Vient de paraître "Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa"

Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa
Edited by Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, Thomas Pierret, Edinburgh University Press, 344 p.

The first comprehensive overview of utopianism in the modern Middle East and North Africa:
- Studies utopian projects inspired by liberalism, nationalism, socialism, modernism, secularism, Islamic revivalism, urbanism, atomic energy, and artificial intelligence.
- Discusses cases from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia.
- Highlights both the transformative potential of utopias, and their role in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes.
- Brings together researchers from the fields of history, politics, anthropology, literature, art history, and urban studies.

This is the first systematic exploration of the diversity of utopian thought and practice in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Beyond intellectual debates, utopianism has infused the many ideologies that have shaped contentious politics and governance in the region, from state formation to revolutionary transformations, conflicts, and the recent authoritarian resurgence. Drawing on case studies from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, contributors address a broad array of utopian visions pertaining to political ideologies such as liberalism, secularism, Islamic revivalism, and socialism, but also to fields of expertise and technologies such as urbanism, the atom, and artificial intelligence. Likewise, they acknowledge the diversity of players that partake in the production of utopias, including writers, ideologues, activists, statesmen, experts, artists, and social media users. Moreover, authors consider both imaginaries promoted by challengers to the incumbents, and visions that serve the consolidation of authoritarianism.

Simon WOLFGANG FUCHS is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2015 and has since taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Frankfurt. Simon works on transnational connections between South Asia and the Middle East as well as on global Islam in the modern period. His last monograph In a Pure Muslim Land. Shi‘ism between Pakistan and the Middle East was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2019. He is currently working on a global history of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Thomas PIERRET is a Senior Researcher at Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France. He holds a PhD in Political science from Sciences Po Paris and the University of Louvain. He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (2011-2017) and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He focuses on politics and religion in modern Syria. He is the author of Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Islam in Post-Ottoman Syria (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as the editor of Ethnographies of Islam. Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

More information available on the publisher’s website