A Fundamental Fear

Abstract

A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism usescritical theory to examine the Islamists’ political projects and their depictions.Scholars are divided between those who believe in a religious ornational essence to the Muslim community (essentialists) and those whoreject this assumption (anti-essentialists). In regards to a Muslim essence,Sayyid identifies two existing scholarly camps: Orientalists assume an ahistorical,acontextual Islamic essence that drives and shapes Muslim societyand activity through most places and ages. Anti-Orientalists, as manifestedin such writers as Hamid El-Zien, assert that there is not one “Islam,” butonly many “Islams.” According to this view, Islam and indeed all religion cannot exist as an analytic category having a self-sustaining, positive, fixing,universal, and autonomous content; rather, religion is only manifestedthrough particular contexts.While acknowledging an intellectual debt to Edward Said, whose critiquesfed the anti-Orientalist camp, Sayyid argues for a middle pathbetween Orientalist and anti-Orientalist understandings. Orientalists claimthat the relationship between Islam and Islamism is direct, whereas anti-Orientalists claim that the relationship is merely opportunistic – Islam iswhat Marxists might call “superstructural” (a surface action over deeper,more real material contests) and is driven by a false consciousness.Picking theoretical fruit from writers who explored signs, ideas, andlanguage, among them Slavoj Zizek, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan,the author asks Zizek’s general question: “What creates and sustains theidentity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its ideologicalcontent?” (p. 44). Analysts typically find themselves unable toanswer this question without reasserting a new Orientalism. Sayyid assertsthat despite the malleability of Islamic symbols and Islamist programs,Islam has retained its specificity, a term by which he means the traces of itsoriginal meaning articulated at the foundation, traces that have beeninvoked repeatedly. Islam is a crucial nodal point, à la Jacques Lacan, retrospectivelygiving meaning to other elements, be they Sufi discussions,debates on fiqh, or other discourses (p. 45) ...