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LACROIX, Stéphane. Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia. Translated by George Holoch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 373pp. Cloth, $29.95- Call it what you may, "The Islamic awakening," "al Sahwa al Islamiyya," or simply "Sahwa," the movement described by Stéphane Lacroix was absent from the Saudi Arabian landscape until it emerged in the 1990s. The Sahwa, Lacroix finds, must be regarded as a distinctive form of Islamism, a hybrid of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabi tradition. True, the Sahwa was preceded by other movements in the Middle East, notably by the Muslim Brotherhood that emerged in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood's founder, Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), created it as an organization to promote the estabüshment of an Islamic state that would be ruled by Shari'a. The movement grew rapidly and provided crucial support to the Egyptian revolution of July 1952, the one that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.
Lacroix's time frame work for this work begins with the late nineteenth century when Muslim reformism first began to appear, but he is primarily interested in the 1960s and the 1970s, a period that witnessed the development of a vast social movement advancing a modern form of Islam throughout the Middle East. His study of Islam is further narrowed to that which occurred in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s when an inteUectual class began to show hostility to both Sufism and popular Islam. By Lacroix's account, the inteUigentsia became open to Western modes of thinking in the 1970s largely...