With the end of the Cold War and the unfolding of unprecedented acts of transnational terror on September 11, representing perhaps new civilizational cleavages, Islam has attained renewed prominence in Western political reflections. Too often viewed from ethnocentric or sensationalist perspectives, how is Islam, as a strategic entity, to be understood in contemporary world politics?

The New Politics of Islam is a timely study of the international relations of Islamic states. In detailing both theory and practice, it both describes the idea of pan-Islamism from classical to post-caliphal times and analyzes the foreign-policy behavior of contemporary states - especially Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan - from the colonial period to the global aftermath of September 11. With a concise and analytic style, the book engages one-by-one with the pressing questions of Islam's political theory, Islam's political geography, and Islam's political sociology. Critical of grand explanations, The New Politics of Islam seeks to restore the scholarly balance between different perspectives on religion and realpolitik in the Middle East and South Asia. The primary empirical investigation of this book is centred on the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57-member international regime, sometimes referred to as the Muslim United Nations, and its involvement in post-Cold War crises in the form of the Gulf War, the Palestine problem, the Balkan wars, the Chechnya campaign, and nuclearization in South Asia. In its subsequent theoretical deliberations on Islam and the postmodern condition, The New Politics of Islam reconstructs contemporary social-science understandings of how religiousideas and identities influence international politics in the Islamic world in a worthy attempt to move beyond the clash-of-civilizations paradigm. A necessary tour d'horizon for the researcher and informed observer alike.

Examines how Islam is to be understood in relation to contemporary international relations. It highlights salient characteristics in pan-Islamic theory and its implications for the foreign policy of key states in the international pan-Islamic forum, the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

With the end of the Cold War and its adjacent ideological rivalry, Islam has attained renewed prominence in western political reflections, although too often from ethnocentric or sensationalist perspectives. This book is a timely study of Islam in international relations. Detailing both theory and practice, it approaches Islam both as a norm of policy making and a discourse of policy presentation.