Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse
by Mohammed Bamyeh
Explores the genesis of Islam for insight into the nature of ideological transformation.
Category: Origins of IslamMohammed Bamyeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of International Sociology Review of Books (ISRB). He has held the Hubert Humphrey chair in International Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the SSRC-MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He has previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Massachusetts. He has delivered invited lectures at many other universities and institutions in the United States, Canada, China, Taiwan, Sweden, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Malaysia, Macau, and Zimbabwe.
He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. His subsequent areas of interest have included Islamic studies, political and cultural globalization, civil society and social movements, and comparative social and political theory. He is currently involved in studying the Arab revolutions, about which he lectured widely and published several articles since January 2011. His most recent book, Islam and Society: Social Movements, Global Structures, Social Critique, is expected to appear as part of the American Sociological Association’s Rose monograph series, co-sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013. His other books include Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East (Tauris 2012); Anarchy as Order: The History and future of Civic Humanity (Rowan & Littlefield 2009); Of Death and Dominion: The Existential Foundations of Governance (Northwestern UP 2007); The Ends of Globalization (Minnesota UP 2000); The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minnesota UP 1999, winner of the Albert Hourani Honorable Mention from the Middle East Studies Association); and the trend report Transnationalism, published as a special issue of the International Sociological Association’s journal Current Sociology (1993). He has also edited Palestine America (published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2003); and co-edited (with Brett Neilson) Drugs in Motion: Toward a Materialist Tracking of Global Mobilities (published as a special issue of Cultural Critique, 2009).
Mohammed Bamyeh is the founding editor of the journal Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies, the former book series editor of “World Heritage Studies on Multiculturalism and Transnationalism,” and the current co-editor of the book series “Tracking Globalization” (Indiana UP). His articles and reviews have appeared in, among others, The Royal Bulletin of Interfaith Studies, Arena Journal, American Sociological Review, The American Journal of Sociology, Rethinking Marxism, Social Semiotics, Lettre International, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, The Middle East Journal, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Social Text, Criterios, Social Analysis, as well as in various edited volumes and encyclopedias (such as the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, and The Encyclopedia of the Qur’an). He has further organized a number of community-oriented film series on the Arab World, and participated in organizing two larger scale Arab film festivals in Minneapolis.
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