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  • The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam
  • Amyn B. Sajoo
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, ed. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010. 337 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 sc.

Long before the events of September 11, 2001, political Islam—or “Islamism”—had become a conspicuous part of public discourse in Muslim societies as well as in Europe and North America. Indeed, in the “clash of civilizations” thesis championed by Samuel Huntington in 1993-4, Islamism all but swallowed Islam as a faith tradition and civilization: both were deemed to be implacably opposed to the essential values of western liberalism. The conflation was rather handy, since few of the western protagonists in the debate (including Huntington) had access to most of the Islamist writings that they claimed spoke for Islam at large. And 9/11 seemed to provide the perfect vindication. Surely al-Qaeda and the Taliban were merely the more militant “representatives” of a generally radical Muslim world, including the likes of Saddam Hussein, and those troublesome Palestinians?

The “Arab Spring” of 2011 has neatly straddled those stances. Evidently, the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria stood for a rejection of a repressive generation of autocrats who had overstayed their welcome—with varying degrees of western military and economic support. Then came the wave of Islamist success in winning public favor, to the point of an electoral landslide in Egypt. Yet it also became obvious that the Islamism of Tunisia’s Nahda (Renaissance) party is hardly that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and that both are decidedly to the left of the Wahhabi strain in Saudi Arabia. What, then, do they have in common? Is Islamism inherently at odds with a rights-sensitive democratic life, and does its success signal an unavoidable clash with the West?

In a finely analytical introduction to this volume, Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’—Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta until his death in 2011—finds in Islamism primarily a response to the challenges of western political modernity. While 18th century Wahhabism is cast as “pre-modern” (xiv), Islamism and its movements came of age in the 20th century; the emphasis in this Reader is very much on “contemporary” expressions. Abu-Rabi’ firmly rejects the idea put forward by Olivier Roy in The Failure of Political Islam (1994) that the phenomenon is “dominated by a single paradigm: that of the first community of believers at the time of the Prophet and of the first four caliphs” (xx). This reduction not only fails to [End Page 287] account for the complexity of Islamist aspirations, and what Edward Said in Covering Islam (1981) noted were the “political actualities” that a “return to Islam” entails (ix). Those aspirations tend to focus around the centrality of the shari’a in public life, frequently as a template for State governance; but opinions about how this should work in practice are informed at least as much by socio-political context as by theology.

The 35 selections of writings here are intended to present a diversity of Arab Islamist voices “without mediation,” in contrast to the standard filtering by Orientalists and political commentators, often with no reference to the original sources. “The time has come to hear the complex Islamist arguments about history, education, politics, the New World Order, and the future of Islamism from the proponents themselves, so that we can begin to engage with these arguments and, from this foundation, concur or not with conclusions drawn” (viii). Abu-Rabi’ has organized the selections into six parts: conceptualization of the Islamist project; jihad and martyrdom in Islamist struggles; the place of Palestine/Israel in the project and its struggles; self-criticism within Islamism, notably in the 1980s; relations between the West and the Muslim world, especially post-9/11; and Islamism in specific Arab national settings today.

Some of the personalities and stances in this collection will be familiar to Western readers. Rashid al-Ghannoushi and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, both highly influential in the Middle East, are self-critical about Islamist movements and the tendency to extremism. The no less influential Muhammad al-Ghazali is scathing here about the...

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