-It is a pleasure to commend this worthy study. Professor Israeli offers an exceptionally timely work that combines an international perspective of the global power configuration, while highlighting the role of Islam as a historical game-changer of sweeping proportions. Years of Upheaval, relevant and readable as ever, identifies multiple Islamic movements and personalities, from China to Nigeria and from Sweden to Israel, that compellingly demonstrate how radical Muslims have penetrated and disrupted the state of affairs in America, across Europe, Africa and Asia. This book meticulously tells the story of a triumphant Islam and a cowering West, as Muslims proselytize and terrorize their path to victory. It would not be a clichE to say that this book is a must read.- --Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "It is a pleasure to commend this worthy study. Professor Israeli offers an exceptionally timely work that combines an international perspective of the global power configuration, while highlighting the role of Islam as a historical game-changer of sweeping proportions. Years of Upheaval, relevant and readable as ever, identifies multiple Islamic movements and personalities, from China to Nigeria and from Sweden to Israel, that compellingly demonstrate how radical Muslims have penetrated and disrupted the state of affairs in America, across Europe, Africa and Asia. This book meticulously tells the story of a triumphant Islam and a cowering West, as Muslims proselytize and terrorize their path to victory. It would not be a clichE to say that this book is a must read." --Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "It is a pleasure to commend this worthy study. Professor Israeli offers an exceptionally timely work that combines an international perspective of the global power configuration, while highlighting the role of Islam as a historical game-changer of sweeping proportions. Years of Upheaval, relevant and readable as ever, identifies multiple Islamic movements and personalities, from China to Nigeria and from Sweden to Israel, that compellingly demonstrate how radical Muslims have penetrated and disrupted the state of affairs in America, across Europe, Africa and Asia. This book meticulously tells the story of a triumphant Islam and a cowering West, as Muslims proselytize and terrorize their path to victory. It would not be a clichE to say that this book is a must read." --Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Years of Upheaval discusses 'Axial periods' in history; years that witnessed such fundamental reversals in history as to make the world turn upside down and inaugurate a new era. Raphael Israeli sees the post-1989 period as such a period in Islam. He explores events in the Islamic world since the end of the 1980s, and during the 1990s and their aftermath, particularly following the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Rushdie Affair, and the death of Khumeini.
Israeli posits these events signalled a new age of Islamic violence and fundamentalism. The period has seen the dissipation of state borders and the rise of transnational and trans-territorial movements, such as ISIS, that have been extraordinarily attractive to young people in the Islamic world. The hopeful Arab Spring (2010-2013) has been replaced by a threatening Islamic winter.
A number of major events shook the Muslim world on both the Asian and the African continents as well as peripheral Islamic minorities in Australia, Canada, and Latin America. Among them were the Islamic Bomb and the rise of radical Islamic movements (notably Hamas and Hezbollah) and the rift between Sunnites and Shiites. These and other momentous events in the Islamic world occasioned the 'Arab Spring' and produced unrest in a wide swath of the Muslim world. Even more importantly, these were forming trends that are characterizing the decades thereafter.