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From the Caliphate to Khomeini
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13822 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1988 |
4,169 Words |
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Khalid Durán
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THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE OF ISLAM
Bernard Lewis
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988
168 pp., $14.95
In this slim, 168-page volume, Bernard Lewis speaks not only about the various body politics of the Muslim empires, but also about relations between the rulers and the ruled, and the Muslim understanding of war and peace. He does this within the context of a diplomatic history of the Islamic Orient. As such, it is a much needed corrective to the recent flood of literature on Islam and Middle Eastern politics, much of it confounded with exotic but imprecisely defined vocabulary. It is interesting to note that Muslim social scientists themselves are having difficulty reaching a consensus on the terminology to explain the advent and spread of so-called Islamic fundamentalism.
Lewis' study is not a handbook, although it has many such characteristics. Neither is it an essay nor a dictionary nor a lexicon, although it resembles a series of lectures that could serve as the groundwork for an encyclopedia of Muslim political terms, together with elaborate footnotes, which quite a few students of Islamics are eagerly looking for.
Fundamentalism and Islamism
The author joins numerous scholars who are not happy with the use of the term "fundamentalist" to describe the radical Muslim activists presently so much in the news. It is, of course, correct that the term "fundamentalist" is of fairly recent coinage, having its origin in late nineteenth-century Protestant America. The particular brand of Muslims subsumed under this rubric has antecedents in the last century as well. Their claim to revive the "golden age" of early Islam in its "pristine purity" is a tall claim, too. In fact, there is an appreciable modernist strand in this Islamic fundamentalism, inasmuch as it castigates superstitious practices and certain unsavory excesses of popular religion such as worship of the saints and black magic. "Fundamentalist" Islamic movements advocate voluntarist ethics and disavow fatalistic quietism. They promote education, including sports, and venture into new economic activities. Some of them have a kind of Calvinist flair.
While some of this "Islamic fundamentalism" has a pietist motivation and is partially akin to reformism, some of it is religious in name only. The latter is best defined as Islamo-Fascism because its use of religious nomenclature to legitimize military dictatorships (Nimeiry in the Sudan, Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan) is strikingly similar to the nacionalcatolicismo in Spain under Franco. The fact that the Generalissimo's relations with the fascist Falange Party were quite tense at times does not invalidate this comparison but rather corroborates it. Nimeiry and Zia ul Haq, too, were not members of the Islamist Party in their countries. There was much conflict, and yet both forces depended upon each other.
Islamists have often consciously copied the fascist pattern of thrusting a centralized state ruled by one particular ethnic group. (Arabized northerners in Sudan, Persians in Iran, Muhajir-Panjabis in Pakistan) upon the rest of an unwilling population, eliminating national and religious minorities as well as political dissidents within their own
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