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Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths From antiquity To Islam
[Hardback - 2012]
william f. mccants
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Category: History
Sub-category: Islamic History
Publisher: Princeton University Press | ISBN: 9780691151489 | Pages: 194
Shipping Weight: .397 | Dimensions: 0

Description

From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, William McCants looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire.The Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture that competed with that of native elites. The conquering Arabs, in contrast, had no learned culture, which led to three hundred years of Muslim competition over the cultural orientation of Islam, a contest reflected in the culture myths of that time. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of this contest, whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity.McCants argues that authors in all three periods did not write about civilization's origins solely out of pure antiquarian interest--they also sought to address the social and political tensions of the day. The strategies they employed and the postcolonial dilemmas they confronted provide invaluable context for understanding how authors today use myth and history to locate themselves in the confusing aftermath of empire.

About the Author

William McCants is a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He is also adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and has held various government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism.From 2009 to 2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He has also held positions as program manager of the Minerva Initiative for the Department of Defense; an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses and SAIC; and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.He is the founder of Jihadica.com, an academic group blog focused on the global jihadi movement. The blog has been featured on the cover of The New York Times, and described by Wired magazine’s Danger Room as “the gold standard in militant studies.” In 2011 and 2012, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its FP's Top 100 "Twitterati.”McCants is the author of numerous articles on Islamist politics and terrorism, including the headlining article of Foreign Affairs’ 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Edition. He also edited the Militant Ideology Atlas, which identified the key ideologues in the global jihadi movement, and also translated, from Arabic into English, a book written by an al-Qaida strategist. Much of his current writing is devoted to Salafi parliamentary politics in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.His book,Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam(Princeton University Press, 2011), traces the history of cultural debate in the Middle East after the Greeks, Romans and Arabs conquered the region. He is also working on a book about the scriptural history of the Quran.McCants has a doctorate from Princeton University and has lived in Israel, Egypt, and Lebanon.

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