Shari'a and Muslim Minorities

The wasati and salafi approaches to fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-Muslima (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Based on a study of thousands of religious decisions (fatwas) and juristic treatises, the book examines the ideologies and methodologies of two contesting approaches to the religious law of Muslim minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima): the pragmatic and integration-minded wasaṭī, and the rigid and segregating salafī. Examining a range of debated issues—from whether it is permissible to serve in non-Muslim militaries to whether Muslims should congratulate Christian colleagues on Christmas to whether French female pupils may take off their headscarves—the book offers the most systematic study to date on a diverse and dynamic field of jurisprudence that concerns millions and is at the core of the most politically charged polemics of our time. Among its innovative contributions, it demonstrates how the notion that Muslims should convert Christians to Islam has come to legitimize Muslim permanent residence in the West and to justify facilitating pragmatic decisions that allow greater integration into Muslim societies.

Scientific and Political Freedom in Islam

A Critical Reading of the Modernist-Apologetic School (Routledge, 2017)

The modernist-apologetic approach to the relation between revelation and science and politics has been a central part of Arab discourses on the future of Muslim societies for over a century. This approach introduced historical and theological narratives and interpretative mechanisms that contextualize reason and freedom in Islamic terms to argue that, unlike with Christianity, it is possible for Muslim societies to be technologically and politically advanced without forfeiting revelation as an all-encompassing, legally-binding guide.

Islamism and the West

From "Cultural Attack" to "Missionary Migrant" (Routledge, 2014)

Offering a unique analysis of Islamist ideology, Islamism and the West attempts to explain how- and why-mainstream Islamist leaders have, for the past century, developed and canonized theories which depict theWest as engaged in a sophisticated conspiracy to undermine Muslim identity by cultural means, while morallycollapsing and yearning for the spiritual salvation brought by Muslim migrants.

Zionism in Arab Discourses

With Ofir Winter (Project Muse, 2017)

Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands. Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation. This study presents the debates between and within contesting Arab ideological trends on a conflict that has shaped, and is certain to continue and shape, one of the most complicated regions in the world.

The New Imagined Community

Global Media and the Construction of National and Muslim Identities of Migrants (Sussex Academic Press, 2009)

This book examines how advanced media technologies - satellite technology and the internet - have transformed immigrants' relations with their departure and arrival societies. Part I of the book - titled "Imagining Nation States from Afar" - extends Benedict Anderson's model of the nation as an imagined community. The discussion focuses on how immigrants are enabled to imagine their native national communities from afar, almost as if they never left their homelands. As a result, new typologies of migrants are created, such as the passive trans-national. A comprehensive analytic framework for the role of advanced media technologies in fostering relations between immigrants and their national communities of origin is presented