A very good book review of two timely books in Foreign Affairs' latest issue [remember, the reason why this place exists.] Though the author is a bit nebulous at times, he fires on all cylinders in his conclusory paragraphs, which I post, though he forgets Brezinski and Carter, who should be mentioned along with Reagan
And, for the record, the culturists--Huntington and Lewis, in the main--in my opinion are definitely onto something. Perhaps the reviewer's background prevents him from acknowledging the force of their arguments. Nonetheless, his focus on Afghanistan, which he trots out only at the end, definitely has merit:
foreignaffairs.org
Still, if Roy's sociological analysis is always insightful, it is, in the end, limited. His account of neofundamentalism, a religious tendency, cannot fully explain the nature of Islamism, a political construct; the first seeks salvation, the second liberation. Curiously, although Roy traces the transformation of Islamist parties in Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries to political rather than sociological conditions, he attributes the rise of jihadist Islam in the Muslim diaspora in the West only to sociological causes. Ultimately, Roy's argument cannot explain why jihadist Islam, an ideology of marginal political significance in the late 1970s, has come to dominate Islamist politics any more than can Kepel's skillful intellectual history. And although both Roy and Kepel (the former perhaps more so than the latter) have begun to part from the premises of culture talk, the break is still incomplete.
They share a common failing: Kepel's history refuses to relate Islam to non-Islam, and Roy avoids studying encounters between Muslims and non-Muslims. Yet in fact, the birth of jihadist Islam, which embraces violence as central to political action, cannot be fully explained without reference to the Afghan jihad and the Western influences that shaped it. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and set aside the then-common secular model of national liberation in favor of an international Islamic jihad. Thanks to that approach the Afghan rebels used charities to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers and created the militarized madrassas (Islamic schools) that turned these volunteers into cadres. Without the rallying cause of the jihad, the Afghan mujahideen would have had neither the numbers, the training, the organization, nor the coherence or sense of mission that has since turned jihadist Islam into a global political force.
The influence of the Afghan jihad cannot be overstated. It is evidence that the growth of political Islam has been less linear and more hybrid than is often acknowledged and that it has been driven largely by distinct political projects, such as the "global jihad" or "the West." And properly understanding the development of political Islam is the only way to gauge its prospects. According to Roy's account, political Islam will continue to bifurcate between an indigenous strand and an immigrant strand. According to Kepel's, the two strands will become more connected, but with the diaspora playing a more dynamic role, perhaps much like the African diaspora of a century ago, which later brought home notions of black consciousness and pan-Africanism developed in the West. But a full understanding of the political nature of the jihadist project, which neither Kepel's nor Roy's book quite achieves, begs a radically new question: Will political Islam follow the example of Marxism, which spread from the West to fuse with various local nationalisms and create hybrids potent enough to topple regimes?
It is too soon to tell, but anyone who wants to venture a guess should first turn to Iraq, where, more than anywhere else today, the future of political Islam is being cast. Every Middle Eastern movement that opposes the American empire--secular or religious, state or nonstate--is being drawn to Iraq, as if to a magnet, to test out its convictions. More than a year after the U.S. invasion, it has become clear that, by blowing the top off one of the region's most efficient dictatorships, the United States has created a free-for-all for fighters of every hue--Islamist and nationalist, from the homeland and the diaspora--sparking a contest that will influence the course of political Islam for years to come. |
