Islam and Modernities (review)

Under review is the third edition of a work that has become somehow a classic, which comprises essays whose first versions were written by Aziz Al-Azmeh between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. As stated by the author, the essays are connected by the address to 'correlative phenomena which mirror each other' (xi), namely: political and social identitarianism, claims for post-modernism, and post-coloniality. The underlying claim, declared in the preface to the edition, is that 'events subsequent to these [first and second] editions have in many ways validated the analyses of cultural, social and political conditions and developments offered in this book' (xi).

The ambitions of the author in this book aim high. Since 'identitarian reclamations have become manifest on a far larger scale, and have become crucial for the workings and for the understanding of the present' (xi), the need of an objective and dispassionate historical analysis is compelling, and the basis for such an analysis is provided by Al-Azmeh's vigorous call for a return to historical and socio-economical awareness. The animated discussions around the book justified a third edition, to which two more essays have been included. The additional essays endow the book, so the author argues, 'with firmer consistency and broader intelligibility', binding its 'various elements into a firmer texture' (xii). The plural in the title ( Islams) is used to argue against the adoption of the category Islam as an explanatory or causal concept. In doing so, Al-Azmeh intends to dissolve essentialist categories in order to enable historical enquiry, arguing against transfiguring societies and histories into 'cultures'. This transfiguration has multiple historical reasons. However, for Al-Azmeh, the culprits are to be identified in the postmodernist approach to things Islamic and in the subsequent Islamisation of the internal discourse in Muslim societies. While the 'domestication' of the Left by the Right since 1989 is a fact that no honest observer would be so ingenuous to deny, that the culprit of this decay is culturalism, and its post-colonialist and post-modernist cant – as Al-Azmeh plainly and apodictically suggests – is not convincingly fully demonstrated by the book.

Al-Azmeh declares the source of inspiration and the theoretical basis for his undertaking to be Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, explicitly denouncing post-moderninst theorists' fate of mirroring the regimes of cultural, social and political deregulation that devolve into nothing more than 'consumer choice'.

The prologue (1-16) sets the framework for the author's subsequent reasoning, that is a – sometimes unnecessarily complicated – discourse on the absence of historicity from recent scholarship on Islam unfolding over ten chapters. Culturalisation, in both its form of xenophobia and xenophilia (that are regarded as indissolubly allies) is at the centre of the discourse. An assessment of the character and nature of Islamic law is also provided, whereby Islamic law is usefully defined as a technically refined, historically determined, and practically complex expertise against the backdrop of generalisations made of it either by Islamist political activist and hostile, exotising adversaries. While, so goes the argument, there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it; Islam seems to work like an exception in the public discourse, as it is often treated as impermeable to change (1). The author's intention is to deculturalise and demystify elements of cultures 'Islamic' by fully placing them into the flow of history and social forces.

In Chapter 1 ('Culturalism, grand Narrative of Capitalism Exultant') the author questions the theme of 'cross-cultural conversations', as it presupposes the idea of the fixity of the cultures in conversation. This presupposition forms the basis of one of the concepts crossing the entire book, that is the epistemological equality between the rapturous fascination with the exotic and the dehumanization of the other. Al-Azmeh introduces the idea of an 'objective complicity' between Western xenophobia, postmodernist xenophilia and xenophobic nationalism in Eastern Europe and the 'countries of the South' (in which political...