Freedom and Orthodoxy

Abstract

Freedom and Orthodoxy is a brilliant apology for dismantling the hegemonicand false pretensions of western universalisms in favor of a world inwhich local groups (e.g., religious communities, regions, and nations) areallowed to construe their own strategies for cultural, political, and economicflourishing. A Moroccan intellectual teaching in the United States(chair of the Department of English, University of NewEngland) and a leadingyoung cultural critic who writes in a lucid and often elegant Englishprose,AnouarMajid’s French cultural background also shines through, judgingby his abundant use of French sources (though not one in Arabic).Building on his previous book, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islamin a Polycentric World (Duke University Press: 2000), Majid expands anddeepens his historical and philosophical analysis, exhorts both Muslims andwesterners to search their souls, remove the roots of their own cherished certaintiesthat exclude the Other (i.e., fundamentalisms), and engage in the pathof creative dialog. Yet as the book unfolds, it turns out that over 90 percent ofthe material relates to the western universalisms born of the Renaissance andthe Enlightenment – ideals that, in fact, cannot be separated from the historicalrealities of the Reconquista, the Spanish conquest of Latin America, theAnglo-American colonization of North America, and the subsequent genocideof the native population. Even the revolutionary ideals of the Americanand French revolutions, however universal the reach of freedom and humanrights might have been in theory, came to be wedded to a capitalist ideologythat has, in the postcolonial era, become an economic and cultural steamroller,a globalization process that consolidates western hegemony andimposes its secular and consumerist values on the non-western world.Besides the already heavy toll in human suffering,Majid argues that fargreater clashes loom on the horizon if this scenario continues. This bringsus to the remaining 10 percent of his book: although Muslims must takeresponsibility for their own extremists and find ways to reinterpret the traditionalShari`ah in a polycentric world, nevertheless, contemporaryIslamic militancy should be seen as an offshoot of “the triumph of capitalismand its ongoing legacy of conquest” (pp. 213-14). Hence, most of thebook unveils what he has coined “the post-Andalusian paradigm,” or the ...