"Terror, Islam, and Democracy,"
Read it. Have a few summary comments with more detail if we decide to discuss it further.
It's one of the better essays we've collectively read. My favorite was in the Rose and Hogue edited book, by the assistant professor of religion at Princeton on Islam. But this one is in the competition. It's large in scope, well written, seems to have control of the argument (some questions in a moment), and raises very significant questions.
I thought it was strongest on Iran, not surprisingly because, according to the blurb, the two sisters are Iranians and are working on a "study" of the Iranian revolution. And, because one of the clear agendas driving the arguments, was to delegitimize Khomeini as a Muslim theologian. Their rendering is, of course, that he poisoned Islam with some of the more violent rhetoric from the West.
I also thought it was strong when they began the task of establishing links between Islamists. I don't know how much of this is new but it worked in this argument.
As a result of these strengths, if I were putting together an edited volume with some of the materials we've been reading, I would either frame it as one of the table setting essays in the first section, the essays which laid out larger arguments but needed the documentation of more detailed pieces later; or I would have considered it a niche essay on the Iranian revolution.
However, I thought it needed work on several fronts:
1. Quite obviously, one other agenda they have is to link rhetoric from what they call Marxism to the language of the Islamists. I find that intriguing but the argument needs a good bit of work. First, the language of class struggle is not limiited to Marxism; second, Marxism (not the theories of Karl Marx) is a very broad category, some members of which wrote about the kind of violence they deplore, some did not, so that needs to be made clearer; third, a good bit of purity of violence language is no respector of political position (left or right) just of opposition to the status quo among some actors; finally, so far as I know, Marx never argued for this kind of violence, a purity via violence.
2. If this essay is to be taken as part of a genre of work which relates the movement of ideas to social movements, it needs to fill in some rather obvious blank spots. The most glaring is what social conditions make a population ready to hear these ideas and act on them. Not an easy task and certainly not one that can be done in this short an essay but they needed to acknowledge the absence.
3. I particularly enjoyed the connections made between folk. But that's just the beginning of working those out. The argument is weak as it stands but extremely suggestive.
Finally, much of this was familiar, perhaps to all of us on the thread. Thanks to Nadine's mention of "Islamists", I started reading this kind of stuff last fall. She sent me to Daniel Pipes and company. I found them both too tendentious and too ideological but they lead me to Judith Butler's book, The Ninety Nine Names of God. Which I highly recommend as an introduction to this. She's a very professional journalist, was the Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times for a period, writes well, and has no policy axe to grind, at least that I could spot. Just found an important story and wanted to get it told right.
Thanks, again, to tek for posting the article. And for improving my education. |
