Saudi Arabia And Ethiopia: Islam, Christianity, And Politics Entwined

Suggesting that the main civilizational confrontation in the world today is not Christian-Islamic but rather inter-Islamic, Erlich (Middle East and African history, Tel Aviv U., Israel) analyzes the dialectical interplay between formative religious legacies and concrete issues of international politics as it has played out in Saudi-Ethiopian relations from 1930 to 2005. He traces how the complex relationship between fundamentalist Wahhabi-ism and the Saudi state has influenced Saudi Arabia's shifting policy towards predominately Christian Ethiopia over the course of these 75 years, as well as the ongoing tension between imported Saudi Wahhabi-ism in Ethiopia and Ethiopia's local mildly orthodox Sufi Islam, which by the 1990s had becom a full-blown struggle over the very nature of Islam in Ethiopia and definitions of Ethiopian national identity. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)