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The Wage Slave's Glossary
by Pseud Seth Joshua Glenn Mark KingwellWhen The Idler's Glossary was released in October 2008 the world was on the cusp of experiencing its greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Depending on your sense of irony, this was either foolhardy or prescient. The Wage Slave's Glossary, a second volume of anti-economic etymology, comes as we climb out of recession, and continues to explore and challenge the interconnected world of work and leisure and labor and how the language we use continues to keep us in chains.
Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It
by Kim Bobo&“This book will give you an entirely new perspective on work in America.&” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed In what has been described as &“the crime wave no one talks about,&” billions of dollars&’ worth of wages are stolen from millions of workers in the United States every year—a grand theft that exceeds every other larceny category. Even the Economic Policy Foundation, a business-funded think tank, has estimated that companies annually steal an incredible $19 billion in unpaid overtime. The scope of these abuses is staggering, but activists, unions, and policymakers—along with everyday Americans in congregations and towns across the country—have begun to take notice. While the first edition of Wage Theft In America documented the scope of the problem, this new edition adds the latest research on wage theft and tells what community, religious, and labor activists are now doing to address the crisis—from passing state and local wage-theft bills to establishing mayoral task forces and tapping agencies that help low-wage workers in spotting wage theft. Citing hard-hitting statistics and heartbreaking first-person accounts of exploitation at the hands of employers, this updated edition of Wage Theft In America offers concrete solutions and a roadmap for putting an end to this insidious practice.
Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism (Forerunners: Ideas First)
by Ian G. Shaw Marv WaterstoneDrawing up alternate ways to &“make a living&” beyond capitalism To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
The Wages of Appeasement
by Bruce S. ThorntonWages of Appeasement explores the reasons why a powerful state gives in to aggressors. It tells the story of three historical examples of appeasement: the greek city-states of the fourth century b.c., which lost their freedom to Philip II of Macedon; England in the twenties and thirties, and the failure to stop Germany's aggression that led to World War II; and America's current war against Islamic jihad and the 30-year failure to counter Iran's attacks on the U.S. The inherent weaknesses of democracies and their bad habit of pursuing short-term interests at the expense of long-term security play a role in appeasement. But more important are the bad ideas people indulge, from idealized views of human nature to utopian notions like pacifism or disarmament. But especially important is the notion that diplomatic engagement and international institutions like the u.n. can resolve conflict and deter an aggressor--the delusion currently driving the Obama foreign policy in the middle east. Wages of Appeasement combines narrative history and cultural analysis to show how ideas can have dangerous and deadly consequences.
The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines
by Amy TysonAnyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets while dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota's Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant observation, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies. Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilege--an opportunity to connect with the public in meaningful ways through the medium of history--the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace. This case study also offers insights--many drawn from the author's seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snelling--into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history's front lines both resist and embrace the site's more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide.
Wages of Impunity: Power, Justice and Human Rights
by K. G. KannabiranThe Wages of Impunity consists of essays on human rights and civil liberties in India. Reiterating the indispensability of fundamental rights, the essays focus on aspects such as secularism, socialism, and the right to life, liberty and free speech.
The Wages of Oil: Parliaments and Economic Development in Kuwait and the UAE
by Michael HerbThe contrast between Kuwait and the UAE today illustrates the vastly different possible futures facing the smaller states of the Gulf. Dubai's rulers dream of creating a truly global business center, a megalopolis of many millions attracting immigrants in great waves from near and far. Kuwait, meanwhile, has the most spirited and influential parliament in any of the oil-rich Gulf monarchies. In The Wages of Oil, Michael Herb provides a robust framework for thinking about the future of the Gulf monarchies. The Gulf has seen enormous changes in recent years, and more are to come. Herb explains the nature of the changes we are likely to see in the future. He starts by asking why Kuwait is far ahead of all other Gulf monarchies in terms of political liberalization, but behind all of them in its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil. He compares Kuwait with the United Arab Emirates, which lacks Kuwait's parliament but has moved ambitiously to diversify. This data-rich book reflects the importance of both politics and economic development issues for decision-makers in the Gulf. Herb develops a political economy of the Gulf that ties together a variety of issues usually treated separately: Kuwait's National Assembly, Dubai's real estate boom, the paucity of citizen labor in the private sector, class divisions among citizens, the caste divide between citizens and noncitizens, and the politics of land.
Wages of Rebellion
by Chris HedgesIn the face of modern conditions, revolution is inevitable. The rampant inequality that exists between the political and corporate elites and the struggling masses; the destruction wreaked upon our environment by faceless, careless corporations; the steady stripping away of our civil liberties and the creation of a monstrous surveillance system--all of these have combined to spark a profound revolutionary moment. Corporate capitalists, dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges--a renowned chronicler of the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline--investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution and resistance. Focusing on the stories of radicals and dissenters from around the world and throughout history, and drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and novelists, Hedges explores what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Hedges, using a term coined by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, cites "sublime madness” as the essential force that guides the actions of rebels--the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unwavering fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protestors in Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking truth to power and demanding justice. This is a fight that requires us to find in acts of rebellion the sparks of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies beyond the possibility of success. For Hedges, resistance is not finally defined by what we achieve, but by what we become.
The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929–39
by Eric StrikwerdaIn the early part of the Dirty Thirties, the Canadian prairie city was a relatively safe haven. Having faced recession before the Great War and then again in the early 1920s, municipalities already had relief apparatuses in place to deal with poverty and unemployment. Until 1933, responsibilty for the care of the urban poor remained with local governments, but when the farms failed that year, and the Depression deepened, western Canadian cities suffered tremendously. Recognizing the severity of the crisis, the national government intervened. Evolving federal programs and policies took over responsibility for the delivery of relief to the single unemployed, while the government simultaneously withdrew financing for all public works projects. Setting municipal relief administrations of the 1930s within a wider literature on welfare and urban poor relief, Strikwerda highlights the legacy on which relief policymakers relied in determining policy directions, as well as the experiences of the individuals and families who depended on relief for their survival. Focusing on three prairie cities—Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg—Strikwerda argues that municipal officials used their power to set policy to address what they perceived to be the most serious threats to the social order stemming from the economic crisis. By analyzing the differing ways in which local relief programs treated married and single men, he also explores important gendered dynamics at work in the response of city administrators to the social and economic upheaval of the Depression. Probing the mindset of local elites struggling in extraordinary circumstances, The Wages of Relief describes the enduring impact of the policy changes made in the 1930s in the direction of a broad, national approach to unemployment—an approach that ushered in Canada’s modern welfare system.
The Wages of Sickness
by Beatrix HoffmanThe Clinton administration's failed health care reform was not the first attempt to establish government-sponsored medical coverage in the United States. From 1915 to 1920, Progressive reformers led a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful crusade for compulsory health insurance in New York State. Beatrix Hoffman argues that this first health insurance campaign was a crucial moment in the creation of the American welfare state and health care system. Its defeat, she says, gave rise to an uneven and inegalitarian system of medical coverage and helped shape the limits of American social policy for the rest of the century. Hoffman examines each of the major combatants in the battle over compulsory health insurance. While physicians, employers, the insurance industry, and conservative politicians forged a uniquely powerful coalition in opposition to health insurance proposals, she shows, reformers' potential allies within women's organizations and the labor movement were bitterly divided. Against the backdrop of World War I and the Red Scare, opponents of reform denounced government-sponsored health insurance as "un-American" and, in the process, helped fashion a political culture that resists proposals for universal health care and a comprehensive welfare state even today.
The Wages of War: When America's Soldiers Came Home: From Valley Forge to Vietnam (Forbidden Bookshelf #20)
by Mark Crispin Miller Richard Severo Lewis Milford Charles Sheehan-MilesA disturbing chronicle of the US government's mistreatment of American soldiers and veterans throughout history, with a new introduction by Charles Sheehan-Miles Time and time again, the sacrifices made by veterans and their families have been repaid with scorn, discrimination, lack of health services, scant financial compensation, and other indignities. This injustice dates back as far as the American Revolution, when troops came home penniless and without prospects for work, yet had to wait decades before the government paid them the wages they were owed. When soldiers returned from the Cuban campaign after the Spanish-American War, they were riddled with malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery--but the government refused to acknowledge their illnesses, and finally dumped them in a makeshift tent city on Long Island, where they were left to starve and die. Perhaps the most infamous case of disgraceful behavior toward veterans happened after the Vietnam War, when soldiers were forced to battle bureaucrats and lawyers, and suffer media slander, because they asked the government and chemical industry to help them cope with the toxic aftereffects of Agent Orange. In The Wages of War, authors Richard Severo and Lewis Milford not only uncover new information about the controversial use of this defoliant in Vietnam and the subsequent class action suit brought against its manufacturers, but also present fresh information on every war in US history. The result is exhaustive proof that--save for the treatment of soldiers in the aftermath of World War II--the government's behavior towards American servicemen has been more like that of "a slippery insurance company than a policy rooted in the idea of justice and fair reward."
Wages, Price and Profit
by Karl MarxProduction of Surplus Value; Value of Labour; Profit Is Made by Selling a Commodity at its Value; The Different Parts into Which Surplus Value Is Decomposed; General Relation of Profits, Wages and Prices.
Wages, Prices, Profits, and Economic Policy: Proceedings of a Conference Held by the Centre for Industrial Relations, University of Toronto, 1967
by John CrispoThe essays included in this book are the proceedings of a conference held by the Centre for Industrial Relations at the University of Toronto, 1967. They have been divided into five sections: "Wage-Price-Profit Relations in Canada—The Problem in Perspective," "A Diagnosis of the Problem," "Foreign Experience," "The Government and Wage-Price-Profit Relations," and "A Policy for Canada." The essays included are by such eminent contributors as Dr. John Deutsch, Professor G.L. Reuber, Mr. David McQueen, Dr. Arthur M. Ross, and The Honourable Mitchell Sharp.
Wages, Race, Skills and Space: Lessons from Employers in Detroit's Auto Industry (Contemporary Urban Affairs #5)
by Susan Turner MeiklejohnFirst Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
by Thomas E. Ricks#1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world."Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America . . . Riveting." —Charles Kaiser, The Guardian In Waging a Good War, bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to note the surprising affinities between that ethos and the organized pursuit of success at war. The greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century, he stresses, were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization—the hallmarks of any successful military campaign. An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the movement’s triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance – involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement’s adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool—the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America’s civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change—and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.
Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948-2003 - Updated and Revised Edition
by Itamar RabinovichConsiderably expanded to include the impact of the 2003 war in Iraq and its aftermath, this new edition of Waging Peace provides a unique insight into the critical debate on the future of peace in the Middle East. A former chief negotiator for Israel, noted scholar-diplomat Itamar Rabinovich examines the complete history of Arab-Israeli relations beginning in 1948. He then gives a vivid account of the peace processes of 1992-1996 and the more dispiriting record since then. His updated analysis on Iraq, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon--and on the expanding role of the United States in the Middle East--sheds new light on the long and tumultuous history between Arabs and Jews. As Rabinovich brings the conflict into this century, he widens the scope of his proposals for achieving normalized and peaceful Arab-Israeli relations. While he considers the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians--a classic dispute between two national movements claiming the same land--Rabinovich also studies the broader political, cultural, and increasingly religious conflict between Israel and Arab nationalism and discusses the region in an international context. Rabinovich's firsthand experiences as a negotiator and an ambassador provide an extraordinary perspective on the major players involved. The result is a shrewd assessment of the past and current state of affairs, as well as a hopeful look at the possibilities for a peaceful future.
Waging War: The Clash Between Presidents and Congress, 1776 to ISIS
by David J. Barron"A first-rate history filled with revealing incidents and informed analysis." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A timely account of a raging debate: The history of the ongoing struggle between the presidents and Congress over who has the power to declare and wage war.The Constitution states that it is Congress that declares war, but it is the presidents who have more often taken us to war and decided how to wage it. In Waging War, David J. Barron opens with an account of George Washington and the Continental Congress over Washington's plan to burn New York City before the British invasion. Congress ordered him not to, and he obeyed. Barron takes us through all the wars that followed: 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American war, World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now, most spectacularly, the War on Terror. Congress has criticized George W. Bush for being too aggressive and Barack Obama for not being aggressive enough, but it avoids a vote on the matter. By recounting how our presidents have declared and waged wars, Barron shows that these executives have had to get their way without openly defying Congress. Waging War shows us our country's revered and colorful presidents at their most trying times--Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Johnson, both Bushes, and Obama. Their wars have made heroes of some and victims of others, but most have proved adept at getting their way over reluctant or hostile Congresses. The next president will face this challenge immediately--and the Constitution and its fragile system of checks and balances will once again be at the forefront of the national debate.
Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence
by Patricia A. WeitsmanMilitary alliances provide constraints and opportunities for states seeking to advance their interests around the globe. War, from the Western perspective, is not a solitary endeavor. Partnerships of all types serve as a foundation for the projection of power and the employment of force. These relationships among states provide the foundation upon which hegemony is built. Waging War argues that these institutions of interstate violence—not just the technology, capability, and level of professionalism and training of armed forces—serve as ready mechanisms to employ force. However, these institutions are not always well designed, and do not always augment fighting effectiveness as they could. They sometimes serve as drags on state capacity. At the same time, the net benefit of having this web of partnerships, agreements, and alliances is remarkable. It makes rapid response to crisis possible, and facilitates countering threats wherever they emerge. This book lays out which institutional arrangements lubricate states' abilities to advance their agendas and prevail in wartime, and which components of institutional arrangements undermine effectiveness and cohesion, and increase costs to states. Patricia Weitsman outlines what she calls a realist institutionalist agenda: one that understands institutions as conduits of capability. She demonstrates and tests the argument in five empirical chapters, examining the cases of the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Each case has distinct lessons as well as important generalizations for contemporary multilateral warfighting.
Waging War On Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws and Documents
by Brian R. Dirck Charles L. ZeldenLegal analysis of problems associated with the waging of war by this Nation.
Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature
by Giorgio MarianiThe notion that war plays a fundamental role in the United States' idea of itself obscures the rich--and by no means naïve--seam of anti-war thinking that winds through American culture. Non-violent resistance, far from being a philosophy of passive dreamers, instead embodies Ralph Waldo Emerson's belief that peace "can never be defended, never be executed, by cowards." Giorgio Mariani rigorously engages with the essential question of what makes a text explicitly anti-war. Ranging from Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, Waging War on War explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war text's formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. Mariani moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. warmaking and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, he shows how the ideal of nonviolence and a dislike of war have been significant, if nonhegemonic, features of American culture since the nation's early days. Ambitious and nuanced, Waging War on War at last defines anti-war literature while exploring the genre's role in an assertive peacefighting project that offered--and still offers--alternatives to violence.
Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
by Aaron RapportAs the U.S. experience in Iraq following the 2003 invasion made abundantly clear, failure to properly plan for risks associated with postconflict stabilization and reconstruction can have a devastating impact on the overall success of a military mission. In Waging War, Planning Peace, Aaron Rapport investigates how U.S. presidents and their senior advisers have managed vital noncombat activities while the nation is in the midst of fighting or preparing to fight major wars. He argues that research from psychology--specifically, construal level theory--can help explain how individuals reason about the costs of postconflict noncombat operations that they perceive as lying in the distant future. In addition to preparations for "Phase IV" in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Rapport looks at the occupation of Germany after World War II, the planned occupation of North Korea in 1950, and noncombat operations in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. Applying his insights to these cases, he finds that civilian and military planners tend to think about near-term tasks in concrete terms, seriously assessing the feasibility of the means they plan to employ to secure valued ends. For tasks they perceive as further removed in time, they tend to focus more on the desirability of the overarching goals they are pursuing rather than the potential costs, risks, and challenges associated with the means necessary to achieve these goals. Construal level theory, Rapport contends, provides a coherent explanation of how a strategic disconnect can occur. It can also show postwar planners how to avoid such perilous missteps.
Wagnerism: Art And Politics In The Shadow Of Music
by Alex RossFor better or worse, Richard Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt the composer's impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, charlatans, and prophets does battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first-century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. ALEX ROSS has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His second book, the essay collection Listen to This, received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
The Wagon and Other Stories from the City
by Martin PreibMartin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department--a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Over the course of countless hours driving the wagon through the city streets, claiming corpses and taking them to the morgue, arresting drunks and criminals and hauling them to jail, Preib took pen to paper to record his experiences. Inspired by Preib's daily life as a policeman, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself. The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges an unlikely connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten--or rendered invisible--by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, such as a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend or a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. As he encounters the real and imagined geographies of Chicago, the city reveals itself to be not just a backdrop, but a central force in his narrative of life and death. Preib's accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, range from noir-like reports of police work to streetwise meditations on life and darkly humorous accounts of other jobs in the city's service industry. Here, Preib's universe of police officers, criminals, and victims--and everyone in between--comes alive in ways that readers will long remember.
The Wahhabi Code: How the Saudis Spread Extremism Globally
by Terence WardAn Eye-Opening, Concise Look at the Source of the Current Wave of Terrorism, How it Spread, and Why the West Did Nothing Lifting the mask of international terrorism, Terence Ward reveals a sinister truth. Far from being “the West’s ally in the War on Terror,” Saudi Arabia is in reality the largest exporter of Wahhabism—the severe, ultra-conservative sect of Islam that is both Saudi Arabia’s official religion and the core ideology for international terror groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Boko Haram. Over decades, the Saudi regime has engaged in a well-crafted mission to fund charities, mosques, and schools that promote their Wahhabi doctrine across the Middle East and beyond. Efforts to expand Saudi influence have now been focused on European cities as well. The front lines of the War of Terror aren’t a world away; they are much closer than we can imagine. Terence Ward, who has spent much of his life in the Middle East, gives his unique insight into the culture of extremism, its rapid expansion, and how it can be stopped.
Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement
by Cole M. BunzelAn essential history of Wahhābism from its founding to the Islamic StateIn the mid-eighteenth century, a controversial Islamic movement arose in the central Arabian region of Najd that forever changed the political landscape of the Arabian Peninsula and the history of Islamic thought. Its founder, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, taught that most professed Muslims were polytheists due to their veneration of Islamic saints at tombs and gravesites. He preached that true Muslims, those who worship God alone, must show hatred and enmity toward these polytheists and fight them in jihād. Cole Bunzel tells the story of Wahhābism from its emergence in the 1740s to its taming and coopting by the modern Saudi state in the 1920s, and shows how its legacy endures in the ideologies of al-Qāʿida and the Islamic State.Drawing on a wealth of primary source materials, Bunzel traces the origins of Wahhābī doctrine to the religious thought of medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya and examines its development through several generations of Wahhābī scholars. While widely seen as heretical and schismatic, the movement nonetheless flourished in central Arabia, spreading across the peninsula under the political authority of the Āl Suʿūd dynasty until the invading Egyptian army crushed it in 1818. The militant Wahhābī ethos, however, persisted well into the early twentieth century, when the Saudi kingdom used Wahhābism to bolster its legitimacy.This incisive history is the definitive account of a militant Islamic movement founded on enmity toward non-Wahhābī Muslims and that is still with us today in the violent doctrines of Sunni jihādīs.