusses and defines the terminology employed to describe, analyse, and evaluate Arabic-Islamic records on medieval Western Europe on a macro-historical scale. An overview of the range of available sources introduces the reader to the material that is subject to analysis in the following chapters. An account of the current state of research questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records and outlines the study’s alternative approach: to analyse and interpret the extant material thematically and in chronological order, thus tracing and explaining the processes of transmission, reception, and contextualization that facilitated the production of the extant Arabic-Islamic records on certain Latin-Christian phenomena. Two short overviews at the beginning and end of the chapter explain the structure of the current study.

Chapter 2 features an overview of relations between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Its purpose is to show how much information on medieval Western Europe was potentially available in the Arabic-Islamic sphere and to provide an understanding of where to place the authors of Arabic-Islamic records within an overriding framework of transmission and reception. From Antiquity and leading up to the fifteenth century, it explains how the Arab sphere was integrated into the Roman orbit, discusses the effects of the Roman Empire’s disintegration on the pre-Islamic Arab world-view and presents the Arabic-Islamic expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries as a process that acquainted the Muslims with new information on the western Mediterranean. With regards to the ensuing period, characterized by various forms of intra- and intersocietal neighbourship in the Mediterranean sphere, the chapter lists channels of transmission by which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic world.

Chapter 3 addresses the various factors that influenced how Arabic-Islamic scholars received and processed information on the Roman West and medieval Western Europe. Explaining briefly how the rise of Islam was accompanied by the emergence of an Islamic scholarly culture in Arabic, the chapter maintains that the delayed emergence of this culture in the Muslim West accounts for the dearth of contemporary Arabic-Islamic sources on the early medieval Latin West. Then it focuses on the obstacles encountered by Arabic-Islamic scholars wishing to describe the Latin-Christian sphere and its history. It discusses their knowledge of Latin and other Western European languages of the Middle Ages and their problems of surmounting linguistic barriers. It equally gives attention to their problems of acquiring reliable data on the history and contemporary affairs of medieval Western Europe. Finally, it shows how Arabic-Islamic scholars often unintentionally or intentionally distorted this data by contextualizing and interpreting it.