In order to reduce the number of notes, multiple citations from one source in a single paragraph have usually been consolidated into a single note. For full publication information see the Bibliography.
1. Why Islamism Is Not Islam
1. This aspect of Islamism (political Islam) is not well understood in most contributions of Western scholarship to this theme. The mainstream U.S. literature on political Islam is not only controversial and flawed but also at times charged with misleading assessments. The same applies even to a higher degree to the state of the art in Europe, in particular to the French contributions by two authors who dominate the field also in the United States through the citation of their books in English translations: Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, and even to a greater extent Gilles Kepel, Jihad. Both pundits seem to fail to understand properly the dual nature of Islamism as religionized politics in pursuit of a divine order, the shari’a state. This duality is better understood by the Dutch scholar Johannes Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism. The most influential and at the same time most flawed contributions in the United States are the numerous books published one after the other mostly in a short time span by John Esposito. In contrast to this kind of work, the older monograph by the late Muslim scholar Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam, continues to be more useful as an introduction. In Germany there are almost no basic scholarly books on this subject worth mentioning. In Arabic the central critical book on Islamism is by the former state court judge Said M. al-Ashmawi, al-Islam al-Siyasi.
2. I acknowledge the impact of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1989–95) on my work. See B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism and the fives volumes of the project referenced in Chapter 2.
3. The primary source of this debate is the lecture by Daniel Bell, “The Return of the Sacred,” presented in 1977 at the London School of Economics and published in his book The Winding Passage, 324–54. This debate has been resumed in the 2005 edition of my book Islam between Culture and Politics, chapter 11, written in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2011. This book has been published in association with Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. One aspect of “The Return of the Sacred” is the revival of particular calendars based on religion and thus the contestation of what has earlier been considered as “world time”; each civilization refers to its own time context. For instance there exist Jewish, Muslim, and other creed-based calendars. The term “world time” refers to the European expansion and to the globalization it generated. Under the impact of these processes the understanding of time changed in that Europeanization has created along the new global structures a “world time.” This expansion “promoted the spread of European civilization across the entire globe” to the extent of establishing “the dimension of ‘world time,’ ” as Theda Skocpol writes in States and Social Revolution, 21–23. The revival of “Islamic time” (the hijra year, 622 C.E., is the first year of the Islamic calendar) by the Islamists happens under the adverse conditions of world time.
4. In his authoritative multi-volume history of early Islam, van Ess writes that “umma” in early Islam did not have the meaning attributed to it in current times. This is an important and authoritative statement: van Ess is the most distinguished German professor of Islamic studies in thetwentieth century. Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra.
5. The classic book that the Holocaust survivors Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote in U.S. exile, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectics of Enlightenment), presents a much misunderstood view of the Enlightenment. Many scholars—failing to read the work carefully—incorrectly impute to Adorno and Horkheimer the thesis that fascism grew from the Enlightenment.
6. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, introduction.
7. Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.
9. The volume edited by Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas, includes my chapter on an Islamic humanism–based “peace of ideas” viewed as the alternative to the Islamist war of anti-Western propaganda. See also Walid Phares, The War of Ideas. Some discard this thinking as an expression of Said’s Orientalism (al-istishraq); Edward Said, Orientalism. The truth is that the use of the notion predates the work of Said; the former Sheykh of al-Azhar, Mohammed al Bahi, coined the term in al-fikr al-Islami al hadith wa silatuhu bi al-isti’mar al-gharbi; he connected “Orientalism” with clearly antisemitic sentiments toward world Jewry. Al-Bahi earned his Ph.D. in Hamburg in 1936, when Germany was under Nazi rule. The contemporary use of “Orientalism” is related to Said’s impact dubbed as Saidism. Said’s book was timely when it was first published, as it challenged the dreadful Eurocentrism then in vogue. However, it was grossly distorted by the U.S. Middle East studies community. As the U.S.-educated Arab-Muslim scholar Sadik J. al-Azm suggests, Said’s thinking has been subverted to justify an “Orientalism in reverse.” See Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Dhihniyyat al-tahrim, 17–86. Unfortunately, the powerful criticism by al-Azm did not resonate in Western scholarship and was simply ignored. For a comprehensive survey on this issue, see also chapter 4 on the Orientalism debate in my Einladung in die islamische Geschichte, 136–90.
10. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-tariq, 201; translations are my own unless otherwise specified. Most of the writings of Qutb circulate in millions of copies of illegal printings distributed in the underground, or in informal translations in the diaspora and at home. The Western reader has access to Qutb’s texts through this anthology: Albert Bergesen, ed., The Qutb Reader.
11. Sayyid Qutb, al-Salam al-’alami wa al-Islam, 172–73. In this pivotal Islamic source Qutb views global jihad as a civilizational project for a remaking of the world. This Islamism is not simple terrorism but rather a public choice committed to changing world order. Without a reference to Qutb the contemporary moderate Islamist Hasan al-Hanafi has put forward a claim for an Islamic lead articulated in this phrasing: “In the past, Islam found its way between two falling empires, the Persian and the Roman. Both were exhausted by wars. Both suffered moral and spiritual crises. Islam, as a new world order, was able to expand as a substitute to the old regime. Nowadays, Islam finds itself again a new power, making its way between the two superpowers in crises. Islam is regenerating, the two superpowers are degenerating. Islam is the power of the future, inheriting the two superpowers in the present.” Quoted by Martin Kramer, Arab Awakening and Muslim Revival, 155–56. The quoted statement predates the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. Islamists claim to have brought down the Soviet superpower in the first Afghanistan war. Today, al-Qaeda wants to continue this mission in the envisioned toppling of the only remaining superpower, the United States, as a step toward a “return of history.”
12. Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” 107–22, is a poorly informed article that runs against all facts and is highly ignorant about the Movement of the Muslim Brothers. The significance of the article is not its quality but the fact that it upgrades the Islamist Muslim Brothers to pure “moderate Muslims.” The same wrong assessment is continued in another article published later in the powerful journal Foreign Affairs, which is also read by U.S. policymakers, in the article “Veiled Truth,” by Marc Lynch (2010). For solid information see the classic on this subject by Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, which continues to be the authoritative source on the Muslim Brotherhood. A useful recent book on this movement is by Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. See the section on the Muslim Brotherhood in Chapter 4 of this book.
13. For a clarification and some corrections see B. Tibi, “Religious Extremism or Religionization of Politics?” in Hillel Frisch and Efraim Inbar, Radical Islam and International Security, 11–37.
14. This classification is baseless, but it is done in the poor contributions included in Barry Rubin, Revolutionaries and Reformers; much more informative is the book on this subject by the Egyptian historian Abdulazim Ramadan, Jama’at al-Takfir fi misr. Al-Usul. Some U.S. Middle East pundits do not read these original sources and are obsessed with their own projections.
15. On the Shi’ite doctrine of taqiyya see Moojan Momen, An Introduction into Shi’a Islam, 183. Momen states this deception is “lawful in Shi’ism.” Sunni Islamists adopt today this sentiment but give it another name: iham, or deception of the infidels.
16. See the book by the Islamist Mohammed Imara, al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya. Among those who confuse revivalism and Islamism one finds Tariq Ramadan, Aux Sources du Renouveau Musulman, who views his grandfather Hasan al-Banna as a “revivalist”; in fact, al-Banna invents tradition and clearly revives nothing.
17. Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear.
18. See, for instance, John Esposito and John Voll, Islam and Democracy. In my book review in the Journal of Religion, 667–69, I demonstrate that Esposito and Voll deal in fact with Islamism, but they always speak of Islam in general. This flaw also exists in John Esposito, The Islamic Threat.
19. See William McNeill, The Rise of the West.
20. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History.
21. On this medieval tradition of a reason-based Islamic enlightenment see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam, part II; for more information and sources see also Chapter 7 in this book. On the Islamic history of ideas see Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Arab Philosophy, and also my comprehensive monograph Der wahre Imam.
22. See the definition of Enlightenment by Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 18.
23. Jakob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. On the Renaissance placed in an Islamic context see B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad, chapter 5.
24. Lee Harris, The Suicide, 205.
25. Ibid., 206.
26. Bruce Bawer, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.
27. This writing-off of a “liberal Islam” is amazingly shared between someone like Bruce Bawer, who fears Islamism, and Marc Lynch, who in “Veiled Truth” romanticizes it. Even worse is the upgrading of some Islamists to “liberals” in the questionable reader: Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman.
28. See the knowledgeable but unfortunately flawed and biased anthologies edited by Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. One source of the flaws is the confusion first between Islam and Islamism, and second between jihad and jihadism. Bostom’s work is cited by Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad, as an authoritative source for the view that Islam and Islamism are the same. For a criticism see Chapter 9 of this book.
29. Hasan al-Banna, “Risalat al-Jihad,” in Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Imam al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna [Collected essays of the Martyr Imam al-Banna], 271–92; the quotation is compiled from 289–91.
30. See note 12.
31. B. Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger,” 47–54; Zeyno Baran, Torn Country: Turkey between Secularism and Islamism.
32. Matthew Levitt, Hamas, is highly recommended. Among the few useful books on jihad and jihadism are David Cook, Understanding Jihad, and Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad, but the best is John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam.
33. See August R. Norton, Hezbollah. Norton is unfortunately among these Western apologetics who promote favorable views about Islamism, including Hezbollah. For a contrast see the chapter on Hezbollah by Eithan Azani in Katherina von Knop and Martin van Creveld, eds., Countering Modern Terrorism, 71–86.
34. On Islamist Shi’a parties in Iraq see Faleh A. Jabar, The Islamist Shi’ite Movement in Iraq.
35. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine. For more on the findings included in this book see Chapter 3.
36. Richard Schultz and Andreas Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias, chapter 7 on post-Saddam Iraq.
37. See the following reports: “Turkish Parliament Approves Bill to Overhaul Judiciary and Role of Military,” New York Times, May 7, 2010, A12; Sebnem Arsu, “Turkey Sets Its Sights on a Whole New Constitution,” International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), September 14, 2010.
38. In addition to the new book by Zeyno Baran, Torn Country, see the following new books: Ali Carkoglu and Ersin Kalaycioglu, The Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey, in particular the section “Consequences for the Relations with the EU,” 121–40; William Hale and Ergun Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism in Turkey; and Arda Can Kumbaracibasi, Turkish Politics and the Rise of the AKP.
39. See “Turkey’s Radical Drift,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2010.
40. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 2: 12–61.
41. The seminal work on this subject is Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe.
42. See the historical overview by Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society, chapter 11 on the Islamic system and chapter 17 on Westphalia; see also the valuable contributions in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society, in particular the chapter by Hedley Bull, “The Revolt against the West.”
43. See John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam.
44. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. On the Frankfurt School from which Habermas emanates see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. The recent book by Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, revives rationalist modernity as an enlightenment against antienlightenment, of which Islamism is a powerful variety.
45. B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
46. Turan Kayaoglu, “Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory.” This interpretation is defensive-cultural. On the notion of defensive culture in the context of crisis see B. Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam, 1–8.
47. Jadul-Haq Ali Jadul-Haq, Bayan li al-nas, 1: 273–91.
48. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 54–55.
49. The late Naser Hamed Abu Zaid, in al-Tafkir fi asr al-Takfir [Thinking in the age of the accusation of heresy], was among liberal Muslims who were harassed by Islamists; takfir is the accusation of heresy; Abu Zaid died in July 2010. Among other critics of Islamism is Abdulazim Ramadan, Jama’at al-Takfir fi misr, not to be confused with Tariq Ramadan. Unlike some Western pundits who positively classify Islamists in categories such as “revolutionaries and reformers,” Abdulazim Ramadan views Islamists as takfiris. See also Dharif, al-Islam al-Siyasi fi al-Watan al-Arabi. These Muslim scholars are more informative about Islamism than are some Western. The notorious lack of knowledge of sources in Arabic often damages Western books. For a contrast see the excellent introduction into Islamism in Arabic by Halah Mustafa, al-Islam al-Siyasi fi Misr. American pundits also confuse politics in Islam with Islamism. For an insightful study of Islam and politics that is not Islamism see Husain F. al-Najjar, al-Islam wa al-Siyasa. See also B. Tibi, “Between Islam and Islamism.”
50. Thomas Farr, “How Obama Is Sidelining Religious Freedom,” Washington Post, June 25, 2010, A17.
51. Patrick French, “Touting Religion, Grabbing Land,” New York Times, March 16, 2009, A27.
52. Donald Emmerson, “Inclusive Islamism: The Utility of Diversity,” 22; Daniel Varisco, “Inventing Islamism: The Violence of Rhetoric,” 45, both in Martin in association with Barzegar, Islamism; Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, 285.
2. Islamism and the Political Order
1. The principle of din wa dawla was conceived by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna. His major writings are collected in one volume: Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Imam al-Shahid. Today this tradition is continued by the Egyptian Islamist Mohammed Imara, author of Ma’rakat al-Islam wa Usul al-Hikm. The best survey of this Islamist ideology was completed by the Moroccan Muslim scholar Mohammed Dharif, al-Islam al-Siyasi fi al-Watan al-Arabi; see in particular 253–62.
2. On the ambition of all religious fundamentalisms for a remaking of the order of the state in a unity of religion and politics see Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, The Fundamentalism Project, vol. 3. The project conducted at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and led by Marty and Appleby has had a great impact on this chapter, but the underlying knowledge was obtained in the world of Islam itself. I am a contributor to volume 2 of the five volumes of this project. It is most deplorable to state that in most writings on political Islam as a movement, as well as on the ideology of Islamism, Western authors flatly ignore the findings of this research project.
3. The shari’a state that Islamism proposes to establish is an order placed on top of the agenda of Islamist movements. This fact is authoritatively reflected in the Islamist contributions published in Arabic by Mustafa A. Fahmi, Fan al-hukm fi al-Islam, and the more influential book by Mohammed Salim al-Awwa, Fi al-Nizam al-Siyasi lil dawla al-Islamiyya.
4. Maajid Nawaz, “Dangerous Concepts and the Struggle Within,” 49.
5. On shari’a and on the invention of its tradition in the Islamist shari’atization agenda, see Chapter 6 and the references cited there.
6. On this notion see the preceding chapter and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 1–14. See also the authoritative introduction to Islam by Mahmoud Zakzouk, the German-educated former dean of the Shari’a faculty of the stage-setting al-Azhar University in Cairo, Einführung in den Islam. There is no mention of an Islamic state or government in this introduction.
7. I elaborate upon the notion of “world disorder” in The Challenge of Fundamentalism.
8. Charles Tilly, The Formation of the National States, 45.
9. See Milton-Edwards, Islam and Politics in the Contemporary World.
10. John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, 165–70.
11. The premature prediction of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History has been repudiated by the claims of Islamism in its call for a “return of history”; for more details see B. Tibi, Political Islam, introduction and chapter 5. Already in 1995, in Der Krieg der Zivilisationen, 28–29, I contested Fukuyama’s view of an End of History and argued instead that the Islamist claim for a return of history is a serious challenge. This combination of a contestation and a claim occurs in the shape of constructing collective memories about the historical competition between rival civilizational models. The conflict that results from these tensions is a civilizational value-based conflict that should not be confused with Huntington’s “clash.” On this issue see B. Tibi, “Islam between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics.”
12. Hedley Bull, “The Revolt against the West,” 223.
13. Daniel Philpott, “The Challenge of September 11.”
14. As I have mentioned, the research on this chapter rests on my participation in the Fundamentalism Project. The work done in that project was carried out in the years 1989–93, and the findings were published in five volumes by the chairpersons, Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, acting as editors. My essay “The Worldview of Sunni-Arab Fundamentalists” was published as chapter 4 of vol. 2, Fundamentalisms and Society. The other volumes are Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalisms and the State, Accounting for Fundamentalisms, and Comprehending Fundamentalisms. My book The Challenge of Fundamentalism relates also to this project.
15. The work of this Culture Matters Research Project was published in two volumes: Lawrence Harrison and Jerome Kagan, Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change, and Lawrence Harrison and Peter Berger, Developing Cultures: Case Studies. I am a contributor to both volumes.
16. Hasan Hanafi, in contrast to his Arabic book a-Usuliyya al-Islamiyya, states in his chapter in the U.S. book Islamism, edited by Richard C. Martin in association with Abbas Barzegar, that the notion of usuliyaa (fundamentalism) reflects “a Western invention” (64).
17. See B. Tibi, “Worldview of Sunni-Arab Fundamentalists.”
18. See B. Tibi, “Islam between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics,” and the introduction to my Islam’s Predicament.
19. The challenge addressed by the Islamist Mohammed Imara, al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya wa al-Tahddi al-Hadari, creates a predicament and a related crisis. This issue has been a research focus in my work in the course of the past four decades. See my Islam’s Predicament with Modernity and, earlier, by the same The Crisis of Modern Islam. This kind of reasoning is also continued by Hichem Djaït, Islamic Culture in Crisis.
20. The publication by each of three authoritative encyclopedias of an entry the length of a journal article on fundamentalism based on the finding of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Art and Sciences is a sign of growing recognition of the phenomenon. See my entries in Seymour Martin Lipset, The Encyclopedia of Democracy; Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Government and Politics; and Marc Bevier, The Encyclopedia of Political Theory. In these entries it is argued that Islamism is not the other modernity, but rather the Islamic variety of religious fundamentalism viewed as antienlightenment in its nature as a totalitarian ideology.
21. See chapter 7 on pluralism in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
22. See Nikkie Keddie’s edited writings of al-Afghani published under the title An Islamic Response to Imperialism. Tariq Ramadan, Aux sources du renouveau musulman: D’al Afghani à Hasan al-Banna. Un siècle de réformisme islamique, establishes a wrong continuity between the revivalist al-Afghani and the Islamist al-Banna. For a criticism see Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals. The Berlin-based liberal Muslim immigrant Ralph Ghadban, Tariq Ramadan und die Islamisierung Europas, accuses Ramadan of engaging in an “Islamization of Europe.” Ramadan denies this, but the French feminist writer Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, contends that Ramadan’s statements depend on the audience he addresses. In my view it seems to be a fallacy when this Islamist thinking is presented as a reform. See Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform.
23. Traditional, pre-Islamist, classical shari’a is characterized by diversity. It differs in many ways from the reinvented shari’a as represented by political Islam. On this debate see Chapter 6 and B. Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics.
24. For more details see B. Tibi, “The Return of the Sacred to Politics as Constitutional Law.”
25. John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, 165–66. On this subject see also my most recent article, “John Kelsay and Shari’a Reasoning in Just War in Islam.”
26. See Albert Bergesen, The Qutb Reader. In terms of influence and lasting impact, the major work of Sayyid Qutb in Arabic is Ma’alim fi al-tariq, especially 5–10 and 201–2. On Qutb see also Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 54–55. On Hasan al-Banna see Chapter 5 and his collected essays in one volume, Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Imam al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna. Unlike Qutb, who was a thinker and acted in his numerous writings as the intellectual authority in the philosophical foundation of Islamism, al-Banna was a simpleminded practitioner of jihadism, not a pillar of a Renouveau Musulman as his grandson Tariq Ramadan contends. Basically, al-Banna was a propagandist of the first Islamist movement. Among his writings is the most influential text on jihad; ibid., 271–92. This text is the cornerstone of the ideology of jihadism as a new interpretation of jihad. New, archivally based disclosures by the historian Jeffrey Herf reveal a connection between al-Banna and the antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, who met and closely worked with Hitler. See Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
27. Paul Cliteur, The Secular Outlook.
28. In traditional Islamic shari’a non-Muslim territoriality—such as Europe—is classified as dar al-harb, abode of war. Tariq Ramadan, viewed by some as “moderate Islamist,” but accused by others of “double-speak,” no longer views Europe as “Dar al-harb” but defines it as dar al-shahadah; the shift is considered a liberalization by ill-informed Europeans, who seem not to understand the implication of Ramadan’s formula. Ramadan’s new label for Europe is another term for “house of Islam.” Thus the presence of Muslims in Europe makes Europe an Islamic territoriality. On this issue see B. Tibi, “Ethnicity of Fear?”
29. This application has been criticized in the debate published in English by the European online magazine Signandsight.com. Euro-Islam understood as Europeanized Islam is the alternative to the approach of Ramadan. Some of the basic contributions of the cited debate—including mine—were published in German in a book edited by Thierry Chervel, Islam in Europa.
30. On this decisive epoch see B. Tibi, Conflict and War in the Middle East, chapters 3 and 4, as well as the new chapter 12 added to the second edition. The seminal book on the ensuing legitimacy crisis is by Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament, 50–75 (on fundamentalism), reprinted a dozen of times. The classical book by Hudson, Arab Politics, in particular the introduction, 1–30, continues to be worth reading.
31. For more details see Carry Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam. For an overview on Egypt as a model: Tibi, “Egypt as a Model of Development.”
32. See B. Tibi, “Secularization and De-Secularization in Islam,” chapter 6, on secularization, in Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
33. Hedley Bull, “Revolt against the West,” 222.
34. See Zeyno Baran, “Fighting the War of Ideas”; and Walid Phares, The War of Ideas; and more recently the contributions in Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas.
35. On Islamism and political order see the books by the influential “moderate” Egyptian Islamists: Mustafa A. Fahmi Fan al-hukm fi al-Islam, and Mohammed Salim al-Awwa, Fi al-Nizam al-Siyasi lil dawla al-Islamiyya.
36. Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 55, and for similar evidence on Qutb’s impact see also David Cook, Understanding Jihad, 102–6.
37. On the AKP see Zeyno Baran, Torn Country, chapters 2, 3, and 5. During my tenure as a visiting professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, 1995, one of my able Turkish students, Ayşegül Keceçiler, completed a fully referenced thesis, “Qutb and His Influence on Turkish-Islamic Intellectuals” (unpublished). On Turkish Islamism see B. Tibi: “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.”
38. See Daniel Philpott, “Challenge of September 11,” and my contribution to Efraim Inbar and Hillel Frisch, Radical Islam and International Security, “Religious Extremism or Religionization of Politics?”
39. In this venture I wrote a chapter, “International Morality and Cross-Cultural Bridging,” for the response by Roman Herzog and others to Samuel Huntington, Preventing the Clash of Civilizations. By the time of the publication, Herzog was the president of the Federal Republic of Germany. See also my contribution, “Euro-Islam,” to Zeyno Baran’s The Other Muslims.
40. See Chapter 4 and for a survey on this history see my comprehensive monograph Kreuzzug und Djihad, in which this history is subdivided—in terms of historical sociology—into eight great epochs. A biased but well-informed study is the book by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism.
41. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution and the Rise of the West; Philip Curtin, The World and the West.
42. The earlier book by my academic teacher Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, continues to be a major source of inspiration for my work. Modernity matters in understanding Islamism as it does with regard to any other religious fundamentalism. The exposure to modernity is the overall context of the phenomenon. The feature of Islamist nostalgia reflects a modern invention of tradition undertaken under conditions of this exposure. On this Islamic nostalgia see John Kelsay, Islam and War, 114–18.
43. On Islam and cultural pluralism see Anthony Reid and Michael Gilsenan, Islamic Legitimacy in Plural Asia, including my chapter, “Islam and Cultural Modernity,” and chapter 7 in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
44. See Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude.
45. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave, 13.
46. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 191.
47. The reader is reminded of the fact that nation-states emerged as new states in the non-Western world in the course of the process of decolonization, but without any parallel real nation-building underlying the process. Therefore, the new emerging states are weak states; for more details see Robert Jackson, Quasi-States. It is not an exaggeration to describe this process in the Arab world as an emergence of “nominal states” that are practically ruled by tribes with national flags. For an elaboration and more details see B. Tibi, “The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous.”
48. For more details see Michael Barnett, Dialogue in Arab Politics, and Beverly Milton-Edwards, Contemporary Politics in the Middle East. See also my Das arabische Staatensystem.
49. See B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism.
50. The confusion of Islamist internationalism and pan-Islamism can even be found in the work of such established scholars as James Piscatori of Oxford. In his chapter in Shahram Akbarzadeh and Fethi Mansouri, Islam and Political Violence, he confuses these realities and the related notions, but he is contradicted in the same volume in by B. Tibi “Jihadism and Intercivilizational Conflict.” See also Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, 41–114, for a historical overview of the background from which the contemporary civilizational conflict emerges.
51. Today, Yusuf al-Qaradawi acts as the heir of Sayyid Qutb and his tradition. His three-volume work al-hall al-Islami has been reprinted in numerous editions. The first volume bears the title al-Hulul al-Mustawrada [The imported solutions].
52. Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam.
53. See Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, The Globalization Reader, part VIII, in particular 358–63.
54. See B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad, chapters 1 and 4, and Fred Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests. This book published decades ago by Donner is more enlightening than his recent book adjusted to the new mindset of U.S.-Islamic studies: Muhammad and the Believers. Much better than both is the book by Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State. See also Ephraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, a most provocative book on this subject that could have been more valuable if it were more sound, but Karsh’s book has a point and is closer to the historical truth than is the new book by Donner.
55. These terms, “Islamicate” (synonymous for Islamdom), “international civilization,” and “international order,” were coined by Marshall Hodgson in The Venture of Islam, vol. 2.
56. On the industrialization of warfare see the respective chapter in Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 2, Nation-State and Violence.
57. On the significance of Qutb’s pamphlet “our struggle against the Jews” as the major source for Islamist antisemitism see Chapter 3 and the references cited there.
58. It follows that Islamism is about the order of the world, but in two rival visions. On Islamist internationalism and the Sunni-Shi’i competition, see B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, part II.
59. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History.
60. Francis Fukuyama, “Identity, Immigration, and Liberal Democracy.” See also Fukuyama’s earlier End of History.
61. Ernest Gellner, Religion and Postmodernism, 84.
62. See the proceedings of the Erasmus Foundation, The Limits of Pluralism, which includes this controversy between Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz next to contributions by Schlomo Avineri and this author, among others.
63. I was there in May 1994 and witnessed these tensions in the Gellner-Geertz controversy. The quotation is based on my notes during the conference.
64. Therefore Turan Kayaoglu, “Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory,” is wrong—see the debate in Chapters 1 and 4.
65. See Feldman, Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. For a different interpretation of the Islamist shari’a state, see chapters 6–8 in my Challenge of Fundamentalism.
3. Islamism and Antisemitism
1. See the recent most remarkable books on this issue, by Robert Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, and by Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora. New books that relate these issues to the Holocaust are cited in subsequent notes to this chapter. This chapter is based on my evaluation of representative Arab-Islamist sources collected during several research trips to the Middle East. It was completed between 2008 and 2010 at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S.-Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In spring 2008 and again in summer 2010 I was designated as the Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Scholar for the Study of Antisemitism in that institution.
2. Edward Rothstein, “A Hatred That Resists Exorcism.” New York Times, July 5, 2010, C1, C5. Rothstein discusses the books cited in note 1. The present chapter continues my earlier research on this subject matter; see “Public Policy and the Combination of Anti-Americanism and Antisemitism in Contemporary Islamist Ideology” and From Sayyid Qutb to Hamas.
3. Edward Rothstein, “A Hatred That Resists Exorcism,” C5.
4. Bernard Lewis, “The New Antisemitism.” 25–26. Lewis’s The Jews of Islam is the most authoritative and highly appreciated source for the study of this subject. See also Bernard Lewis, Semites and Antisemites.
5. The reader edited by Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, is on the one hand highly knowledgeable, but on the other it is based on untenable generalizations that lack nuances and distinctions, then become wrong.
6. See the report in Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 20–21, 2005.
7. On secular Arab nationalism see B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism.
8. See Robert Wistrich, Lethal Obsession; Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora; and Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation. One source of Islamist anti-Americanism is the prejudice that the Jewish lobby rules the United States. Unbelievably, at least two prominent American professors unwittingly support this prejudice; see John Mearshheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which Islamists quote to support their anti-Americanism.
9. In addition to the most important book on anti-Americanism, by Andrei Markovits, cited in the previous note, one needs to mention the book edited by Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, Anti-Americanism in World Politics, though it includes an extremely weak chapter on Islam and the Middle East by Marc Lynch. This chapter does a disservice to an otherwise fine volume.
10. Maxime Rodinson, Peuple juif ou problème juif? 135–52.
11. B. Tibi, Die Verschwörung, introduction and chapter 1.
12. Bernard Lewis’s The Jews of Islam is the best record for “The Judeo-Islamic Tradition” (chapter 2, 67–106) and its “End” (chapter 4, 154–92).
13. See Martin Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam.
14. In May 2010 Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), an Islamist charity with close ties to the AKP, sent a flotilla of vessels carrying humanitarian aid to challenge the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. After Israeli commandoes boarded one vessel, the Mavi Marmara, nine Turkish activists—one carrying a U.S. passport—were killed and several dozen injured, and seven Israeli soldiers were wounded. Israel claimed to have found no humanitarian supplies on board the ship and to have responded to an armed attack. The flotilla turned around; the incident sparked an international uproar and was generally viewed as a public relations disaster for Israel. See “Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Elite of Turkey,” New York Times, July 16, 2010, A4; “Islamic Charity,” Washington Post, June 10, 2010, A8; Steven Rosen, “Erdogan and the Israel Card,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2010, A21. Rosen’s article cites “the 2009 PEW global attitudes survey” that found that “73% of Turks rated their opinions of Jews as negative.” AKP Prime Minister T. Erdoğan plays this card in his election campaign; he made use of Israel’s mistake and exploited the popularity of this issue to freeze all relations to the Jewish state and to upgrade Turkey’s relationship to Hamas. The Washington Post of July 5, 2010, A7, reported, “the prime minister’s autocratic tendencies … to arrest journalists and Erdogan’s allegations that some Turkish columnists are agents of Israel”; as a result, “journalists are jailed,” in most cases with no trial.
15. For more details on cultural Arab Germanophilia see the third edition of my Arab Nationalism; for details about the Nazi link to some Arab nationalists see Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. The classic by Lukas Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, continues to be worth reading.
16. See Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti al-Husaini, and the published Ph.D. dissertation by Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, as well as Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, chapters 2–4, discusses at length Islamist antisemitism. Berman has been defamed by Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truth” for this “pathological obsession,” but he was praised by Anthony Julius, “The Pretender,” New York Times, May 14, 2010. This imported antisemitism explains the change Meir Litvak and Ester Webman deal with in From Empathy to Denial.
17. Bernard Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism.”
18. Muhammed Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, and Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti.
19. See B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism.
20. For a powerful example see Faruq Abdul-Salam, al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya wa al-Fasl bayn al-din wa al-Dawla, 23.
21. I discuss this Islamist argument in more detail in “Der djihadistische Islamismus.”
22. See chapter 6 on secularization and desecularization in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, 178–208.
23. For some examples see Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face, 125–50 and 191–206, as well as Bernard Harrison, The Resurgence of Antisemitism, 1–26. Phyllis Chesler, The New Antisemitism, is also worth reading, though it is also charged with this flaw.
24. Robert Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism, 44; similar mistakes are made by Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face, 141 and 197, and Mattias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Despite this minor criticism, I acknowledge the great significance of Wistrich’s contribution to the future study of antisemitism in his new magisterial book A Lethal Obsession. The spelling “antisemitism,” with no hyphen or capitalization, which also has been adopted by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., is derived from Laqueur. I refer to Hannah Arendt’s views in refuting Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and in rejecting his equation of antisemitism with Judeophobia. In contrast, Arendt argues in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism that “antisemitism is not simply Jew-hatred.” Bostom’s anthology includes a disturbingly Islamophobic chapter by the German right-wing author Hans Peter Raddatz, “Antisemitism in Islam,” 643–49.
25. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud, 15 (“not for the sake of any material benefits”), 36 (“this is an enduring war”).
26. Ibid., 21.
27. Walid Phares, War of Ideas, and the alternative to this war: Tibi, “Inter-Civilizational Conflict between Value Systems and Concepts of Order.”
28. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud, 31.
29. Ibid., 33.
30. Ibid., 32.
31. Ibid., 27.
32. Ibid., 33 (“there is a crusader-Zionist war”), 23 (“The Jews were the instigator”).
33. Salah A. al-Khalidi, Amerika min al-dakhil bi minzar Sayyid Qutb. See also my “Public Policy and the Combination of Anti-Americanism and Antisemitism in Islamist Ideology.”
34. Quoted in “House-Negro Job Is Just Another of al-Qaeda Lies,” USA Today, November 25, 2008.
35. “America Seeks Bonds to Islam, Obama Insists,” New York Times, April 7, 2009, A1. This message was repeated by Obama with more substance and vigor as well in his historical address to the people of Islamic civilization delivered in Cairo on June 4 of the same year. See the coverage of International Herald Tribune, June 5, 2009, A1, A4.
36. Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face, 10. The phenomenon Laqueur addresses is one feature of the ethnicization of the Islamic diaspora in Europe. For more details see my chapter, on the Islamic diaspora in Europe and also the chapters on Jewish communities in Europe in Roland Hsu, Ethnic Europe.
37. Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face, 200. See also B. Tibi, Die Verschwörung, about the origin of this Arab “Verschwörung/conspiracy”-driven mindset.
38. See the contributions in Patterson and Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas.
39. On this most consequential perception see Graham Fuller, A Sense of Siege.
40. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-Ghazu al-Fikri lil alam al-Islami, 3–4.
41. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’arakatuna ma’a al-Yahud, 21.
42. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami, 150.
43. On this distinction see Leslie Lipson, The Ethical Crisis of Civilizations, 62–66, and B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad, chapter 5.
44. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-Ghazu al-Fikri lil alam al-Islami, 9.
45. For evidence of the Jewish-Islamic alliance, see Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades.
46. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-Ghazu al-Fikri lil alam al-Islami, 20.
47. See the festschrift for Bernard Lewis edited by Martin Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam.
48. Mohammed al-Bahi, al-Fikr al-Islami al-Hadith wa silatuhu bi al-ist’mar al-Gharbi. The book includes an appendix on Orientalism, 528–53, that lists the names of European Orientalists, some of them resentfully identified and profiled as “Jews.” The late Azhar-Sheykh al-Bahi completed his Ph.D. in Germany at the University of Hamburg in the year 1936 under Nazi rule. In that dissertation his name is transliterated as al-Bahy.
49. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami, 37–39.
50. Ibid., 110–11, 150.
51. Ibid., 202. This is evidence for the predicament of Islam with pluralism. On this issue see B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, chapter 7.
52. Ali M. Jarisha and Mohammed Sh. Zaibaq, Asalib al-ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami, 179.
53. Ibid., 203; see also Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand, and B. Tibi, Die Verschwörung, introduction and chapter 1.
54. On this religionization see B. Tibi: “Islam between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics.”
55. On Islam’s place in the Middle East conflict see Rifaat S. Ahmed, al-Islam wa qadaya al-Sira’ al-Arabi al-Israeli. On this issue see also Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine, and Jacob Lassner and Ilan Troen, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World.
56. Muhsin al-Antawabi, Limatha narfud al-Salam ma’a al-Yahud.
57. Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, 109. For more details on Hamas as a terrorist movement see Matthew Levitt, Hamas, as well as Richard Cohen, “Hamas, a Threat to Its Own People,” Washington Post, June 29, 2010, A19. The Palestinian Khalid Hurub, based in Cambridge, defamed and distorted Levitt’s book in his review “Hamas Viewed in American Eyes.” The review was published in the Arab-Saudi sponsored newspaper al-Hayat. The charter of Hamas is quoted from its original text in Arabic; the translation is my own. The full text of the charter in Arabic is included in Ahmed Izzuldin, Harakat al-Muqawamha al-Islamiyya Hamas, 43–82.
58. See Matthew Levitt, Hamas, 30.
59. Hamas Charter.
60. Ibid.
61. Paul McGough, “The Changing Face of Hamas,” International Herald Tribune, April 13, 2009.
62. The three volumes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hatmiyyat al-hall al-Islami, have been cited in the preceding chapters.
63. Quoted in Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face, 199.
64. On this third-worldism see B. Tibi, “The Legacy of Max Horkheimer and Islamist Totalitarianism.” One also encounters an equation of Muslims in Europe with Jews; see B. Tibi, “Foreigners: Today’s New Jews?”
65. See B. Tibi, “Public Policy and the Combination of Anti-Americanism and Antisemitism in Islamist Ideology” and the references in note 9 above.
66. Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 180.
67. See B. Tibi, “Ethnicity of Fear?” and Roland Hsu, Ethnic Europe.
68. See Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 195, and Tibi, “Foreigners: Today’s New Jews?”
69. Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 180 (“While these immigrants awakened”), 194 (“raised their voices”).
70. Jeffrey Herf, Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective; see in particular the introduction to the volume by Herf, x–xix, and the chapter by Markovits.
71. Hanif Kureishi, “Der Karneval der Kulturen. Ein Plädoyer gegen fundamentalistische Wahrheitsbegriffe,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 11, 2005.
72. On the British diaspora of Islam see Melanie Phillips, Londonistan.
73. This point is not well understood by Jonathan Lawrence and Justin Vaisse in their questionable book Integrating Islam, 233. For a contrast see B. Tibi, “A Migration Story.” My article includes a section on Islamic diasporic antisemitism. The contention of “integrating Islam” is belied by the reality of the failed integration of Muslims in Europe. For evidence and on the related challenges see B. Tibi, Political Islam, chapters 5 and 6, and B. Tibi, “Ethnicity of Fear?”
74. This is the phrasing of Lawrence and Vaisse.
75. See Seyran Ateş, Der Multikulti-Irrtum, 253.
76. Jeffrey Herf, preface to Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, vii–xvii.
77. B. Tibi, “Der Islamismus ist genauso gefährlich wie der Rechtsradikalismus,” Die Welt, January 15, 2001, 2. On the Islamist radicalization in the Islam diaspora in Europe see Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 71–88. Sageman fails, however, to understand the ideology and the movement involved.
78. See B. Tibi, “Europeanizing Islam or the Islamization of Europe.”
79. See Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq, and Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals.
80. See, for instance, Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truth”; in contrast, Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, provides a better understanding of Islamism. See also my critique of Ramadan in my chapter to Zeyno Baran, The Other Muslims, 157–74. Jeffrey Herf and Paul Berman published lengthy rejoinders in the subsequent issue (September 2010) of Foreign Affairs, in which Lynch’s “Veiled Truth” appeared.
81. These voices are documented by liberal Muslims in Zeyno Baran, ed., The Other Muslims.
82. On Islamist networks in Europe see Lorenzo Vidino, Al-Qaeda in Europe and, more recently, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. To be sure, there is no Holocaust in contemporary Europe against Muslims. Ester Webman, the Israeli historian and author of the book From Empathy to Denial, coined the formula “Stealing the Holocaust from the Jews” as the title of her paper presented to the International Conference on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial in Dublin, November 18–19, 2010, to characterize a variety of denial pursued by Islamists.
83. B. Tibi, “Bringing Back the Heterogeneity of Civilizations.”
84. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine. See also Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti al-Husaini, and Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, as well as Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
85. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, 225; see also 198–200.
86. Ibid., 243–44; see also 253.
87. Ibid., 265.
88. Quoted ibid., 244.
89. Ibid.
90. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 124 (“The example of the Einsatzgruppen”), 125 (“A vast number of Arabs”), 124 (“friction”), 166 (“Hitler had planned in 1941”).
91. Ibid. 111 (“that such a terrorist”), 15 (“the acceptance of the universal values”). The critical reference pertains to the work of Gudrun Krämer.
92. Ibid., 217–18.
93. See Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, and Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
94. On Islamic tolerence see Yohanan Friedman, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam.
95. On the classification of Jews as dhimmi, see Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude.
96. See Ali Mohammed Jarisha and Mohammed Sharif Zaibaq, Asalib al-ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami, and B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity. To be sure, traditional Islamic tolerance does not solve this flaw.
97. A most deplorable example of this trend is the highly questionable book by Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (see also the critical review by the historian Jeffrey Herf in the New Republic, www.tnr.com). Achcar does not deny the existence of Arab antisemitism, but—in the name of fighting prejudice and Islamophobia—ends up belittling of this evil to the extent of defaming scholars who straightforwardly address the issue. These scholars, however, provide a better analysis. I restrict this positive reference to Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial, and Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred.
Achcar is among those who outlaw the dealing with Islamism as Islamophobia: “Islamophobia has found a means of large-scale sublimation to what has come to be called Islamism” (268). Based on this prejudice he writes further: “For a few years now Bassam Tibi has been one of the authors who serve certain writers as warrant for this Islamophobia” (296). As a devout Muslim who descends from the Islamic Kadi/Mufti aristocracy of Damascus, I prefer to refrain from commenting on this defamation, but quote it to demonstrate the mine field that the present book enters.
98. Michael Borgstede, “Angriff auf den Frieden,” Die Welt, September 11, 2011, 8.
4. Islamism and Democracy
1. In its July 2008 issue the Journal of Democracy published a debate that revolves around this question addressed in eight contributions.
2. On this issue see the debate covered in Chapter 3 and the related references there, as well as Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xi–xvi and–120. In Chapter 8, employing Arendt’s approach, I conceptualize Islamism as the most recent variety of totalitarianism.
3. B. Tibi, “Islamist Parties”; see also the other seven contributions to the debate in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
4. Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truths.” See also the debate on Islamism in the review article by Andrew F. March, “Arguments: The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan” and the response to it by Paul Berman, “Arguments: The Response to Andrew F. March,” both published in Dissent in 2010.
5. Ibid.
6. The Western scholarly debate on these issues in which I have participated relates basically to my contributions to three research projects to be acknowledged because this chapter draws on them: (a) the project at Boston University chaired by Alan Olson, who edited the volume Educating for Democracy; (b) the Center for European Policy Studies, an EU think tank for which Michael Emerson edited Democratization in the Neighborhood; and (c) the international congress organized by the Club of Madrid one year after the assaults in that city of March 11, 2004, from which a volume edited by Leonard Weinberg grew: Democratic Responses to Terrorism. A more general debate about Islam and democracy can be found in my “Democracy and Democratization in Islam.”
7. Contrary to Marc Lynch’s assertion, liberal Muslims are not an “insignificant slice.” Their pivotal contribution to the debate on democracy is documented in the proceedings of the Arab Congress Azmat al-democratiyya fi al-watan al-Arabi, (Crisis of democracy in the Arab world), published and edited in Arabic by the Center of Arab Unity Studies. This chapter also reflects the Islamic reasoning on democracy earlier pursued in the volume that grew from the November 1982 meeting of seventy leading Arab thinkers and opinion leaders, myself among them, in Limassol, Cyprus, to discuss Azmat al-demoqratiyya fi al-Watan al-Arabi (Crisis of democracy in the Arab world). We were denied a venue at which to convene in any Arab country. No Islamists were invited. My chapter in Arabic is included in that volume, 73–87. Before that Limassol congress a smaller group of leading Arab democrats, to which I also belonged, met in Tunis in October 1980 to discuss the “Arab Future.” The host institution, Centre d’Études et de Récherches Economiques et Sociales, acted as an editor to the volume Les Arabes face à leur destin.
8. Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truths.”
9. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hatmiyyat al-hall al-islami. Qaradawi views democracy as an “import from the West” and dismisses it. See the important contribution by Ana B. Soage, “Yusuf al-Qaradawi.”
10. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-tariq, 6–7, emphasis added.
11. Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, al-Islam wa al-Madaniyya al-haditah, as reprinted verbatim in Mohammed Dharif, al-Islam al-siyasi fi a-Watan al-Arabi, 98–99, emphasis added.
12. These quotations are from Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hatmiyyat al-Hall al-Islami, 1: 53–56, 61–73, 111–24.
13. For instance, John Esposito and John Voll do this in Islam and Democracy. See my critical review in the Journal of Religion.
14. For more details see B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, and chapter 10, on “Shura,” in B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam.
15. On this debate with more details see chapter 7, “Democracy and Democratization in Islamic Civilization,” in B. Tibi, Islam, World Politics, and Europe.
16. On the first Afghanistan war of the 1980s see Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, part III. See also Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban.
17. See Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear, on the Egyptian Islamists organized in the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. For a contrast see Lorenzo Vidino, New Muslim Brotherhood, and Barry Rubin, Muslim Brotherhood.
18. Stephen Larrabee, “Turkey’s Broading Crisis,” International Herald Tribune, July 26–27, 4.
19. Zeyno Baran, Torn Country, 140–41. It is worth mentioning that in 2008 the then chief prosecutor of Turkey requested this ban in his 162-page indictment of the AKP as a suspected Islamist party. In that year this view was partly shared by the Constitutional Court, which admitted the indictment but stopped short a verdict of banning. See the report by Sebnem Arsu, “Against Ban on Turkey’s Top Party: Judges Cut Financing with Strong Warning,” International Herald Tribune, July 31, 2008. I argue that the AKP is an Islamist, not an Islamic-conservative party, as it successfully camouflages itself in the West. See also the earlier article by Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided,” and B. Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.” The AKP takes revenge against the secular judiciary and the supreme court in the new constitution. Turkish Islamists weaken the independent judiciary, and also target the supreme court.
20. Sebnem Arsu, “Turkey Sets Its Sights on a Whole New Constitution” International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), September 14, 2010.
21. “Turkish Parliament Approves Bill to Overhaul Judiciary,” New York Times, May 7, 2010.
22. Marc Champion, “Turkey Faces Rap on Media Curbs,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2010.
23. Der Spiegel, November 29, 2010, in particular the article “Volkstribun aus Anatolien: Der NATO-Partner Türkei,” 116–17, the source of the following quotations.
24. Ibid.
25. Michael Martens, “Muslime an die Front,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 26, 2011.
26. For background on the Egyptian political situation before the uprising, see the chapter on Egypt in Lawrence Harrison, Developing Cultures, 2: 63–180, which stands in contrast to Raymond Baker’s Islam without Fear. See also the classic by the late Richard P. Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers.
27. The classic on this movement is by the late Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers.
28. See Zeyno Baran, “The Brotherhood Network in the US.”
29. On the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe see Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood.
30. Barry Rubin, The Muslim Brotherhood.
31. David Rich, “The Very Model of a British Muslim Brotherhood.” On Tariq Ramadan see Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.
32. David Rich, “The Very Model of a British Muslim Brotherhood,” 133.
33. Ana B. Soage, “Yusuf al-Qaradawi.”
34. Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, 92 (“Ramadan’s admired hero”), 150 (“Muslim counterculture in the West”). This counterculture is an ethnicized Islam. See B. Tibi, “Ethnicity of Fear?”
35. B. Tibi, “Europeanizing Islam or the Islamization of Europe.”
36. Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood, 222 (“deceitful actors”), 223 (“ample evidence” and “nonviolent Islamists”). On the theme of Islamist double-speak, see Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.
37. Robert Hefner, Civil Islam.
38. On political ethics in Islam see the contributions included in Sohail Hashmi, Islamic Political Ethics, including my chapter 9.
39. This statement was made by Professor Ibrahim in public in Madrid in 2005, during the commemoration of the victims of the terrorist attack of March 11, 2004, the European equivalent to 9/11 in the United States. There, the Club of Madrid organized a huge congress (see note 6). Among the organizers was Professor Peter Neumann of London, who is also the editor of the three volumes that emerged from this venture. I was among the speakers at this Madrid meeting and contributed to the second volume of the papers, edited by Leonard Weinberg, Democratic Reponses to Terrorism.
40. See B. Tibi, “Religious Extremism, or Religionization of Politics?”
41. See B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, as well as the contributions in Zeyno Baran, The Other Muslims.
42. Editorial, Financial Times, December 28, 2005.
43. Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift; on Iraq’s Shi’a see the authoritative study by Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq; more recent, but more biased, is Faleh A. Jabar, The Shi’ite Movements in Iraq.
44. On Hamas see also the most informed and enlightening monograph by Matthew Levitt, Hamas, and earlier, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas. The overall context is addressed by Beverly Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine.
45. See Loren D. Lybarger, Identity and Religion, and Amal Jamal, The Palestinian National Movement.
46. On Hezbollah see the questionable study by Augustus R. Norton, Hezbollah.
47. On this unlucky war see Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 34 Days.
48. On democracy in the Middle East see the references in note 7 above. More promising on democracy in Indonesia is Robert Hefner, Civil Islam; on the one-dimensional interaction between Southeast Asia and the Arab Middle East for the favor of the Middle East see Fred R. von der Mehden, Two Worlds of Islam, 97.
49. The book by Jocelyne Cesari, When Islam and Democracy Meet, ignores all facts on the ground (Islamist networks placed in Europe) and baselessly claims to see “in the West a reformist trend … in Islamic thought,” 159. One finds this kind of wishful thinking also in a book by Jytte Klausen, The Islamic Challenge.
50. For an example of enlightened Arab-Muslim thought, see Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt, Islam, and Democracy, in particular chapter 12, on civil society and the prospects of democratization in the Arab world. See also Beverly Milton-Edwards, Contemporary Politics in the Middle East, 145–72, and on the way pre-Islamist modern Muslims made efforts to accommodate democracy, see Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, 125 ff.
51. Leslie Lipson, The Ethical Crises of Civilization, 62. On the two waves of the Hellenization of Islam see Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, parts II and III. On the Islamic heritage see the classic by Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage of Islam.
52. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.
53. Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Paris; see also B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam, 221–51.
54. See the contributions in Philipp Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, Tribes and State-Formation in the Middle-East.
55. On military regimes in the Arab world see Eliezer Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society, part VI, and B. Tibi, Militär und Sozialismus in der Dritten Welt.
56. On “cultural development” see Lawrence Harrison, Developing Cultures. I am a contributor to both volumes. On institution building as “political development” see the classic by Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
57. For more details see Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament—reprinted more than a dozen times—herein in particular the chapter on political Islam, 50–75. Sadik J. al-Azm, Al-naqd al-dhati ba’d al-hazima, is among the works by critical Arab thinkers appreciated by Fouad Ajami (The Arab Predicament, 30–37).
58. The core idea of Islamism is that Islam prescribes a state order; for more details see B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism, in particular chapters 7 and 8. See also my “Islamic Law, Shari’a, and Human Rights,” and “Return of the Sacred to Politics.”
59. Yechi Dreazen, “Iraqi Charter Causes Alarm: Bush Allies Raise Concern over the Role of Islam,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2005, A15.
60. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided,” 57.
61. See Matthew Levitt, Hamas, and, on the roots of Palestinian Hamas in Muslim Brotherhood, Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza.
62. See the references in note 7.
63. United Nations Development Program, Arab Human Development Report.
64. See Hisham Sharabi, Arab Neo-Patriarchy, and Hudson, Arab Politics, in particular 1–30.
65. The Arab-Muslim Yale-educated Enlightenment philosopher al-Azm writes in Dhihniyyat al-tahrim, 17–128, of “al-Istishraq Ma’kusan”—Orientalism in reverse—and unravels this as a conspiracy-driven thinking.
66. On conspiracy-driven Arab political thought see B. Tibi, Die Verschwörung, and the Spanish edition, La conspiración. Later Daniel Pipes published The Hidden Hand, not only without acknowledging this previously published work, but also with a different mindset.
67. This question is the point of departure for traditional Muslims and it determines the intellectual history of Islam. See B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam, and Fuad Khuri, Imams and Emirs, on the role of the imams in creating sectarian divisions within the umma.
68. Al-Farabi, al-Madina al-Fadila [On the Perfect State], trans. and ed. Richard Walzer.
69. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
70. Hasan Sa’b, al-Islam tijah tahidiyat al-hayat al-’asriyya, 123.
71. This is an argument against and a criticism of the “postsecular society” of Jürgen Habermas, who fails to understand the reality of religionized politics, as shown in B. Tibi, “Habermas and the Return of the Sacred.”
72. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided” and Torn Country.
73. John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, chapter 2. See also B. Tibi, “John Kelsay and Shari’a Reasoning.”
74. John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, 72.
75. Ibid., 165.
76. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided.”
77. For an example of these shifts see the autobiographical book by Ed Hussain, The Islamist.
78. This was also the view of Abdullahi An-Nai’im, expressed in his first book. Like some other Muslims, An-Na’im swings in a pendulum on this hot-bottom issue: his two books contradict each other. In his 1990 book he adopts a critical view of shari’a, while his 2008 book is an apologetics of it. This puzzling U-turn makes one wonder how the same person could have written so inconsistently. See Towards an Islamic Reformation and Islam and the Secular State. For a criticism of An-Nai’im see B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, 95–129 and 178–208.
79. See B. Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger,” 47–54.
80. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided.”
81. Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy. The late Samuel P. Huntington coined the term “third wave of democratization” in The Third Wave.
82. On the view that the order of a shari’a state contradicts individual human rights see B. Tibi: “Islamic Law, Shari’a, and Human Rights,” and “The Return of the Sacred to Politics as Constitutional Law.” This interpretation rebukes the views of Noah Feldman, Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
83. See the contributions in Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas.
84. Thomas Friedman, “Pay Attention,” International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), May 30, 2011, 9.
85. Anthony Shadad, “Arab Spring Turns to Blazing Summer,” International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), August 26, 2011, 5.
86. International Herald Tribune, February 5–6, 2011, 3.
87. International Herald Tribune, February 4, 2011, 3.
88. Financial Times, January 31, 2011, 9.
89. Ibid.
90. Thomas Friedman, “Pay Attention.”
91. See my essay “Islamism in the Arab Spring” on the Telos Press blog, http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=445.
92. Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2011, 15. A more accurate transcription of the Arabic is al-Barad’i.
93. International Herald Tribune, February 4, 2011, 6.
94. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 13, 2011, 2.
95. International Herald Tribune, February 3, 2011, 6.
96. Ibid.
97. “Islamists’ Role Fuels a Debate,” global edition of New York Times (International Herald Tribune), September 15, 2011 (front page, continued p. 4).
98. Associated Press, “Erdogan in Cairo Touts Turkey as Model for All Arab Nations,” Haaretz (supplement to International Herald Tribune, September 15, 2011), 2.
99. Nabil Abdel Fattah, quoted in “Erdogan in Cairo,” Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2011.
100. Quoted in Anthony Shadid, “Arab World Turns to Defining Islam after Revolt,” global edition of New York Times (International Herald Tribune), September 30, 2011 (front page, continued p. 7).
101. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” (1859), in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. On “Political Islam and Democracy’s Decline to a Voting Procedure,” see chapter 7 of my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe (New York: Routledge, 2008), 216–34.
5. Islamism and Violence
1. B. Tibi, Violence and Religious Fundamentalism in Political Islam.
2. As is true of any part of Muslim belief, knowledge about the religious obligation to jihad is incorporated in Islamic patterns of socialization equally in family, school, and society. This principle can also be applied to my own upbringing in Damascus. I was first inspired to research jihad and jihadism, however, as part of a project conducted in Jerusalem by the American Ethicon Institute. The findings were published by Terry Nardin as The Ethics of War and Peace. The present chapter continues the research for my contribution to that volume.
3. On the reinvention see Hasan al-Banna, “Risalat al-jihad.”
4. See volume 1, Politics and War, in Bernard Lewis, Islam. See also B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad, and my chapter “War and Peace in Islam” in Terry Nardin, Ethics of War and Peace.
5. It is pertinent here to remember the work of Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, in which he argues that responsibility ethics combined with professional knowledge is part of the profession of policymakers. John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, outlines a new context most pertinent to Western policy, but most policymakers seem to ignore this. See Henry Kissinger, “How to Repair Our Afghan Strategy,” Washington Post, June 24, 2010, A21.
6. See Barak Mendelsohn, Combating Jihadism. On the recognition that Islamism and security are interrelated, see the contributions in Hillel Frisch and Efraim Inbar, Radical Islam and International Security.
7. John Brennan, “A New Approval to Safeguarding Americans,” lecture at CSIS, Washington, D.C., August 6, 2009, and repeated elsewhere, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-assistant-president-homeland-security-and-counterterrorism-john-brennan-csi.
8. John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam.
9. David Cook, Understanding Jihad; Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad.
10. For historical overviews see Alan Jamieson, Faith and Sword, and B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad.
11. On this lecture by the pope and the related story see Knut Wenzel, Die Religionen und die Vernunft. The prose of the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict in its original German text is known only in sound bites to most protesting Muslims. So it is safe to state that only a few Muslims read it. The text was published under the title “Vernunft baut auf Glauben” in the Christian weekly Rheinischer Merkur, issue 37, 2006, 25. This issue was taken up again in a project at the University of Zurich on religion and violence, where I addressed the pope’s lecture in more detail. The findings were published by Christiane Abbt and Donata Schoeller, Im Zeichen der Religion, including my “Gewalt, Krieg und die Verbreitung der Religion des Islam,” specifically 215–21.
12. See note 11.
13. Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State.
14. See Bernard Lewis, Islam, vol. 1, Politics and War; B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad; Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam”; David Cook, Understanding Jihad; Alan Jamieson, Faith and Sword; and Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism.
15. Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude.
16. On rules and permitted targets of classical jihad as tenets basic to the distinction between jihad and jihadism see B. Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam.” It is unfortunate that Fawaz A. Gerges, the author of The Far Enemy, fails to understand this distinction between jihad and jihadism. The distinction in point is not about “going global” (jihad and jihadism are both global). It is about the honoring of rules and complying with limiting targets (irregular war in contrast to regular war).
17. The term “irregular war” that I coined in my first book on Islamism, The Challenge of Fundamentalism, 86–88, is a notion that clarifies jihadism and intercivilizational conflict in an understanding of post-Clausewitzian war. See B. Tibi, Violence and Religious Fundamentalism in Political Islam.
18. Along the sectarian divides in Islam there exist two varieties of jihadism, one Shi’ite and state-sponsored (Iran), the other Sunni and represented by nonstate actors. For more details on both see B. Tibi, Political Islam, chapters 3 and 4.
19. Hedley Bull, “The Revolt Against the West,” in particular, 223.
20. See the most interesting article by Daniel Philpott, “The Challenge of September 11.”
21. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, and his earlier The New Cold War.
22. See “Nasrallah Wins the War,” cover story of the Economist, August 19, 2006.
23. The change of the nature of war from an interstate conflict to a new post-Clausewitzian warfare waged by nonstate actors is also addressed, however, in different terms by Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, and B. Tibi, Conflict and War in the Middle East, in particular chapter 12. Some scholars boast of their discovery of “the new wars” (see, e.g. the German professor Herfried Münkler) after 9/11, though without acknowledging the origin of the debate in the cited works.
24. The basic differences between Islam and Islamism explained in Chapters 1 and 2 are also pertinent to a perspective of security; on this see B. Tibi, “Islam and Islamism.”
25. See Hasan al-Banna, “Risalat al-jihad,” in particular the quotation on 289–91, which I have included in Chapter 1.
26. On the related real history see Bernard Lewis, Islam, vol. 1, Politics and War; B. Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam”; David Cook, Understanding Jihad; Alan Jamieson, Faith and Sword; Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism; and Walter Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. In his Regensburg lecture Pope Benedict did refer to this imperial expansion, unspecifically, quoting Manuel II. In real history the Muslims’ violent conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is most essential. This jihad war ended the history of Byzantium. For more details see Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople. See also B. Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad, especially chapter 1 on the early Arab-Muslim jihad conquests and chapter 4 on their continuation by Ottoman Turks. These futuhat were wars of Islamization; in short, the da’wa was not pursued peacefully.
27. See the pertinent chapters in Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, Fundamentalism and the State.
28. Peter Neumann, “Europe’s Jihadist Dilemma.” On jihadist Islamism as a transnational religion that matters to European politics see my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe.
29. Sayyid Qutb, al-Salam al-Alami wa al-Islam, 171–73, and Qutb, al-Jihad for Sabil Allah. The “war of ideas” is a central part of the issue. See B. Tibi, “Countering Terrorism als Krieg der Weltanschauungen.”
30. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.
31. See for instance the flawed survey by Michael Banner, Jihad in Islamic History. The reference to al-Banna, 161, is, for instance, fairly meaningless. There are general contributions like Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors, with poor knowledge about Islam. More helpful and more comparative are Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, Cook, Understanding Jihad, and Murawiec, Mind of Jihad.
32. Books like Dale Eickelmann and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, ignore all basic issues. Political science is not to be confused with anthropology, as Eickelmann does. Piscatori, a political scientist, confuses pan-ideologies (e.g., nationalism) with internationalism, and thus fails to draw a line between what is pan-Islamic and the Islamist internationalism. This confusion gives reasons to mistrust the understanding that underlies what “Islamic Politics” is all about.
33. B. Tibi, Violence and Religious Fundamentalism in Political Islam.
34. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad. Unlike Sageman, there are experts who look at jihadism in terms of ideology and movement, not simply technically as “terror networks.”
35. In earlier contributions to this theme, such as in Grant Wordlaw, Political Terrorism, one finds no reference to Islam or to jihad at all. In contrast, recent books like Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, deal with this issue. Among the more topical contributions are: David J. Whittacker, The Terrorism Reader, and Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. In the United States jihadist terror is bizarrely treated by some as a taboo in established Islamic studies. At the same time in popular publications terrorism is identified indiscriminately with Islam, with no distinction between jihad and jihadism. Most professional scholars in the field either remain silent and fail to enlighten, or deny.
36. On Islamic nostalgia see John Kelsay, Islam and War, 25–26. This Islamist nostalgia is not a mere romanticism but is associated with a claim for a return of Islamic glory in the new shape of the envisioned Islamist world order.
37. See my entry on jihad in Roger S. Powers and William Vogele, Protest, Power, and Change.
38. The seminal work on world order continues to be Hedley Bull’s classic, The Anarchical Society.
39. See B. Tibi, From Islamist Jihadism to Democratic Peace? and on democratic peace, Bruce Russet, Grasping Democratic Peace. The origin of the concept is Immanuel Kant, “Zum ewigen Frieden.”
40. This notion of disorder is used in the subtitle of my Challenge of Fundamentalism, published in 1998 and updated 2002. Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders, also employs the term, but without any reference to religion and fundamentalism, or to earlier research, thus overlooking the basic issue pertinent to this topic. Politicized religion is one of the major sources of disorder and is a threat to security, as I argue throughout the present book.
41. For more details see Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al-Qaeda, and his recent book written with Michael Chandler, Countering Terrorism. On the Taliban as a case of jihadism see Rashid, The Taliban.
42. This allegation of “une vaste conspiration juif-chrétienne” is made by the Algerian Islamist Mohammed Y. Kassab, L’Islam face au nouvel ordre mondial. Not only Islamists but also some Germans, left and right, have claimed in best-selling books that September 11 was a homemade U.S. conspiracy. The German news magazine Der Spiegel, in its special issue Verschwörung (Conspiracy), no. 37, 2003, criticized these best-sellers, some of which were not only anti-American but also antisemitic.
43. Hedley Bull, “The Revolt against the West,” 223.
44. See Mohammed Salim al-Awwa, fi al-Nizam al-Siyasi li al-dawla al-Islamiyya.
45. Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, 1–25.
46. See Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear.
47. Robert Pape, Dying to Win.
48. On the traditional origins of this concept and its current relevance see John Kelsay, Islam and War, chapter 5, and James T. Johanson, The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Tradition. The issue has to be placed in the study of civilizations in the tradition of Sir Hamilton Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, who established Islamic Studies at Harvard.
49. On this Sunni-Shi’i conflict carried out, e.g., by shi’ite movements in Iraq after Saddam’s fall, see Faleh A. Jabar, The Shi’ite Movements in Iraq. In an earlier contribution, Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, analyzed this issue under Saddam’s rule.
50. See B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, chapter 4.
51. On the rise of Iran to a regional superpower and on the empowering of shi’a pursuant to the Iraq war of 2003 see Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat, and on the related rise of shi’a, Yitzhak Nakash, Reaching for Power.
52. B. Tibi, “Jihadism and Inter-Civilizational Conflict.”
53. John Kelsay, Islam and War, 117.
54. Leonore Martin, New Frontiers in Middle Eastern Security, introduction.
55. See B. Tibi, “Europeanizing Islam or the Islamization of Europe” and “Islamization of Europe.” J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Alms for Jihad, in which the latter chapter appears, discloses terror financing and—in contestation of the disclosure—was withdrawn from the market after a successful Saudi lawsuit.
56. See the contributions in Roland Hsu, Ethnic Europe, including my “The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?”
57. B. Tibi, “Ethnicity of Fear?”
58. Souat Mekhennet, “Young Muslims Travel Route from Germany to Radicalism,” New York Times, July 31, 2010. These “young Muslims” do not resort to jihadism only because of “grievances” but also as a result of Islamist indoctrination. On Jihadist Islam in Europe see also Russel Berman, Freedom or Terror, and also B. Tibi, Die islamische Herausforderung, as well as the two books by Lorenzo Vidino cited in the following note.
59. See Lorenzo Vidino, Al-Qaeda in Europe and The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West.
60. See the paper by B. Tibi, “The Mosques in Germany between Freedom of Faith and Parallel Societies,” presented to the conference Secularism in the Muslim Diaspora at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and published in the Occasional Paper Series (Summer 2009) of the Center, 4–10.
6. Islamism and Law
1. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 1. The research for this chapter goes back to my Harvard University affiliation in several appointments and continued at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. My findings have been presented in lectures delivered at Cornell University Law School, and at Carthago University, Tunis, during the International Humanities Convention in July 2006, as well as the Japanese Association for Comparative Constitutional Law in Tokyo. See also my “Return of the Sacred to Politics.” I acknowledge that my understanding of Islamic shari’a law is based on borrowings from the work of Schacht.Though I share the spirit (but not the outcome) of the critique of Orientalism, I strongly dismiss turning the table to an Orientalism in reverse. Therefore I deplore the intrusion of Islamic identity politics into the field that disqualifies what non-Muslims write about Islam. As a Muslim, I defend Schacht against the work of Wael Hallaq. Among the questionable books of Hallaq are The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law and History of Islamic Legal Theories.
2. See the chapter by John Kelsay on shari’a reasoning in Arguing the Just War in Islam. Islamist shari’a reasoning happens in an invention of tradition; see Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1–14.
3. Mahmoud Zaqzuq has a German Ph.D. and therefore he wrote his introduction in German but published it in Cairo; see Einführung in den Islam, chapter 3 on diversity and chapter 4 on spirituality.
4. Personal communication in Cairo. On the tatbiq al-shari’a debate see Salah al-Sawi, al-Muhawara.
5. On this issue see Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, al-Shari’a al-Islamiyya wa al-qanun al-misri. For more details see the chapter on Egypt in Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, and chapter 9 in Lawrence Harrison and Peter L. Berger, Developing Cultures 163–80.
6. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Hall al-Islami, vol. 2 of the three-volume Hatmiyyat al-Hall al-Islami, 82–83.
7. See the book by the Sheykh al-Azhar, Mahmud Schaltut, al-Islam, Aqida wa Shari’a, 9–13. Another Sheykh of al-Azhar, Jadul-Haq Ali Jadul-Haq, edited the authoritative al-Azhar textbook Bayan li al-nas, in which taschr’i (legislation) is equated with wahi (revelation).
8. Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an, completely revised and enlarged by William M. Watt, 162. The numbering of the Qur’anic verses in the present book follows the authoritative German edition by Rudi Paret, Der Koran.
9. On the madhahib shari’a schools see Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, chapters 6 and 9, and Joseph Schacht and Clifford Bosworth, The Legacy of Islam, chapter 9.
10. On hudud law see Ahmad Fathi Bohnasi, al-Jara’im fi al-fiqh al-Islami.
11. According to the founder of Islamic studies at Harvard (before that at Oxford), Sir Hamilton Gibb, the religious foundations of the Islamic caliphate were always based on a post eventum legitimation. See Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, in particular part II.
12. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 54 (“to apply and to complete the sacred law”), 54–55 (“a double administration”). Another authoritative source is N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law.
13. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, 67 (“there is no such thing”), 99 (“not … any rigid code of laws”), 131 (“was never implemented”).
14. Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, Usul al-shari’a.
15. See ibid. and Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, al-Islam al-Siyasi, 177–92.
16. See my paper presented in Tokyo at the International Conference on Comparative Constitutional Law, jointly organized by the Japanese Association for Comparative Constitutional Law in 2005, “Islamic Shari’a as Constitutional Law?” Based on my research for this essay I argue that Noah Feldman is wrong when he takes Islamist shari’a reasoning at face value. See his The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, chapter 3.
17. In his challenge to Max Weber the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell puts forward the notion of “the return of the sacred.” This is a lecture given in 1977 at the London School of Economics and published in his The Winding Passage. Weber’s notion of “disenchantment of the world” appears in Soziologie—Weltgeschichtliche Analysen—Politik, 317. See Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam, and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Webers Sicht des Islam.
18. See my 1980 contribution “Islam and Secularization” and twenty years later “Secularization and De-Secularization in Modern Islam.” The final outcome of this reasoning appears in chapter 6 of my Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
19. On the call for tatbiq al-shari’a, the implementation of shari’a, see Salah al-Sawi, al-Muhawara, and B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism, 158–78.
20. Abdullahi an-Na’im, Towards an Islamic Reformation, 100 (“the Qur’an does not mention”), 99 (“unattainable under shari’a”).
21. See Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, chapters 7 and 11.
22. Ali Abdelraziq, al-Islam wa usul al-hukm. For a French translation see Revue des Études Islamiques 7 (1933) and 8 (1934). On Abdelraziq, see B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism, 170–77. See also Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, al-Khilafah al-Islamiyya.
23. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War?
24. See Daniel Bell, “Return of the Sacred”; Max Weber, Soziologie—Weltgeschichtliche Analysen—Politik, 317; Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam; and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Webers Sicht des Islam.
25. Nekki Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism.
26. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-tariq, 5–7.
27. Sayyid Qutb, al-Salam al-Alami wa al-Islam, 171–73.
28. See chapters 2 on knowledge and chapter 6 on secularization in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
29. John Kelsay, Islam and War, 117; see also John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam.
30. Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Siyasa al-Shari’yya, reprinted in many editions and published by many presses. On Ibn Taymiyyah see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam, chapter 5. The early Abdullahi an-Na’im in Towards an Islamic Reformation once offered an alternative to Ibn Taymiyyah and his contemporary followers, but An-Na’im later changed his mindset. Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam, points at the impact of medieval Ibn Taymiyyah on modern Islamism.
31. This coinage leans on the famous formula of Eric Hobsbawm, “invention of tradition.”
32. On this rationalism in Islam see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam.
33. In contrast, Westernization was viewed positively earlier, for instance by Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization. Today, no scholar could write such a book, have it published by a university press, and go unscathed. On the de-Westernization of law see my paper published by the law school of the University of Frankfurt, “Die Entwestlichung des Rechts.”
34. This is an argument put forward by the Iranian born scholar Mehrzad Boroujerdi in Iranian Intellectuals and the West.
35. This notion was coined by Jürgen Habermas in Glauben und Wissen; for a critique see Tibi, “Habermas and the Return of the Sacred.” Habermas has never responded to this criticism.
36. See the contributions included in Y. Raj Isar and Helmut Anheier, Conflicts and Tensions, in particular my chapter, “Islam between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics.”
37. Al-Hayat, May 7, 2005. See the commentary by B. Tibi, “The Clash of Sharia and Democracy,” International Herald Tribune, September 17–18, 2005.
38. B. Tibi, “Islamic Law, Shari’a, and Human Rights” and “European Tradition of Human Rights and the Culture of Islam.”
39. Dale Eickelmann and James Piscatori, in chapter 2 of Muslim Politics, acknowledge “the invention of tradition in Muslim politics” but utterly fail to grasp the shari’atization of politics, nor do they distinguish between Islam and Islamism, or classical shari’a and the invention of its tradition.
40. Mohammed al-Ghazali, Huquq al-insan bain al-Islam wa I’lan al-umam al-mutahhidah; Mohammed Imara, al-Islam wa huquq al-insan.
41. See Abdullahi An-Na’im, Towards an Islamic Reformation, and in contrast Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State.
42. See Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, and B. Tibi, “The Pertinence of Islam’s Predicament with Democratic Pluralism.”
43. See Abdulazim Ramadan, Jama’at al-Takfir.
44. This is acknowledged by Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World, chapter 3, who nonetheless as a Marxist has great problems with understanding the meaning of religion beyond power and economics.
45. See, e.g., Najib al-Armanazi, al-Shar’ al-duwali fi al-Islam.
46. See ibid., Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, Usul al-shari’a, Abdullahi A. An-Na’im, Towards an Islamic Reformation, and Subhi al-Salih, Ma’alim al-shari’a al-Islamiyya. Al-Salih was the vice mufti of Lebanon, killed by Shi’ite gunmen in Beirut.
47. My understanding of international society in world politics has been shaped by Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, 13. Bull argues that international society exists “when a group of states conscious of certain common interests and common values form a society.” The values of shari’a do not fulfill this requirement.
48. On this notion see my chapter in Robert Fortner and Mark Fackler, Handbook of Global Communication.
49. On the Saudi-sponsored shari’a universalism see Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam. For a contrast see Paul Cliteur, The Secular Outlook.
50. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 221. See also Michael Akehurst, A Modern Introduction to International Law, 21 ff.; F. S. C. Northrop, The Taming of the Nations; and Terry Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States.
51. For more details on the Sunni and Shi’ite varieties of this Islamist internationalism see B. Tibi, Islam, World Politics, and Europe, part II.
52. See the contributions to Tore Lindholm and Kari Vogt, Islamic Law Reform and Human Rights.
53. See chapter 3 on law in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
54. Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 290–91.
55. Theodor Viehweg, Topik und Jurisprudenz, 118. This is allowed by Salih, Ma’alim al-shari’a, 122 ff., but not by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Halal wa al-haram fi al-Islam.
56. On the notion of cross-cultural morality and its meaning for bridging see my chapter in Roman Herzog et al., Preventing the Clash of Civilizations.
57. On this classical binary see Najib al-Armanazi, al-Shar’ al-duwali fi al-Islam; W. M. Watt, Islamic Political Thought, 91; and Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam.”
58. See B. Tibi, “Bridging the Heterogeneity of Civilizations.”
59. See the articles by Ann E. Mayer, Abdulaziz Sachedina, and Norman Caldor on “Islamic Law” in John Esposito, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Middle Eastern World, 2: 450–72.
60. See B. Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, 76–101, and Ann E. Mayer, “Law and Religion in the Muslim Middle East.”
61. See Donald E. Smith, Politics and Social Change in the Third World.
62. Rudi Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Bell and Watt, Introduction to the Qur’an; N. J. Dawood, The Koran, 320 ff.; and Johan Bouman, Gott und Mensch im Qur’an.
63. See W. M. Watt, Islamic Revelation in the Modern World.
64. N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, 5–7. See also part III, “Islamic Law in Modern Times.”
65. For an example see Sabir Tu’aima, al-Shari’a al-Islamiyya fi asr al-ilm, 208 ff.
66. Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform. Kerr was murdered by Islamist Shi’ite fanatics in Beirut in January 1984, while president of the American University of Beirut. Kerr is defamed by Muslehuddin, Philosophy in Islamic Law and the Orientalists, 242, 247.
67. See B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, 95–129, and my chapters in Lawrence Harrison, Developing Cultures, 1: 245–60, and 2: 163–80.
68. More on this in B. Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 159–66.
7. Islamism, Purity, and Authenticity
1. The fashionable notion of authenticity on which the claim to identity politics rests is a contemporary drive that is central to Islamism. My work on this subject has been associated with an effort to introduce the social-scientific study of religion and culture in international relations. As I have pointed out, interest in the new discipline of Islamology grew rapidly only after 9/11. The pilot projects on this issue area that have been pertinent for the completion of this chapter are the Culture and Globalization Research Project, chaired by Y. Raj Isar and Helmut Anheier, and the Culture Matters Research Project, chaired by Lawrence Harrison. I am a coauthor of the volumes in which the research findings of both projects are published: Y. Raj Isar and Helmut Anheier, Conflicts and Tensions, and Lawrence Harrison, Developing Cultures. Those projects provided the research background for this chapter, as well as to chapter 8 on authenticity in my Islam’s Predicament with Modernity. Here I develop the arguments included there, but with a further focus on Islamism and purity.
2. The classic on this subject is the book by David Apter, The Politics of Modernization. On Westernization see Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization.
3. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Bayinat al-hall al-Islami wa shabahat al-ilmaniyyin wa al-Mustaghribin.
4. Faruq Abdul-Salam, al-Ahzab al-siyasiyya wa al-fasl bain al-din wa al-siyasa, 4.
5. Ibid., 137. For more details on this issue see B. Tibi, “Secularization and De-Secularization in Islam,” and chapter 6 in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
6. See the interesting but not so critical book by Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity. The authoritative—but also uncritical—work on this subject is Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity.
7. Anwar al-Jundi, Min al-tabai’iyya ila al-asalah, 184.
8. Anwar al-Jundi, Ahdaf al-taghrib; on the conspiracy 11–29.
9. Mohammed Sharif Zaibaq and Ali Mohammed Jarisha, al-Ghazu al-fikri lil alam al-Islami.
10. Anwar al-Jundi, al-Mu’asarah fi itar al-asalah, 35. All of the following quotations, if not otherwise referenced, originate from that book and are translated from Arabic by the author.
11. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.
12. For the research on this inner-Islamic conflict in the history of ideas, see B. Tibi, “Politisches Denken im mittelalterlichen Islam zwischen Philosophie (Falsafa) und Religio-Jurisprudenz (Fiqh).”
13. On these questions see the bright answers given by Mohammed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy.
14. See John Kenny, The Politics of Identity. See also my chapter on Islamic identity politics in H. Anheier and Y. Raj Isar, Conflicts and Tensions.
15. This view is shared with the late Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: The best elaboration of the notion of cultural modernity is Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In the aftermath of 9/11 Habermas retreated and proclaimed a “postsecular society.” This deplorable retreat amounts to a setback, as I have argued in “Habermas and the Return of the Sacred.”
16. See B. Tibi, “Politisches Denken im mittelalterlichen Islam zwischen Philosophie (Falsafa) und Religio-Jurisprudenz (Fiqh).” In my comprehensive intellectual history of Islam, Der wahre Imam, I contrast the fiqh and falsafa traditions to demonstrate two rival discourses throughout Islamic history.
17. See Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage of Islam. This heritage is based on Hellenization with seeds of enlightenment. Contemporary Islamism claims to be an Islamic revival, but it is not based on this heritage.
18. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 18.
19. Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity, 191.
20. George Makdisi, The Rise of the Colleges.
21. For a survey on these efforts see the most valuable work of Anke von Kugelgen, Averroës und die arabische Moderne.
22. Mohammed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, 124.
23. Herbert A. Davidson, Averroes, al-Farabi, and Avicenna on Intellect. On Hellenization of Islam see W. M. Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, parts II and III.
24. For more details B. Tibi, “The Worldview of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists.”
25. Emmanuel Sivan, Militant Islam. To be sure, in Islam fiqh is not kalam (theology) and therefore Sivan is wrong!
26. Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity, 191, 193.
27. Ibid., 177.
28. Rifa’a R. al-Tahtawi, Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Paris. There is an excellent German translation by Karl Stowasser, al-Tahtawi.
29. B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, chapter 2.
30. On this accusations of Muslims of jahl, ignorance, by al-Afghani see the edition by Mohammed Imara, al-A’mal al-Kamila li al-Afghani, 448; see also 327–28.
31. See Hasan al-Banna’s collected writings in one volume, Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Imam al-Shahid.
32. Science was highly developed in classical Islam. For more details see Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, 29 ff., 176 ff.; and Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 47 ff. On the Islamic tradition of science see also Howard Turner, Science in Medieval Islam.
33. Gerald Holton, Science and Anti-Science.
34. See Max Weber, Soziologie, weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik, 317.
35. See David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, in particular chapters 8–10; quotation is from 168.
36. See chapter 2, “Knowledge” in: B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity; and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Bayinat al-hall al-Islami wa shabahat al-ilmaniyyin wa al-Mustaghribin. For a contrast see Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Bayinat al-hall al-Islami wa shabahat al-ilmaniyyin wa al-Mustaghribin.
37. See Ziauddin Sardar, Islamic Futures, 85–86; see also Ziauddin Sardar, Exploration in Islamic Science.
38. David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 170–71.
39. See Richard Martin, Mark R. Woodward, and Dwi S. Atmaja, Defenders of Reason in Islam.
40. The formula “bi al-wahi aw bi al-aql”—Either by revelation or by reason—was coined and given authenticity by Abu al-Hassan al-Marwadi, Kitab al-ahkam al-sultaniyya [Book of rules on the Sultanic government].
41. David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 174. See also 180.
42. See ibid., as well as Edward Grant, Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages; Toby E. Huff, Rise of Early Modern Science; and Howard Turner, Science in Medieval Islam.
43. Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order, 265–98.
44. International Institute of Islamic Thought, Islamiyyat al-ma’rifah.
45. See the second report of the United Nations Development Program on Arab Human Development 2003, Building a Knowledge Society (New York: United Nations, 2003). Instead of a search for knowledge, apologetic authors like C. A. Qadir, Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World, and Abdulrawiq Nawfal, al-Muslimun wa al-ilm, prefer to praise the Islamic collective self.
46. Among these accomplishments is the masterpiece of the medieval-Islamic philosopher al-Farabi, translated by Richard Walzer as Al-Farabi on the Perfect State. Basic texts by al-Farabi are included in the most valuable reader edited by Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy. See also David Reisman, “al-Farabi and the Philosophical Curriculum,” and the Farabi chapter in Tibi, Der wahre Imam, 133–50, as well as Ian Richard Netton, al-Farabi and His School.
47. Jamal al-Afghani, al-A’mal al-kamila, 448.
48. Niklas Luhmann, Funktion der Religion, 87.
49. On the Islamic dream, or illusion, of semimodernity see chapter 11 in B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
50. For example the major Islamic reformer Mohammed Abduh, al-Islam wa al-Nasraniyya bain al-Ilm wa al-Madaniyya.
51. Sadik J. al-Azm, Naqd al-fikr al-dini.
52. Mohammed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, 128.
53. International Institute of Islamic Thought, Islamiyyat al-ma’rifah.
54. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 180.
55. Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. Reilly, who has a point and rightly draws a line between the Islamic past and present, overstretches, however, Asha’rism (Islamic orthodoxy) and fails to draw a line between Islam and Islamism.
56. John Waterbury, “Social Science Research and Arab Studies in the Coming Decade.”
57. John Waterbury and Alan Richards, A Political Economy of the Middle East, chapter 14, “Is Islam the Solution?” 346–65.
8. Islamism and Totalitarianism
1. The interpretation in this book of political religions as totalitarian ideologies has been inspired by the participation in a research project on this issue conducted at the Hannah Arendt Center for the Study of Totalitarianism at the University of Dresden. In addition, my activity since 2007 as a consulting editor of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions had an impact on my thinking. This journal focuses on related research and also publishes my work. Other editors of TMPR, in particular Jeff Bale and Roger Griffin, have been inspiring. The journal published in its issue no. 1 of 2007 my study on Islamist totalitarianism “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism.” Jeffrey Bale and I were in charge for the TMPR special issue on Islamism (vol. 10, 2009). At the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, I contributed to the volume on political religion edited by Gerhard Besier and Hermann Lübbe, Politische Religion und Religionspolitik. The bilingual journal of the Center, Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft, has published since its establishment in 2000 several of my articles on Islamism interpreted as a political religion both in English and in German.
2. Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations. Chapter 8 includes this prediction made at the height of bipolarity and its binary of the East-West blocs.
3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. This assumption reflected a premature forecast. At the time of its publication, shortly after the end of the East-West conflict, most Western international relations scholars overlooked the challenge by Islamism in its claim for the restoration of Islamic supremacy as a return of history; for more details see my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, the introduction and chapter 5. Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy, continues to assume a global democratization.
4. In all respect due to the late Samuel Huntington and in an unforgettable gratitude for his invitation to join Harvard in 1982, I deplore his deliberate negligence of my work in which I express disagreement with his “clash of civilizations.” Huntington knew of my book Krieg der Zivilisationen and wrote me a friendly letter on March 30, 1995, with this positive feedback: “In skimming through the book, I could see that you have developed powerful arguments on the roles of civilizations, religion and of the West and Islam in the contemporary world. I trust the book will get a favorable reception.” Nevertheless, the late Huntington chose to ignore my book, which predates his, as well as the expression of disagreement, which is a violation of scholarly standards. I elaborated on our differences in the new edition of that book republished in 1998 (Munich: Heyne Verlag, expanded 1998), which includes a new chapter (305–33) in which I dissociate my thinking about civilizations from any Huntingtonization of the civilizational conflict, though without engaging in the ritual of a demonization of Huntington, which I reject. This mindset is reflected in “International Morality and Cross-Cultural Bridging,” my contribution to the volume of Roman Herzog, by then the president of Germany, Preventing the Clash of Civilizations, 107–26.
5. In this regard the most authoritative and highly competent case study on Egypt—which is also the most important country in the Middle East for the study of Islamism—is the impressive book by John Waterbury, Egypt under Nasser and Sadat. Also see chapter 14 on political Islam, both acting in opposition and when in power, in Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East.
6. In The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, 165–70, John Brenkman coins in a short section the term “Islam’s civil war,” which turns into a “geo-civil war,” though he fails to provide any further elaboration of the notion. In Islam’s Predicament with Modernity I address the same issue, but argue that there are intra-Islamic tensions related to the predicament indicated in the title of the book; when these tensions become politicized then they develop into sources of conflict (see chapter 5). This process happens not only locally and regionally, but also on a global level. This is the substance of what could be termed Islam’s “geo-civil war.”
7. Lawrence Harrison and Jerome Kagan, Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change. This is vol. 1 of the publication of the Culture Matters Research Program at the Fletcher School, Tufts University; vol. 2 is Lawrence Harrison and Peter L. Berger, Developing Cultures: Case Studies.
8. This crisis is addressed in four books, three of them by Muslim scholars. These are, chronologically, B. Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam; Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam; Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; and Hichem Djaït, Islamic Culture in Crisis.
9. B. Tibi, “Islam: Between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics.”
10. See Wilfried C. Smith, The Meaning and the End of Religion.
11. The coinage “al-hall al-Islami” originates in the trilogy bearing that title by Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
12. This argumentation appears in the repeatedly quoted, highly influential Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Hall al-Islami.
13. For references on Iran see Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat, on Afghanistan, Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban, and on Sudan, Dan Petterson, Inside Sudan.
14. For more details see B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, chapters 5 and 6, and my chapter on Islam in Roland Hsu, Ethnic Europe, 127–56.
15. See, for instance, the flawed studies by Jonathan Lawrence and Justine Vaisse, Integrating Islam; Jytte Klausen, The Islamic Challenge; and Jocelyne Cesari, Where Islam and Democracy Meet.
16. See B. Tibi; “Ethnicity of Fear?”; B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe; B. Tibi, “The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?”; and Lorenzo Vidino, al-Qaeda in Europe.
17. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, 124 (“disaster waiting to happen”), 119 (“compatibility of shari’a and democracy”). For a competing view on the notion of the “Islamic state” and for a different understanding of politicized shari’a see my The Challenge of Fundamentalism, chapters 7 and 8. In Chapter 6 of this book on the shari’atization in Islamist politics I also discuss the “shari’a state.” For a critical assessment of politicized shari’a see my contribution to the following legal authoritative publications: Mashood A. Baderin, International Law and Islamic Law, chapter 16, and Japanese Association of Comparative Constitutional Law, Church and State: Towards Protection for Freedom of Religion, 126–70.
18. On Islamism and democracy see Chapter 4 and also my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, chapter 7.
19. This assessment does not discount crisis and dissent in that country; see John Bradley, Saudi Arabia Exposed, and earlier Mamoun Fandy, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent.
20. John Waterbury, Egypt under Nasser and Sadat.
21. See the report “Turkey Sets Its Sights on a Whole New Constitution,” International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), September 14, 2010, 3. See also the report “Turkey Faces Rap (by EU) on Media Curbs,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2010, and the commentary “Turkey’s Radical Drift,” Wall Street Journal, June 4–6, 2010, 2. On early AKP influence see Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided,” and B. Tibi, “Turkey’s Islamist Danger”; see also Zeyno Baran, Torn Country.
22. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam.
23. See John Cooley, Unholy Wars. This book, published in 1999, includes on its cover a picture of Osama bin Laden, who was not yet well known in the United States. See also the earlier disclosure in Kurt Lehbeck, Holy War, Unholy Victory.
24. See the documentation of the European-German-Afghan connection that led to the 9/11 assaults that was filed by the editors of the German magazine Der Spiegel: Stefan Aust and Cordt Schnibben, 11. September. See also on the Hamburg cell of al-Qaeda Rohan Gunarattna, Inside al-Qaeda, 129–31.
25. Emad El Din Shahin, “Egypt’s Moment of Reform,” in Democratization in the European Neighborhood, 123. The same volume, edited by Michael Emerson, includes B. Tibi, “Islam, Freedom, and Democracy in the Arab World,” with a different assessment of Islamism.
26. Emad El Din Shahin “Egypt’s Moment of Reform,” 128, 129 (“institutional guarantees”); see also Shahin, Political Ascent.
27. Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.”
28. Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear, and Bruce Rutherford, Egypt after Mubarak, as well as Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truth.”
29. See the historical survey on the Weimar Republic by Hagen Schulze, Weimar Deutschland.
30. See the editorial “People Ignore Predictions They Dislike,” Financial Times, December 30, 2008, 7, whose author posits that the financial crisis of 2009 was predicted, but that the prediction was disliked and therefore ignored. This theory sheds light on the stance of opinion leaders in the West toward Islamism: they ignore predictions about Islamists in power (e.g., Hamas in Gaza) because they dislike these alerts.
31. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism.
32. Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, and Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
33. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix.
34. Max Horkheimer, a Holocaust survivor and the founder of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, who was my academic teacher, argued that supporters of his critical theory must pledge to combat any totalitarianism. See B. Tibi, “The Political Legacy of Max Horkheimer and Islamist Totalitarianism.” In this tradition and following both Arendt and Horkheimer, I published 2004 in German my book on Islamism bearing the title Der neue Totalitarismus.
35. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, is a superb study that upholds the continued topicality of Arendt’s theorizing about totalitarianism.
36. See note 1 above on totalitarian ideologies based on political religion and the reference to the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism–based study edited by Gerhard Besier, who was then HAIT director. The major theorist on political religions is Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion.
37. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, 266, 281.
38. Ibid., 35–36 (“a kind of imperialism”), 56 (“the Muslim Brotherhood led by the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna” and “one of the most threatening ways”).
39. See Jean Charles Brisard, Zarqawi.
40. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, “Zarqawi’s Life after Death,” International Herald Tribune, June 10–11, 2006, 4; see also the special issues on this subject “After Zarqawi,” Newsweek, June 19, 2006, and Time, the same date.
41. B. Tibi, “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism”; see also B. Tibi, “Political Legacy of Max Horkheimer and Islamist Totalitarianism,” and Der neue Totalitarismus.
42. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix (“totalitarianism is not merely dictatorship”), 281 (“the permanent domination”), 326 (“totalitarian movements”).
43. Ibid., 308 (“aim at and succeed”), 359 (“The motive of a global conspiracy”).
44. On the terror of Hamas see the excellent study by Matthew Levitt, Hamas, chapters 2 and 5.
45. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 312.
46. Zeyno Baran, Torn Country.
47. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 391–92.
48. Ibid., 331; see also chapter 13, “Ideology and Terror.”
49. Ibid., 465.
50. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.
51. See Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas. See also B. Tibi, “Countering Terrorism als Krieg der Weltanschauungen.”
52. For a prominent example of this flaw see Robert Pape, Dying to Win.
53. B. Tibi, “Islamism and Democracy.”
54. Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West.
55. See the deceptive and misleading selection of text in the reader of Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam, in which the heir of Sayyid Qutb, namely Yusuf al-Qaradawi, becomes a representative of “liberal Islam.”
56. Francis Fukuyama, “Identity, Immigration, and Liberal Democracy.” See also B. Tibi; “Ethnicity of Fear?”; B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe; B. Tibi, “The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?”; and Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West.
57. Jürgen Habermas, Glauben und Wissen; see B. Tibi, “Habermas and the Return of the Sacred.”
58. In Hedley Bull’s seminal work The Anarchical Society, the study of order is placed at the center of international relations; see in particular part I. For an appreciation of Bull, see the essay “Bull and the Contribution to International Relations” in Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders, 13–34.
59. Sayyid Qutb, al-Islam wa Mushkilat al-Hadarah, 191; the reference to the enemies is on 186. Qutb combines theology with politics, leading to the religionized politics that underpin Islamism as a political religion.
60. Without a reference to Hannah Arendt, Emanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, uses the term as a subtitle for his book. The related worldview is analyzed by B. Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 53–68.
61. See B. Tibi; “Ethnicity of Fear?”; B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe; B. Tibi, “The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?”; Lorenzo Vidino, New Muslim Brotherhood in the West; and Peter Katzenstein and Timothy Byrnes, Religion in an Expanding Europe, which introduced the concept of “transnational religion” into the discipline of international relations in a project conducted at Cornell University 2003–6 in which I participated, contributing the chapter “The Europeanization of Islam or the Islamization of Europe.”
62. The origin of this concept is included in Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq, published in millions of copies in Arabic as well as in diverse translations to other Islamic languages. I use the 13th legal edition.
63. Sayyid Qutb, al-Salam al-’alami wa al-Islam, 171–73. See Chapter 5 and my “Jihad.”
64. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror.
65. Hedley Bull, “The Revolt against the West”; Bull’s interpretation is supported by the Muslim Brother Muhhamed Imarah in al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya wa al-Tahaddi al-Hadari (The Islamic awakening and the civilization challenge) (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1991), in which he argues for a “revolt against the West” in this sense: the revolt is not only against the hegemony of the West, it is against its civilization as such and its values; see 30–40 and, on the Muslim Brothers, 41–83.
66. See the remarkable article by Daniel Philpott, “The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations.”
67. This idea was put forward at first in a project of the German Council for Foreign Affairs on postbipolar German policy; see the resulting three-volume publication edited by Karl Kaiser and colleagues, Deutschlands neue Außenpolitik, including my contribution “Die Revolte gegen den Westen in der neuen internationalen Umwelt.”
68. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, provides the best framework for conceptualizing this drive.
69. See the contributions in Adeed Dawisha, Islam in Foreign Policy, and more recently Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser, A Sense of Siege, and B. Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, 130–52.
70. John Kelsay, Islam and War, 117.
71. Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders; on the term “disorder,” with reference to religion and fundamentalism, and on “disorder” as a threat to security, see B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism.
72. Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, 285.
73. See Salim al-Awwa, fi al-Nizam al-Siyasi li al-dawla al-Islamiyya.
74. B. Tibi, “Bridging the Heterogeneity of Civilizations.” On the roots of Islamic humanism see Joel Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam.
75. See Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas, which includes my chapter “Intercivilizational Conflict between Value Systems and Concepts of Order.”
76. John Kelsay, Islam and War, 117.
77. Naika Foroutan, Kulturdialoge zwischen dem Westen und der islamischen Welt; John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy.
78. Zeyno Baran, The Other Muslims.
79. The forthcoming collection of my revised research papers to which I refer at the beginning of the acknowledgments revolves around these issues: Islam in Global Politics: Conflict and Cross-Civilizational Bridging (New York: Routledge, 2012).
9. Civil Islam as an Alternative to Islamism
1. Andrew McCarthy, The Great Jihad, 40 (“I’m not a Muslim”), 39 (“Is it wrong”). See also Andrew Bostom, “Islamism or Islam,” The American Thinker, November 14, 2009.
2. Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity, 21.
3. See B. Tibi, “The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?” and “Ethnicity of Fear?” On Islam in Europe see also chapters 5 and 6 in my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe, and two books by Lorenzo Vidino, Al-Qaeda in Europe and more recently The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. On Islam in the United States see Zuhdi Jasser, “Americanism vs. Islamism.”
4. The Palestinian Hamas-variety of political Islam also receives support in the Islamic diaspora of the United States; for more details see Matthew Levitt, Hamas, 145–55, and for a more general overview see Jane Smith, Islam in America. For an alternative see the liberal U.S. Muslim M. Zudhi Jasser, “Americanism vs. Islamism.”
5. The title and subtitle of the book by the former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy are hyperbolic: The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. McCarthy’s misconception results from his missing the distinction between Islam and Islamism.
6. The result of this missed effort is described in the New York Times report on German-Muslim jihadists who fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Souad Mekhennet, “Young Muslims Travel Route from Germany to Radicalism,” July 31, 2010, A4, A6.
7. Daniel Philpott, “The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations.”
8. The source of this concept is my paper presented in Paris 1992, “Les Conditions d’Euro-Islam.” See also the report on Dalil Boubakir, the imam of the Paris grand mosque, who supports Euro-Islam: Katrin Bennhold, “Muslim and French and Proud to Be Both,” International Herald Tribune, March 16, 2006, 2. On this issue one reads in Time, December 24, 2001, 49: “Bassam Tibi … who coined the term Euro-Islam, insists on the integration of Europe’s Muslims,” 49. On the debate on Islam in Europe see B. Tibi, “Between Communitarism and Euro-Islam,” and “Euro-Islam.”
9. The classic by Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, is highly pertinent for a liberal response against totalitarian Islamism. This is the intellectual underpinning for my plea for an “open Islam” reflected in my concept of Euro-Islam.
10. B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity.
11. On democracy, Islamism, and Islam see chapter 7 of my Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe; on the overall context that has shaped my life’s work, see my Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, in particular the section “Between Four Worlds” in the introduction.
12. See the report by James Slack, “Terrorism? We’ll Call It Anti-Islamic Activity,” Daily Mail, January 18, 2008, ridiculing the “new language” of Jacqui Smith, who by then was secretary of the British home security department. One can safely compare this British politician with Obama’s counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, with whom I took issue in Chapter 5.
13. This Islamist propaganda effort is employed in a war of ideas. See my chapter in Eric Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas.
14. Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, 2.
15. François Revel, Democracy against Itself, chapter 12 on Islamism.
16. This “universal good” is best established in Indonesia as civil Islam. The global success of Islamism also occurs in Southeast Asia, but Indonesia seems to be an exception; see Robert Hefner, Civil Islam. Indonesia is the Islamic country with the largest Muslim population in the world (235 million). There it was possible for me, in teaching, lecturing, and writing in the media, to discuss pending issues with my coreligionists in Jakarta on several occasions. One of these occasions was the international conference on Debating Progressive Islam: A Global Perspective at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) in Jakarta, July 2009. It was a forum for liberal Muslims to express the need for pluralism in Islamic civilization. UIN is the graduate school of Hidayatullah Islamic State University, which allowed me during my tenure there in 2003 to teach a course on my concept of a reform Islam. I also published several books in Bahasa, Indonesia, the language of the country. On pluralism and dialogue see the UIN volume edited by Karlina Helmanita et al., Dialogue in the World of Disorder, which includes my chapter “Islamic Civilization and the Quest for Democratic Pluralism.” Indonesia is also the country where U.S. president Barack Obama spent a part of his childhood. It is noteworthy to quote the report of The International Herald Tribune of April 25–26, 2009, from Jakarta about the April 2009 election in Indonesia: “From Pakistan to Gaza and Lebanon, militant Islamist movements have gained ground rapidly in recent years, fanning Western fears of a consolidation of radical Muslim governments. But here in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, just the opposite is happening.… In parliamentary elections … voters punished Islamic parties.… The largest Islamic party, the Prosperous Justice Party … squeezed out a gain of less than 1 percent over its showing in 2004.… Indonesians overwhelmingly backed the country’s major secular parties even though more of them are continuing to turn to Islam in their private lives.” This is a hopeful coverage about a civil Islam against Islamism. In 2005 I continued my work in Southeast Asia in a project at the National University of Singapore. This research was published in the related volume edited by Anthony Reid and Michael Gilsenan, Islamic Legitimacy in Plural Asia, which includes my chapter “Islam and Cultural Modernity.” Earlier in Jakarta I contradicted the ambassador of Iran to Indonesia Shaban S. Moaddab, who presented there his country as a model that Indonesia might emulate. His speech was included for politeness in the UIN volume Dialogue in the World of Disorder, 149–58, followed by mine (159–201) as a rejoinder not only at more length but also with arguments and evidence instead of Iranian state propaganda, which dominated the ambassador’s contribution.
17. Karl Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies; see also the contributions in Leonard Weinberg, Democratic Responses to Terrorism, including my chapter, “Islam, Islamism, and Democracy.”
18. See Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. I have addressed this crisis in Crisis of Modern Islam. See also the Muslim voice of Hichem Djaït, Islamic Culture in Crisis.
19. B. Tibi, “Bridging the Heterogeneity of Civilizations.”
20. The EU-sponsored volume on Islamist radicalization edited by Michael Emerson and Kristina Kausch, The Challenge for Euro-Mediterranean Relations, includes this misguided view.
21. Zeyno Baran, Torn Country.
22. See the report from Istanbul by Janine Zacharia, “Press Freedom,” Washington Post, July 5, 2010, A7, and on the response of the EU to curbing the freedom of the press by the AKP see Marc Champion: “Turkey Faces Rap on Media Curbs,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2010, A10. Steven Rosen, “Erdogan and the Israel Cord,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2010, A21, also touches on this issue; see also Don Bilefsky and Sebnem Arsu, “Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to the Elite of Turkey,” New York Times, July 16, 2010, A4. It has been proven that IHH (Humanitarian Relief Foundation), which led the flotilla of May 2010 to Gaza in support of Hamas, is an Islamist charity and that this action was supported by the AKP government.
23. Marvine Howe, Turkey Today, 191.
24. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided,” 55, 57, 69.
25. International Herald Tribune (global ed. of New York Times), September 14, 2010. See also Ali Carkoglu and Ersim Kalaycioglu, The Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey; William Hale and Ergun Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism in Turkey; and Arda Can Kumbaracibasi, Turkish Politics and the Rise of the AKP.
26. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 18.
27. Herbert Davidson, Averroës, Al-Farabi, and Avicenna on Intellect.
28. On Islamic humanist rationalism see Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, and in contrast on totalitarian Islamism see B. Tibi, Der neue Totalitarismus. “Heiliger Krieg” und westliche Sicherheit. This interpretation is also shared with the Muslim scholar Mehdi Mozaffari, “The Rise of Islamism in the Light of European Totalitarianism” and Globalization and Civilizations, as well as with Jeffrey Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism.”
29. On this Islamic enlightenment see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam, part II.
30. Mohammed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, 124.
31. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.
32. John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, 165.
33. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, 7 (“Religion …”), 305–6 (“without sacrificing”).
34. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.
35. Azyumardi Azra, Indonesia, Islam, and Democracy, 213–15.
36. This is the view of Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truths.” In this review of Paul Berman, Flight of the Intellectuals, Lynch writes (on his first page) of Berman’s “obsession … [that] approaches the pathological.”
37. See the contributions in Zeyno Baran, The Other Muslims.
38. Ibid.
39. Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage of Islam.
40. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: “Until the Seventeenth Century of our era, the Islamicate society … was the most expansive society in the Afro-Asian hemisphere and had the most influence on other societies” (97). See also Zeyno Baran, ed., The Other Muslims; Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage of Islam.
41. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History, 97. Hodgson is the author of the—in my view—best history of Islamic civilization published in three volumes under the title The Venture of Islam.
42. My thinking on cultural change in Islamic civilization can be found in chapter 14 of Lawrence Harrison and Jerome Kagan, Developing Cultures. The most complete expression of my understanding of diversity attached to pluralism of religions is Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, 209–36; see also the references in the long note 16 above. To be sure, my critique of Islam and Islamism dismisses the rhetoric of a “clash of civilizations”; in my plea for “International Morality and Cross-Cultural Bridging,” I suggest a thinking different from that of Huntington.
43. Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia, 75.
44. See the Tunisian-French Muslim writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sortir de la Malédiction, who employs this term. Meddeb’s ideas are discussed at length in Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, 45–50.
45. See especially B. Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity, 209–36.
46. Therefore, I chose for Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe the subtitle Democratic Peace and Euro Islam versus Global Jihad to express my commitment to Immanuel Kant’s “Zum ewigen Frieden.”
47. Ali Oumlil, Fi shar’iyat al-Ikhtilaf, 12, 89.