Abstract
At the end of the twentieth century, observers of the Middle East worked to define the parameters, reach, and trajectory of Islamization. Particularly after 9/11, policymakers and analysts redoubled efforts to gauge the extent of Islamization’s current and future progress and to grasp its implications for American interests. The American political—military policy community has also publicly and analytically worked to disaggregate the seemingly monolithic Islamist threat into two camps: those whose interests are inimical to American interests and those whose attitudes toward the United States do not go beyond mild antipathy or ambivalence.
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Notes
Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996);
see also John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Shibley Telhami, The Stakes: America in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 1–66; M. Hakan Yavuz, “Is There a Turkish Islam: The Emergence of Convergence and Consensus,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 24, no. 2 (2004);
Jilian Schwedler “Islamic Identity: Myth, Menace, or Mobilizer?” SAIS Review, A Journal of International Affairs, vol. 21, no. 2 (2001), 1–17;
Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Policy and Idolatry,” Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs Merrill House Conversation, edited transcript of remarks, November 2, 2001, at www.carnegiecouncil.org/printerfriendlymedia.php/prmID/82 , accessed May 2, 2005;
Shibley Telhami and James Steinberg, “Fighting Binladenism,” in Flynt Leverett, ed., The Road Ahead: Middle East Policy in the Bush Administration’s Second Term (Washington: The Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, 2005), 13–20.
Enduring illustrations of the variegated nature of Islam and Islamic activism include Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East, rev. ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000);
Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971);
and Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
The literature on this debate is extensive. For a few examples, see Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics, vol. 36, no. 2 (2004); Wicicham, “Islamist Auto-Reform: Lessons from Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait,” UCLA International Institute Lecture, April 21, 2005;
and Raymond W. Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Argued most forcefully by Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 268–280.
For discussions of these Arab Muslim thinkers and selections from their writings, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 67–161;
Sylvia G. Haim, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 3–34, 78–80;
Charles Kurtzman, ed., Modernist Islam: 1840–1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–39, 50–60, 152–157.
William Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati Al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997);
Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism: Nation and State in the Arab World (London: Blackwell, 2001);
and Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Alexander Scholch, Egypt for the Egyptians (London: Ithaca Press, 1981);
Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: The Social and Cultural Origins of F.Pypt’s ‘Urabi Movement’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
and Arthur Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt: The Formation ofa Nation State, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004).
Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 308–373;
Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1998), 431–457;
Erik J. Zurcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 148.
Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 55–74.
James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35;
Jean-Claude Vatin, “Popular Puritanism versus State Reformism: Islam in Algeria,” in James P. Piscatori, ed., Islam in the Political Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 111.
Christophe Jaffrelot, ed., Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation? (London: Zed Books, 2002);
Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000), 386–421, 563–569.
Hillel Frisch, “The Evaluation of Palestinian Nationalist Islamic Doctrine: Territorializing a Universal Religion,” Canadian Review in Nationalism, vol. 21 (1994), 45–55;
N. Johnston, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (London: Kegan and Paul, 1982);
Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974);
and Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement 1929–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977).
This is the concern of Sami Zubaida, Islam: The People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), ix–xvii.
Hence the pitfalls of otherwise useful works such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1996);
and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979)—not that the critiques therein are unhelpful.
A.L. Macfie, Orientalism Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Unsurpassed in their coverage of these dynamics are Marshall G.S. Hodgson’s magisterial three-volume The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975–77);
and Ira Lapidus’s peerless one-volume A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
For the urban–rural disconnect, see Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1981); for works examining similar dynamics elsewhere,
see Stephanie Cronin, ed., The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003);
and Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson, and Barak Salmoni, eds., Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005).
A hadith, or saying attributed to Muhammad, quoted in John O. Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islah,” in John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33. This remains the most concise, insightful, and readable account.
These issues are covered admirably well in Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126–129, 141–151.
Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 2001), 135. For an early, still valuable study of al-Ghazali,
see W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: A Study of al-Gazali (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963).
Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (New York: SUNY Press, 1994);
RC. Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986);
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 216–251;
and Colin Imber, Ebu’s-Suud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
For a recent study suggesting that the movement’s founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab was much more open-minded than his latter day admirers would suppose, see Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to GlobalJihad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994);
For a quite engaging journalistic account illuminating the religious Islamic aspects as well as contemporary meaning of Imam Shamil in Chechnya, see Nicholas Griffin, Caucasus in the Wake of Warriors (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).
Nehemia Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa: A Study of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the Pre-Colonial Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968);
Nehemia Levtzion, Islam in West Africa: Religion, Society and Politics to 1800 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994);
David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985);
and Moustapha Kane, David Robinson, David Dwyer, and Sonja Fagerberg, eds., The Islamic Regime of Fuuta Tooro: An Anthology of Oral Tradition Transcribed in Pulaar and Translated into English (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1984).
Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Kurzman, Modernist Islam; for Central Asia see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); for the Far East,
see Ibrahim bin Abu Bakar, Islamic Modernism in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1994) for the Far East, see Ibrahim bin Abu Bakar, Islamic Modernism in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1994).
For a documentary example of this, see ibn al-Athir, “Puritanism in Baghdad,” in Bernard Lewis, ed., Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19–20.
Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 37–44; Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 70–79; and Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul.
Karpat, The Politicization of Islarn, 172–188, 223–240; see also Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
The parallel sector as an analytical tool is developed by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Islam in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 93–118.
Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975);
J.S. Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971).
Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34–39.
M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133–178.
John R. Hayes, ed., The Genius of Arab Civilization, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1992), chapters by Hamarneh and Sabra in particular;
and Bernard Lewis, ed., The World of Islam (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), especially the chapter by Sabra.
Ralph H. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985); for more on the idea of a secular space in traditional Islam,
see Ira M. Lapidus, “The Separation of Church and State in the Development of Early Islamic Society,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 6 (1975), 363–385.
For Middle Eastern historians adopting the Western, Orientalist perspective, see Gabriel Piterberg, “The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case,” in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Exaggerated emphasis on Islamist atavism and antimodernity mars the otherwise superb work by Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Laurie Goodstein and Greg Myre, “Clerics Fighting a Gay Festival for Jerusalem,” The New York Times, March 31, 2005, Al: “They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable,” Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel’s two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. “It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it.”
Jon B. Alterman, New Media, New Politics? From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998); John W. Anderson, “New Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere of Islam,” Social Research, vol. 70, no. 3 (2003).
The best example of this can still be found in Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 1–146.
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 24–30, 40–41;
and Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 177–183.
Eloquently described in Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 37–62.
William E. Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s Doctrine of Jahaliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (2003), 521–545.
Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994);
and Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
Jenny White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Ali Carkoglu, “Turkey’s November 2002 Elections: A New Beginning?” Middle East Review of International Affairs, vol. 6, no. 4 (2002); Soner Cagaptay, “The November 2002 Elections and Turkey’s New Political Era,” Middle East Review of InternationalAffairs, vol. 6, no. 4 (2002); and Barak Salmoni, “Strategic Partners or Estranged Allies: Turkey, the United States, and Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Strategic Insights (July 2003).
Yitzhak Nakash, “The Shiites and the Future of Iraq,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2003).
For work that might take too seriously the claims of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to already embody civil society, see Denis J. Sullivan and Sana Abed-Kotob, Islam in Contemporary Egypt: Civil Society vs. the State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).
For this phenomenon in Egypt, see Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey through the World of Militant Islam (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 230–251.
Jilian Schwedler, “Political Contestation under Limited Democracy: The Islamic Action Front,” in Hani Hourani, ed., The Social History of Jordan (Amman, Jordan: Markaz al-Urdun al-Jadid, 2002);
Quintan Wiktorowicz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (Albany and Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 2001).
David A. Kaplan, “America is Spending Millions to Change the Very Face of Islam,” US News and World Report, April 25, 2005.
There is far too much literature on democracy and reform in the Middle East to cite here. Two works worthy of consideration are Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway, eds., Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005);
and Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik, eds., Modernization, Democracy, and Islam (New York: Praeger, 2005).
As just one example of this oft-repeated sentiment, see James Phillips, “Press Iran’s Khatami to Follow Words with Deeds,” The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, no. 152 (July 23, 1998), 2.
See the still-valid points made in connection with Iran by James H. Noyes, “Falacies, Smoke, and Pipe Dreams: Forcing Change in Iran and Iraq,” Middle East Policy, vol. 7, no. 3 (2000), 32–50.
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Salmoni, B.A. (2006). Islamization and American Policy. In: Russell, J.A. (eds) Critical Issues Facing the Middle East. Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983206_5
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