Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Rachel Bronson Thicker Than Oil America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia  Council of Foreign Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, hardback, 353pp, ISBN-13: ‎‎978-0-19-516743‎

Thicker than Oil investigates the U.S-Saudi relationship after this relationship became controversial in the aftermath of  9/11. It scrutinises the decision making process on both sides, ‎by necessity an account of the policies of kings, presidents, senior cabinet officials, royal confidants and chief intelligence officers (pp. 11). Bronson situates her narrative in between ‎two poles: Saudi bashing in America and anti-Americanism in Saudi Arabia. For fifty years, the partnership rested on shared interests, held responsible for sowing current radicalism ‎in the Muslim world. Yet because it was an uneasy partnership, the relation had to be conducted behind closed doors for over half a century.   ‎

Ibrahim Abu Rabi’ (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought ‎Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006 (Hardback), 675p. ‎

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought is a reference book that ‎introduces the reader to the diversity of Islamic intellectual tradition. The introduction ‎places Islamic intellectuals and their productions in the contemporary context of the ‎Muslim world. Diverse, fragmented, and unevenly developed, the Muslim world shares ‎common historical developments brought about by the experience of being drawn into ‎Western modernity in its various manifestations. Colonialism, capitalism, globalisation, ‎modernization, liberation struggles, the nation state, dictatorships, religious revivalism, ‎and fundamentalism are but few aspects of the arrival of modernity in Muslim lands. ‎