by
Roy P. Mottahedeh
It is a great pleasure to introduce Hamid Enayat’s Modern Islamic Political Thought to a new generation of readers. Political thought is by its nature a diffuse subject stretching from political philosophy to everyday sentiments on proper and/or necessary political order. Its history may be written with a view to emphasising the continuity of a tradition or the pressures of immediate political circumstances on the Islamic political thinkers considered.
Hamid Enayat was a scholar of great depth and breadth. He was a social as well as an intellectual historian and in his preface he acknowledges that hundreds more pages would be needed to place the books he considers in the full day-to-day context in which they appeared. By and large he omits this day-to-day context.
Enayat’s book is, nevertheless, a classic because he chose clearly defined topics and wrote about them with insight and great learning. He was unusually well-placed to do so. He had devoted his life to intellectual history and was as well-read in secular as in Islamic sources. His translations into Persian of Aristotle and Hegel are still much admired. Moreover, he was one of the very few scholars who truly knew both Arabic and Persian. His enormous reading in these languages created a book that emphasised not only the old stand-bys such as Rashīd Riḍā and Ṭabāṭabā‘ī but also somewhat less well-known authors such as Muḥibb ad-Dīn al-Khaṭīb and Khālid Muḥammad Khālid.
The clearly defined areas of interest that he chose to treat in this book, such as Shī‘ī–Sunnī disputes and the arguments over the caliphate in the twentieth century, are masterfully done. The light cast on many of these subjects has never been surpassed. In particular, his treatment of Shī‘īsm in all periods has detail and nuance that repay many readings. It is the continuing relevance of the categories he suggests that makes his book essential reading for contemporary students of political thought. When he proposes that the ‘basic’ mood of Shī‘īsm (allowing for many exceptions) was: ‘particularism, esotericism, historicism, idealism, a pessimistic conception of human nature, a paradoxical apathy in politics, and emotionalism’ (p. here), one recognises that this is a well-thought through catalogue with which one might disagree, yet which one would be foolish to disregard. In similar ways Enayat’s classifications and points of view find continuing relevance in suggesting categories and perspectives, the importance of which continues to impress.
The book has another unusual advantage in that, while being generally objective in its portrayal of modern Islamic thought, it is written by an ‘insider’ who is intellectually engaged with his sources and not by an ‘antiquarian’ who describes discussions which have no value whatsoever in and of themselves. He even enters into some of the arguments, for example his defence of the ideas of ‘Alī ‘Abd ar-Rāziq.
Thanks to his engagement with the intellectual history he discusses, the scholarship with which he illuminates the topics he chooses and the very precise yet handsome language in which he expresses himself, his work nearly becomes a primary source itself to which we necessarily return. In spite of later developments and recent detailed studies of the figures he treats, Hamid Enayat leaves us with a vision which any serious student of this subject must reckon. Readers of this book will join his many admiring students, colleagues and friends in regretting that we lost him so early in his life.
Roy P. Mottahedeh
Professor of History
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Harvard University