Carranza,
I know you mean to continue your confrontational style by posting Walter Lacquer's review of Kepel's book. (Incidentally, in all cases of reviews, it helps to know the name of the reviewer and what credentials he brings to the conversation. Would you care to do some research on Lacquer for us?)
It's not a thorough review of the argument of the book, which surprises me since I would have expected someone of Lacquer's stature to do such. But it is definitely a piece of a conversation. And it helps to hear Lacquer's voice in that conversation. Let's see what I can say about it, though we are now on Lacquer's territory, which, incidentally, back to the moment this seemed to have started in your mind, is definitely not Bernard Lewis' territory, though he has the usual superstar academic arrogance to not acknowledge his intellectual limits.
1. The first charge is that Kepel would surely revise his argument about the decline of the Islamist movement had he written the book after 9-11 and that part of the thesis is Lacquer's first and, he apparently thinks, his most troubling criticism. Lacquer does, however, note that Kepel has a preface, written after 9-11, in which he reaffirms his thesis about a movement in decline and offers some continuing arguments for it. Other such movements, he notes, as they go into decline take up crazy, pointless acts of violence.
I certainly have no serious idea whether Kepel is right or Lacquer is right. Neither, for that matter, do you. We simply have to take the argument, put them side by side, and wait for more evidence.
Kepel's argument is that prior to the 90s, the Islamist movement had gained control of two states, as I recall, certainly Iran and I think Sudan, had hopes for many more, including making many major inroads in European countries, not least of which were the Balkans. He notes much more but I don't have time to check it. By the middle 90s, only Iran stays on that list; efforts in a large number of other countries were on the decline, save for the brief Taliban reign in Afghanistan. The Egyptians had driven them out; they failed to gain a foothold in the Balkans thanks to the policies of the Clinton administration, among others.
Incidentally, let me stop here. The fine article by Lawrence Wright in last week's New Yorker on the Egyptian doctor who worked with bin Laden works with somewhat the same thesis of the decline of the movement, though on a smaller scale than Kepel. I recommend it highly. Wright thinks it is quite clear that by the end of the 90s, that movement was much in decline.
How does this argument deal with 9-11? I genuinely don't know and will continue to read to see. Kepel, as I said earlier suggested one argument, that this is an instance of a more general process in which politically unconnected movement in decline spin off crazy elements that engage in mindless violence. An interesting argument and one that should be taken seriously.
So, first point--Kepel and Lacquer disagree on the decline argument. We'll have to see how this one goes in the future. Though Lacquer needs to make his argument that it is not in decline. He does not do so in this review.
2. Now on to the second argument. Let me offer your Lacquer bolded quote to get it started:
. . .the attacks on Kepel and his friends after last September were more basic: How could one talk about a post-Islamist age, as Kepel had, at a time when Islam was the one great world religion that was still expanding? Why had the message of bin Laden and other fanatics been treated as something akin to the Catholic theology of liberation? Even Tariq Ramadan, of whom Kepel expected so much, was a conservative, closed in his views to the fundamentalists. If he favored a modest opening to modernity, was this not because he was a citizen of Switzerland, teaching at a Swiss university? How relevant was such a thinker to what went on in the Muslim world? Little more relevant than the publications of relatively liberal journalists in "Londonistan," the world's center of both fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist Arab immigration.
This is a serious misstatement of anything I've read thus far in Kepel (I've read about 2/3rds). I don't see any basis for imagining, from Kepel's material, that he compared Al Q in any way with Catholic liberation theology. As for the comment about Tariq Ramadan, I would need to check back on the book, but I don't recall it as being a significant part of the argument. Kepel does not have any nostalgia, so far as I've read so far, for a "better" state of Islamism. His is a much more analytical approach. Here are the various elements of the movements and how they are related to one another.
So this line of Lacquer's looks to me like a cheap shot right now. I may change my mind after reading more in the book. Perhaps there is a last chapter that carries some of this tone. But it's certainly not available in the first 2/3rds.
3. Now to your next argument. And, again, I'll offer the Lacquer quote you put in bold:
Because Kepel and his fellows must have been aware of the facts, perhaps their misjudgment had something to do with their ideology—their belief that in a conflict between the West and the East the former must be guilty more often than not, just as the Israelis were always bound to be guiltier than the Palestinians, and Christianity guiltier than Islam.
I find nothing of this sort in my reading of Kepel. Perhaps Lacquer has in mind one of the amorphous "fellows" of Kepel to which he refers as the source of this. But, again it's not in the first 2/3rds of the book. Analyzing political movements which attack the US in their language is a far cry from taking on that language, from making it one's own. Kepel does not do that. So far he's as value neutral as scholarship can be. Which is to say, like all scholars, there are value judgments tromping around and perceptual assumptions moving in and out. But they are not ideological nor do they appear to be even close to Lacquer's picture of them. I don't know whether to call this, therefore a cheap shot or just a missed shot.
Well, I'm running out of time and flexibility in my typing fingers. So I'll stop.
I know you meant this as some sort of "told you so." That's childish and a far cry from what a serious intellectual conversation should be. My wife tells me your posts on the Qualcomm threads are not like this. The one's I've read there seem also much less on edge than these.
Well, too much time spent on this reply. |
