Islam in a Globalizing World by Thomas Simons, Jr.

i was surprised to find out, after seeing how poorly written this book was, that it was written by a former US ambassador with a PhD. This book is very short and really offers nothing new besides a very superficial comparison of Islamists with 19th ce Russian revolutionaries.

here are some notes:
15-Simons: during Islam's first 1000 years it was at the forefront of globalization

24-because of the strength of Western modernity, all responses to it (3: accept, adapt, resist) were all "modern" responses (even when the actors themselves denied it) because they addressed modern issues and used modern means to address them

26-the 3 responses all had a western correlate
a) accept/top down modernizers/puppet leaders--euro liberals
b) adapt/landowners/professionals who adapted islam to modern ideas--euro nationalists
c)resist/ religious radicals--euro social revolutionaries

40-primarily uses Richards and Waterbury's analysis of how education and unemployment created Islamists *which is a very superficial analysis. so Simons obviously didn't get into accuracy he could have by using Roy

41-42-Russia had similar circumstances from 1870 to 1917
rapid industrialization due primarily to primary goods (coal, tho russia wasn't as dependent on it as ME is on oil), urbanization (tho russia didn't stop agriculture the way the ME did), population boom, and huge increase in number of ppl educated--which lead to socialist revolutions

52-khomeni used cassette tapes to spread his msg during exile