Abdelwahab El‐affendi
Biographic Data
| ID | 4051380 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Abdelwahab El‐affendi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Abdelwahab |
| FAMILY NAME | El‐affendi |
| SIGNATURE | EL AFFENDI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Westminster |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9413-2244 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza
A major question raised by the ongoing, largely one-sided, confrontation in Gaza is that of the so-called “subaltern genocide”: Can marginalized and occupied minorities and peoples perpetrate genocide against their oppressors and/or occupiers? Many scholars argue that genocide is almost exclusively perpetrated by states. Yet powerful state-like or state-backed minorities can and have committed genocides, especially in colonial settings, where min…
Emergent Edge Modes in Shifted Quasi-One-Dimensional Charge Density Waves
We propose and study a two-dimensional phase of shifted charge density waves (CDW), which is constructed from an array of weakly coupled 1D CDW wires whose phases shift from one wire to the next. We show that the fully gapped bulk CDW has topological properties, characterized by a nonzero Chern number, that imply edge modes within the bulk gap. Remarkably, these edge modes exhibit spectral pseudoflow as a function of position along the edge, and …
The Ultimate Post-Islamist: Ziauddin Sardar’s Cultural Surfing Through Our Epoch
Ziauddin Sardar has had a uniquely rich life experience, and an equally unique ability to share it. In both geographical and historical terms, few individuals have had the opportunity to witness so many great transformations, from an insider vantage point. The focus of this paper is his transition through the transformations of modern Islamic activism, a process with far-reaching consequences, and he was in the thick of it all. One issue highligh…
After the Arab Revolutions: Decentring Democratic Transition Theory
Incorporates the lessons learned from the 2011 Arab revolutions into democratic transition theory Radically reclaims and reformulates democratic transition theory, taking the Middle East and not the West as its focal point Argues that recent Arab transitions are central to our understanding of the dynamics of democratisation, even in advanced democracies Features contributions from prominent authors and intellectuals such as Azmi Bishara, Hamid D…
Political Islam and Democracy in the Muslim World By Paul Kubicek
This book examine the perennial question of Islam and democracy from an interesting angle. It focuses on seven (exclusively non-Arab) case studies of relatively successful democracies in Muslim-majority countries. The objective is to uncover ‘relationships between political manifestations of Islam and competitive, democratic politics and [to explain] how interpretations more amenable to democracy can take root’. The author also seeks ‘to determin…
Abducting Modernity: Boko Haram, Gender Violence and the Marketplace of Bigotry
The abduction in April 2014 of hundreds of Nigerian of schoolgirls by the extremist movement Boko Haram has raised many deep questions about the nature of this decade old insurgency and international reactions to it. This paper asks to what extent the resort by this movement to gender violence represents an escalation in its tactics? And to what extent is this type of violence context-specific? It argues that we have to recognize that this moveme…
Arab Spring, Islamist Ice Age: Islamism, Democracy, and the Dictatorship of the “Liberalism of Fear” in the Era of Revolutions
Between June 30th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Islamist military takeover in Sudan, and July 4th, Independence Day in the United States, something miraculous happened in the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in agreement, and – almost – everyone was happy. President Bashar al-Assad was ecstatic. In an interview with the Baath Party’s newspaper Al-Thawra shortly after the army deposed Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first-ever freely elected civ…
The Souls of Muslim Folk: The “Obama Phenomenon” and the Paradoxes of Paranoid anti-Multiculturalism
The current debate on the vices of multiculturalism and the merits of integration, of problematizing cultural difference, appears to miss important lessons from recent history in the treatment of minorities. In this paper, I start by questioning the celebration of Barack Obama’s election as a “breakthrough” for multicultural inclusiveness. I argue that the “Obama phenomenon” highlights the limits of democratic inclusiveness and sheds light on the…
The Souls of Muslim Folk: The “Obama Phenomenon” and the Paradoxes of Paranoid anti-Multiculturalism
The current debate on the vices of multiculturalism and the merits of integration, of problematizing cultural difference, appears to miss important lessons from recent history in the treatment of minorities. In this paper, I start by questioning the celebration of Barack Obama’s election as a “breakthrough” for multicultural inclusiveness. I argue that the “Obama phenomenon” highlights the limits of democratic inclusiveness and sheds light on the…
Revolutionary anatomy: The lessons of the Sudanese revolutions of October 1964 and April 1985
In spite of the numerous challenges it faces (including a traumatic split), Sudan has not yet fallen to the domino effect of Arab revolutions. However, Sudan has not just one but two experiences from which to draw lessons about the conduct of successful peaceful popular revolutions against entrenched despots. In both instances the revolutions (in 1964 and 1985) came well ahead of similar waves of revolutionary fervour elsewhere, and they were ext…
Constituting Liberty, Healing the Nation: Revolutionary identity creation in the Arab world's delayed 1989
The amazing scenes that were beamed from Cairo's Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 conveyed an important revelation about the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the human spirit. In particular, they highlighted the miraculous power of joint public action not only to carve out spaces for freedom, but to forge a new shared identity which is indispensable for the establishment of a durable democratic order. No less significant, however, is th…
Creatively re-imagining a new Sudanese nation: Towards achieving conditional unity
Sudan is facing the most crucial challenge of its history with the referendum on unity in the South planned for January 2011. In this paper, the two authors attempt to assess the nature of the challenge, and explore possible scenarios and options for dealing with the decision and its aftermath. The central argument is that there is a need for a radical restructuring of the Sudanese state to enable and promote a sense of belonging and nationhood w…
Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror * By Mahmood Mamdani
The Perils of Regionalism: Regional Integration as a Source of Instability in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa, a region that has acquired notoriety as disaster and conflict-prone zone in the 1970s and 1980s, has become the site of a pioneering African experiment in regional cooperation in the early 1990s. In spite of a few successes, the experiment went disastrously wrong, creating more conflict than cooperation. This essay subjects the experiment to close analysis, concluding that the problem is a fundamental one, inherent in the proc…
The Umma and the Dawla: The Nation State and the Arab Middle East * By Tamim AL-BARGHOUTI
This is an interesting work in which al-Barghouti attempts to combine two incompatible narratives (from classical Orientalism and Dependency Theory) to offer an explanation of the current political crisis in the Middle East. In spite of some brilliant insights, the combination does not work overall. The starting point for al-Barghouti is the dual phenomenon of the failure of the modern Arab state and the proliferation of violent non-state actors …
The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights and Comparative Ethics: By Irene OH
The discussion about Islam and human rights has been going on for some time now, and it started long before the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). So what is a new book going to add to this long running debate? Irene Oh argues that her work aims to bring some cross-cultural dialogue into the picture. The author argues (correctly) that most of the contributions to the debate hitherto have come from Western scholars or liberal Musli…
Revolutionary Sudan: Has san al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000
Sudanese futures: One country or many
Conflict-prone Sudan is at a decisive cross-roads in its history as the multiple crises gripping the country force on the actors some stark choices. As the world focuses on the spiralling Darfur crisis and offers the wrong prescriptions for its resolution, the optimistically named Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended the war in the south threatens to unravel under the weight of the diverging agendas of the main peace partners. Unless s…
Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn * by Asef Bayat
Professor Asef Bayat first coined the term ‘post-Islamism’ in a 1996 essay to describe the nascent reform movement in Iran, and it caught on like wild fire. This was a sign that he had captured a signficant insight that many of those working in the field were struggling to articulate. In this book, he clarifies further what the phenomenon denotes. According to Bayat, post-Islamism refers both to a condition, signalling a phase in which ‘the appea…
Democracy and the Islamist Paradox
What Is Liberal Islam? The Elusive Reformation
While Islam as traditionally understood may not favor liberalism, the more “liberal” interpretations of Islam are not democracy friendly either, mainly because they lack wide popular support. The search for an “elusive” Islamic Reformation may not thus be right way to approach the democracy question. Even if such a “Reformation” were to materialize, it is likely to be divisive and disruptive in the short and medium terms. Meanwhile, the liberal m…
Islam and human Rights: The Lessons from Sudan
The Impasse in the Igad Peace Process for Sudan: The Limits of Regional Peacemaking
This article examines the progress (or rather, lack of it) of the initiative launched in 1993 by the Intergovernmental Authority for Drought and Development (IGADD) to achieve peace in Sudan. The initiative is seen as a model for regional co‐operation in Africa and has received a high level of international support. However, it has yet to achieve success in spite of running as a high‐profile mediation effort for more than seven years. The article…
Islam and the future of dissent after the `end of history
Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan By Abdelwahab El-Affendi. Turabi's Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan. London: Grey Seal, 1991, 208pp
The establishment of a new political system and social order as a resultof a conscious Islamization effort is an important event in contemporary worldhistory. The Islamic revolution in Iran and the establishment of an Islamicrepublic in that country in 1979 was such a landmark event. A developmentwhich may have a similar significance for the 1990s is the emergence of a formalsocial and political Islamization effort in Sudan following the revoluti…
What Is Liberal Islam? The Elusive Reformation
While Islam as traditionally understood may not favor liberalism, the more “liberal” interpretations of Islam are not democracy friendly either, mainly because they lack wide popular support. The search for an “elusive” Islamic Reformation may not thus be right way to approach the democracy question. Even if such a “Reformation” were to materialize, it is likely to be divisive and disruptive in the short and medium terms. Meanwhile, the liberal m…
Discovering the South: Sudanese Dilemmas for Islam in Africa
Journal Article ‘DISCOVERING THE SOUTH’: SUDANESE DILEMMAS FOR ISLAM IN AFRICA Get access ABDEL WAHAB EL-AFFENDI ABDEL WAHAB EL-AFFENDI The author was a graduate student at the University of Reading and is currently doing research at St. Antony's College Oxford. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 89, Issue 356, July 1990, Pages 371–389, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098…
Revolutionary anatomy: The lessons of the Sudanese revolutions of October 1964 and April 1985
In spite of the numerous challenges it faces (including a traumatic split), Sudan has not yet fallen to the domino effect of Arab revolutions. However, Sudan has not just one but two experiences from which to draw lessons about the conduct of successful peaceful popular revolutions against entrenched despots. In both instances the revolutions (in 1964 and 1985) came well ahead of similar waves of revolutionary fervour elsewhere, and they were ext…
The Perils of Regionalism: Regional Integration as a Source of Instability in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa, a region that has acquired notoriety as disaster and conflict-prone zone in the 1970s and 1980s, has become the site of a pioneering African experiment in regional cooperation in the early 1990s. In spite of a few successes, the experiment went disastrously wrong, creating more conflict than cooperation. This essay subjects the experiment to close analysis, concluding that the problem is a fundamental one, inherent in the proc…
The Impasse in the Igad Peace Process for Sudan: The Limits of Regional Peacemaking
This article examines the progress (or rather, lack of it) of the initiative launched in 1993 by the Intergovernmental Authority for Drought and Development (IGADD) to achieve peace in Sudan. The initiative is seen as a model for regional co‐operation in Africa and has received a high level of international support. However, it has yet to achieve success in spite of running as a high‐profile mediation effort for more than seven years. The article…
Islam and the future of dissent after the `end of history
Studying My Movement: Social Science Without Cynicism
While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on Ikhwan in the Sudan, 1 a Sudanese colleague of mine working in a related area used to joke that we have all become “Orientalists.” There was a certain sense of irony—and truth—in this “accusation.” Our endeavor was either the negation and supersession of Orientalism, or its final triumph. For here we are, fiery Islamic militants, squatting meekly and dutifully at the feet of our Orientalist sheikhs, hopin…
Abducting Modernity: Boko Haram, Gender Violence and the Marketplace of Bigotry
The abduction in April 2014 of hundreds of Nigerian of schoolgirls by the extremist movement Boko Haram has raised many deep questions about the nature of this decade old insurgency and international reactions to it. This paper asks to what extent the resort by this movement to gender violence represents an escalation in its tactics? And to what extent is this type of violence context-specific? It argues that we have to recognize that this moveme…
The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza
A major question raised by the ongoing, largely one-sided, confrontation in Gaza is that of the so-called “subaltern genocide”: Can marginalized and occupied minorities and peoples perpetrate genocide against their oppressors and/or occupiers? Many scholars argue that genocide is almost exclusively perpetrated by states. Yet powerful state-like or state-backed minorities can and have committed genocides, especially in colonial settings, where min…
Arab Spring, Islamist Ice Age: Islamism, Democracy, and the Dictatorship of the “Liberalism of Fear” in the Era of Revolutions
Between June 30th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Islamist military takeover in Sudan, and July 4th, Independence Day in the United States, something miraculous happened in the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in agreement, and – almost – everyone was happy. President Bashar al-Assad was ecstatic. In an interview with the Baath Party’s newspaper Al-Thawra shortly after the army deposed Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first-ever freely elected civ…
Sudanese futures: One country or many
Conflict-prone Sudan is at a decisive cross-roads in its history as the multiple crises gripping the country force on the actors some stark choices. As the world focuses on the spiralling Darfur crisis and offers the wrong prescriptions for its resolution, the optimistically named Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended the war in the south threatens to unravel under the weight of the diverging agendas of the main peace partners. Unless s…
Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan By Abdelwahab El-Affendi. Turabi's Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan. London: Grey Seal, 1991, 208pp
The establishment of a new political system and social order as a resultof a conscious Islamization effort is an important event in contemporary worldhistory. The Islamic revolution in Iran and the establishment of an Islamicrepublic in that country in 1979 was such a landmark event. A developmentwhich may have a similar significance for the 1990s is the emergence of a formalsocial and political Islamization effort in Sudan following the revoluti…
The long march from Lahore to Khartoum: Beyond the ‘Muslim reformation’
If one were to search for the defining characteristic of the modern Islamist movement, one would most probably find it in its acceptance (and, in some sense, its embodiment) of man's estrangement from God. Since Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), widely regarded as the forerunner of modern Islamic activism, the concerns of modern Islamic revival movements appear to have become decidedly this-worldly. Past religious movements did not see materia…
Discovering the South: Sudanese Dilemmas for Islam in Africa
Journal Article ‘DISCOVERING THE SOUTH’: SUDANESE DILEMMAS FOR ISLAM IN AFRICA Get access ABDEL WAHAB EL-AFFENDI ABDEL WAHAB EL-AFFENDI The author was a graduate student at the University of Reading and is currently doing research at St. Antony's College Oxford. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 89, Issue 356, July 1990, Pages 371–389, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098…
Studying My Movement: Social Science Without Cynicism
While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on Ikhwan in the Sudan, 1 a Sudanese colleague of mine working in a related area used to joke that we have all become “Orientalists.” There was a certain sense of irony—and truth—in this “accusation.” Our endeavor was either the negation and supersession of Orientalism, or its final triumph. For here we are, fiery Islamic militants, squatting meekly and dutifully at the feet of our Orientalist sheikhs, hopin…
Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan By Abdelwahab El-Affendi. Turabi's Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan. London: Grey Seal, 1991, 208pp
The establishment of a new political system and social order as a resultof a conscious Islamization effort is an important event in contemporary worldhistory. The Islamic revolution in Iran and the establishment of an Islamicrepublic in that country in 1979 was such a landmark event. A developmentwhich may have a similar significance for the 1990s is the emergence of a formalsocial and political Islamization effort in Sudan following the revoluti…
Islam and the future of dissent after the `end of history
Islam and human Rights: The Lessons from Sudan
The Impasse in the Igad Peace Process for Sudan: The Limits of Regional Peacemaking
This article examines the progress (or rather, lack of it) of the initiative launched in 1993 by the Intergovernmental Authority for Drought and Development (IGADD) to achieve peace in Sudan. The initiative is seen as a model for regional co‐operation in Africa and has received a high level of international support. However, it has yet to achieve success in spite of running as a high‐profile mediation effort for more than seven years. The article…
Democracy and the Islamist Paradox
What Is Liberal Islam? The Elusive Reformation
While Islam as traditionally understood may not favor liberalism, the more “liberal” interpretations of Islam are not democracy friendly either, mainly because they lack wide popular support. The search for an “elusive” Islamic Reformation may not thus be right way to approach the democracy question. Even if such a “Reformation” were to materialize, it is likely to be divisive and disruptive in the short and medium terms. Meanwhile, the liberal m…
Sudanese futures: One country or many
Conflict-prone Sudan is at a decisive cross-roads in its history as the multiple crises gripping the country force on the actors some stark choices. As the world focuses on the spiralling Darfur crisis and offers the wrong prescriptions for its resolution, the optimistically named Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended the war in the south threatens to unravel under the weight of the diverging agendas of the main peace partners. Unless s…
Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn * by Asef Bayat
Professor Asef Bayat first coined the term ‘post-Islamism’ in a 1996 essay to describe the nascent reform movement in Iran, and it caught on like wild fire. This was a sign that he had captured a signficant insight that many of those working in the field were struggling to articulate. In this book, he clarifies further what the phenomenon denotes. According to Bayat, post-Islamism refers both to a condition, signalling a phase in which ‘the appea…
The Perils of Regionalism: Regional Integration as a Source of Instability in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa, a region that has acquired notoriety as disaster and conflict-prone zone in the 1970s and 1980s, has become the site of a pioneering African experiment in regional cooperation in the early 1990s. In spite of a few successes, the experiment went disastrously wrong, creating more conflict than cooperation. This essay subjects the experiment to close analysis, concluding that the problem is a fundamental one, inherent in the proc…
The Umma and the Dawla: The Nation State and the Arab Middle East * By Tamim AL-BARGHOUTI
This is an interesting work in which al-Barghouti attempts to combine two incompatible narratives (from classical Orientalism and Dependency Theory) to offer an explanation of the current political crisis in the Middle East. In spite of some brilliant insights, the combination does not work overall. The starting point for al-Barghouti is the dual phenomenon of the failure of the modern Arab state and the proliferation of violent non-state actors …
The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights and Comparative Ethics: By Irene OH
The discussion about Islam and human rights has been going on for some time now, and it started long before the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). So what is a new book going to add to this long running debate? Irene Oh argues that her work aims to bring some cross-cultural dialogue into the picture. The author argues (correctly) that most of the contributions to the debate hitherto have come from Western scholars or liberal Musli…
Revolutionary Sudan: Has san al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000
Creatively re-imagining a new Sudanese nation: Towards achieving conditional unity
Sudan is facing the most crucial challenge of its history with the referendum on unity in the South planned for January 2011. In this paper, the two authors attempt to assess the nature of the challenge, and explore possible scenarios and options for dealing with the decision and its aftermath. The central argument is that there is a need for a radical restructuring of the Sudanese state to enable and promote a sense of belonging and nationhood w…
Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror * By Mahmood Mamdani
Constituting Liberty, Healing the Nation: Revolutionary identity creation in the Arab world's delayed 1989
The amazing scenes that were beamed from Cairo's Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 conveyed an important revelation about the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the human spirit. In particular, they highlighted the miraculous power of joint public action not only to carve out spaces for freedom, but to forge a new shared identity which is indispensable for the establishment of a durable democratic order. No less significant, however, is th…
The Souls of Muslim Folk: The “Obama Phenomenon” and the Paradoxes of Paranoid anti-Multiculturalism
The current debate on the vices of multiculturalism and the merits of integration, of problematizing cultural difference, appears to miss important lessons from recent history in the treatment of minorities. In this paper, I start by questioning the celebration of Barack Obama’s election as a “breakthrough” for multicultural inclusiveness. I argue that the “Obama phenomenon” highlights the limits of democratic inclusiveness and sheds light on the…
The Souls of Muslim Folk: The “Obama Phenomenon” and the Paradoxes of Paranoid anti-Multiculturalism
The current debate on the vices of multiculturalism and the merits of integration, of problematizing cultural difference, appears to miss important lessons from recent history in the treatment of minorities. In this paper, I start by questioning the celebration of Barack Obama’s election as a “breakthrough” for multicultural inclusiveness. I argue that the “Obama phenomenon” highlights the limits of democratic inclusiveness and sheds light on the…
Revolutionary anatomy: The lessons of the Sudanese revolutions of October 1964 and April 1985
In spite of the numerous challenges it faces (including a traumatic split), Sudan has not yet fallen to the domino effect of Arab revolutions. However, Sudan has not just one but two experiences from which to draw lessons about the conduct of successful peaceful popular revolutions against entrenched despots. In both instances the revolutions (in 1964 and 1985) came well ahead of similar waves of revolutionary fervour elsewhere, and they were ext…
Arab Spring, Islamist Ice Age: Islamism, Democracy, and the Dictatorship of the “Liberalism of Fear” in the Era of Revolutions
Between June 30th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Islamist military takeover in Sudan, and July 4th, Independence Day in the United States, something miraculous happened in the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in agreement, and – almost – everyone was happy. President Bashar al-Assad was ecstatic. In an interview with the Baath Party’s newspaper Al-Thawra shortly after the army deposed Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first-ever freely elected civ…
Abducting Modernity: Boko Haram, Gender Violence and the Marketplace of Bigotry
The abduction in April 2014 of hundreds of Nigerian of schoolgirls by the extremist movement Boko Haram has raised many deep questions about the nature of this decade old insurgency and international reactions to it. This paper asks to what extent the resort by this movement to gender violence represents an escalation in its tactics? And to what extent is this type of violence context-specific? It argues that we have to recognize that this moveme…
Political Islam and Democracy in the Muslim World By Paul Kubicek
This book examine the perennial question of Islam and democracy from an interesting angle. It focuses on seven (exclusively non-Arab) case studies of relatively successful democracies in Muslim-majority countries. The objective is to uncover ‘relationships between political manifestations of Islam and competitive, democratic politics and [to explain] how interpretations more amenable to democracy can take root’. The author also seeks ‘to determin…
After the Arab Revolutions: Decentring Democratic Transition Theory
Incorporates the lessons learned from the 2011 Arab revolutions into democratic transition theory Radically reclaims and reformulates democratic transition theory, taking the Middle East and not the West as its focal point Argues that recent Arab transitions are central to our understanding of the dynamics of democratisation, even in advanced democracies Features contributions from prominent authors and intellectuals such as Azmi Bishara, Hamid D…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Islam (12 works) · Democracy (10 works) · History (10 works) · Islamic Studies and History (10 works)