Radicalism and political reform in the Islamic and Western worlds

Abstract

Kai Hafez. Radicalism and Political Reform in the Islamic and Western Worlds Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 320 pages. Paperback $30.99In the West, misreading Islam is the norm. In fact, academics and journalists thrive on pillorying Muslims. Popular culture is only marginally worse. Illiteracy and chauvinism drive this habit. It enables Westerners to locate and assert their superiority. Even Pope Benedict XVI succumbed to it. In a university lecture in 2006, he slyly damned Islam as violent and irrational. He was silent on the destruction of a major state (Iraq) by Bush and Blair. Indeed, he oversaw Blair's conversion to Catholicism after the war. Since 9/11, killing Muslims and invading Muslim nations has been the new normal. Obama's military incursions and drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are exemplary instances. The Western projects evince a passion to eviscerate Islam and erase Muslims. It is misguided to call this Islamophobia since fear is not the problem. What we are privy to here is the foreign policy of Mus limicide, the commitment to gutting and superseding the faith of Islam. It is no accident that Muslim cultures and peoples are under attack.In a series of superb apercus and incisive analysis, Kai Hafez offers a massive corrective to this incessant, illiterate and racist white noise. He tackles the anti-Islam philippics which drive Western and thus global discourse on Muslims. A German-bom professor of Media and Communication studies at the University of Erfurt, he is very well versed in Islam, political theory and social science. Hafez lucidly critiques the fallacies of the Western discourse on Islam and Muslim. His principal thematic foci are modernity, democracy and political violence. On this canvas, he comparatively lists the successes and limitations of Islam and the West. In particular, Hafez methodically exposes the illiteracy about Islamism, fundamentalism and political Islam, evident in Western scholarship and journalism.That fact is that anti-modernism is alien to Islam. So is the claim that secularism is un-Muslim. In fact, Western modernity was structured on the Islamic reconciliation of faith and reason. The intimate relationship between Arab and Western traditions of thought (17) was the achievement of the Arab/ Iranian, Shiite/Sunni, philosophers of Islam: Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali. In Muslim history, furthermore, secularism has co-existed with the faith since the birth of Islam. As consultation and as equal access to rulers, the ideal of democracy was intrinsic to Islam prior to Western colonization. But it was never a commitment to liberal individualist ethic or possessive individualism. In Egypt and Iran, the democracy in place is non-liberal, communitarian; it is authentic democracy within the bounds of Islam. It will evolve and accommodate versions of liberal freedoms in time. Intervention by the West in Muslim affairs has undercut this possibility.As Hafez shows in detail,,fundamentalism comes in different forms with distinct cultural and political reform schemas. Liberal Islamic reformers want the kind of modernity and human rights congenial to the Muslim sensibility. Yet they neither reject Islam nor insist on absolute secular rights. They realize that pure secularism is not available in the West either. Conservative Islamic reformers like Tariq Ramadan prize community. They want Quranic law to be the benchmark moral code. Thus in the Islamic context, fundamentalism is neither rigid nor closed to scrutiny and amendment. In both Egypt and Iran, it has long challenged tyrannical mies and practice in the name of Islam. As Hafez notes, such ethical spiritual acumen is ill-understood in the West.In the Western mind, political Islam and Islamism function as medieval manifestations of pure evil, pure terror. …