Browse

Japan's triple disasters - earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown- on March 11 2011 took more than 18,400 lives and caused $235 billion in damage across the Tohoku region. This book tackles several pressing mysteries about the catastrophes, including how more than 96% of the residents of inundated areas survived despite 60-foot waves. Further, mortality rates varied tremendously from town to town in the region, with some communities losing one in ten residents to the disaster and others having no casualties. So too in the recovery process, rates of return and rebuilding have not moved in lockstep across Tohoku. Where some communities have rebounded and even gained population, others have lagged behind. Some observers have been content to explain the 3/11 crises and recovery in terms of culture. Moving beyond that narrow lens, Black Wave looks at multiple levels of recovery - individual, town, regional, national, and international - with a focus on connections and governance. Drawing on years of field work, extensive interviews, hundreds of surveys, and quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book illuminates the ways that social ties and the quality of political guidance and leadership influenced survival and recovery after one of the worst compounded disasters in memory.

For generations, both Islamic and Western intellectuals and policymakers have debated the prospects of Islam’s compatibility with democratic government, usually to few solid conclusions. Sadly, the voices of ordinary, working-class Muslims have been largely absent from these conversations, even as the fate of democracy across the Muslim world rests primarily in their hands. Muslims Talking Politics tells the story of one such community of Muslims in northern Nigeria, which has over the past 20 years witnessed a stunning return to democracy alongside both widespread popular agitation for the implementation of sharia (Islamic law) and the growing threat of radical religious terrorism. This book argues that despite Nigeria’s struggles with the jihadist insurgency Boko Haram, the story of Nigerian Islam is in fact one of tenuous and fragile reconciliation between mass democratic aspirations and concerted efforts to retain space for Islamic values in government and law. Muslims Talking Politics explores the co-evolution of popular Muslim attitudes and beliefs about sharia and democracy through careful historical analysis and the conversations, debates, and everyday experiences of Nigerian Muslims. Finally, it offers some tentative lessons for how democracy might consolidate alongside the legal recognition of Islamic values and institutions in public life.