Radical Islam and the Western Mind

Following up on a recent post, a few inquirers have emailed me about my ongoing studies related to radical Islam and its Western intellectual roots and requested some sources. Here's are six good, accessible articles for the layperson to get you going:

Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, "Terror, Islam and Democracy" Journal of Democracy 13/2 (April 2002)

Waller R. Newell, "Postmodern Jihad," Weekly Standard (November 26, 2001)

Paul Berman, "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror," New York Times Magazine (March 23, 2004) - requires free registration

Daniel Pipes, "The Western Mind of Radical Islam," First Things (December 1995)

Wesley Yang, "The Philosopher and the Ayatollah," Boston Globe (June 12, 2005)

As for books, here's a short list:

Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival
Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God
Daniel Brumberg, Reinventing Khomeini
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism

That should keep you busy for at least the next week...

As for my studies, I'm looking at the topic from a pointed worldview/history of ideas perspective: how did these guys get to where they are? What is in their "footnotes"? Why do many of the themes in their ideology so closely mirror those in Western revolutionary thought? While I would agree that the ideology of Islamism is relatively new, and somewhat of a departure from classical Islam, what is it in the Islamic worldview that allows itself to be coopted in the manner that it has been?

At this point, the teachings of classical Islam are becoming increasingly irrelevent, because the Muslim world is solidifying around Islamist ideology. It is my position that the criticism that Islamism is a form of "fundamentalism" (e.g. Karen Armstong, et al.) is really uninformed and the result of poor presuppositions. Most of the individuals making this criticism are secular fundamentalists themselves. I reject the use of the Western right/left categories generally, because they are so subjective and are rarely good explanations in any discussion, but they are particularly poor when discussing Islamic radicalism, which is usually ascribed as a movement from the right. But in fact, the brains behind bin Laden were committed Leftists. From those sources, many of whom studied in the West (Qutb, Shariati, Aflaq), Islamists picked up concepts from Marxist, Existentialist, and Darwinian thought and "dressed them up in Islamic clothes" (to use a phrase from the Boroumand sisters).

One of the fascinating themes I've been studying this week is how Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker that synthesized many of these Western themes and made them accessible to the Islamic world (his brother was one of bin Laden's mentors and university professors), pinched the cultural idea of the West as "barbarism" from a French Social Darwinist, Alexis Carrel, to create his seminal idea of the non-Islamic world as "jahiliyyah" (paganism). (For a good, detailed analyisis of Qutb's importance, see the Berman article cited above; another good source is this short paper by Luke Loboda).

Another theme I'm working on relates to the ideological father of the Iranian Revolution, Ali Shariati. In an essay I'm reading today, he makes the case that Islamic thought doesn't regard everyone as "human", or that we're not all human in the same way, i.e. we're not all created in God's image. He makes a pretty convincing case from his exegesis of the Quran. This allows Islamists to justify killing non-Muslims and ignorant Muslims (Muslims that don't agree with them and are therefore not "enlightened") -- all proceeding from their Islamic worldview.

Worldview matters, folks. While many writers have examined the ideology behind Islamism, no one has yet approached the topic from a strictly "worldview" analysis. I hope my continuing studies can rectify that and promote some further thinking and discussion in this vein.

Listening to today: Nina Simone, The Essential Nina Simone, Vol. 2; Nickel Creek, Nickel Creek
(I have to admit I still haven't recovered from the Alanis Morissette cover of Seal's Crazy. It will take some time, I'm sure, but in the meantime, I've listened to his first Seal album [he names all of his albums after himself] a couple of times since.)