This is the first English translation of this controversial essay that challenged fundamental ideas about political power. Egypt, 1925: the Muslim world is in turmoil over Mustapha Kamal Ataturk's proposal to abolish the caliphate in Turkey. The debate over Islam and politics re-ignites as traditional political systems dissolve under pressure from European powers and most Muslim countries lose their sovereignty.

Into this debate enters Ali Abdel Razek, a religious cleric trained at Al-Azhar U...

What exactly are words? Are they the things that get listed in dictionaries, or are they the basic units of sentence structure? Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy explores the implications of these different approaches to words in English.