RADICAL ISLAM, MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY AND MODERN POLITICS
Emmanuel Sivan
Yale University Press, 1985
218 pages
IN THE PATH OF GOD, ISLAM AND POLITICAL POWER
Daniel Pipes
Basic Books, 1983
373 pages
Which one, the military nation-state, or a return to Islamic values, will help the Arab world turn to new glory, and incidentally to modernize its structure and economy? This is the basic question-complex asked by Professor Emmanuel Sivan, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Professor Daniel Pipes from the United States Naval War College. To be sure, their topics do not quite overlap. Sivan is mostly interested in the unity of Islamic thought on political matters, from the writing of medieval scholars to the present time. Pipes focuses on the present, especially the last few decades, during which the Arab state (including Iran, which is Moslem but not Arabic) emerged from historical passivity to an almost decisive role, thanks to their geopolitical situation and to the Western industrial need of their black gold, oil.
In these two volumes, interested mainly in political developments, religion plays a prominent function. Islam is the least secularized of the three major monotheistic religions, and the authors stand before this phenomenon with a certain incomprehension, although they study it and describe it with scholarly thoroughness. One of their questions is, precisely whether religion is a constructive or a hindering effect, and whether a modern industrial society may be built when religious values are part of a community's laws and attitudes.
Sivan deals with the second revolution of the Arab world, the first having taken place in the early nineteenth century, after Napoleon's landing in Egypt. Liberal and national ideas began to conquer the minds of Moslem thinkers and politicians, but, so the present reconsideration runs, they also alienated the Arabs from their religion. The central ambition from those times to our own decades has been to beat the West at its own game and build a strong, modern, dynamic society, eventually a united Arab empire, stronger yet than individual nations. Since Arabs, again leaving out the Iranians, never felt really comfortable with the nation-state (a point not emphasized by the authors as it should have been), they were aspiring to the reconstruction of Mohammed's Moslem unity, although in modern form. In whatever shape, the first revolution did achieve a real success, since in this second half of the twentieth century there are Arab states, more or less viable. Had they used the enormous moneys gained through the oil wealth, the second revolution would also have proved successful. Daniel Pipes, for one, believes that the opportunity has been missed, as any traveler may ascertain. Wherever the funds have gone, they did not enrich the infrastructure of these countries. Misery and underdevelopment are here and there interrupted by patches of prosperity, but the masses have not yet benefited even by the results of the first political revolution, let alone by second economic one.
The question now is whether the rise of Moslem fundamentalism in the 1930s and widening since then, is due to
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