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Joshua M Roose, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness and Affective Politics in Pakistan by SHENILA KHOJA-MOOLJI
Feeding Iran: Shi’i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic by ROSE WELLMAN, Sociology of Religion, Volume 83, Issue 3, Autumn 2022, Pages 402–406, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srac012Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Against a backdrop of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and broader realignment by the United States in the Middle East, one thing is clear; that Western attempts to win “hearts and minds” in the Muslim world have largely failed. The Islamic world has not buckled to U.S. or Western demands and, notwithstanding the actions of a few powerful elites, has continued to resist external military and political intervention, including human rights reforms. There may be many reasons for this, yet a lack of involvement from foreign policy practitioners educated in international relations, international human rights, constitutional law, and political science is not one of them. Instead, it might be argued that the form and substance of knowledge informing engagement with the Muslim world has been inherently premised on Western ways of thinking, with this shaping exogenous efforts at democracy promotion. These attempts fundamentally misrecognize the multifaceted dynamics that shape contestations of power and society in Muslim societies. The two books examined here offer very important yet also vastly different studies into the dimensions of this, examining aspects of piety, politics, and culture in the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Iran, two nations that have resisted Western political and military influences for prolonged periods.
