Islamism - 7

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Husky for you!

url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/18.1/br_1.html]Book Review[/url]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. By RICHARD W. BULLLIET. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 187 pp. $24.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

      World historians will enjoy and profit from this wise and wonderful book with an eye-opening approach succinctly captured in its title: The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. <b>Richard W. Bulliett</b>, professor of history at Columbia University and former director of its Middle East Institute, <b>offers a startlingly original interpretation that challenges not only conventional wisdom but the historical master narrative of the last fourteen centuries. No one who has digested this little volume will be able to look at Islam and Christianity again in the same way.  </b>
      At the first glance, Bulliet's book appears to be a rebuttal of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In fact, the real target is Bernard Lewis, sage of Middle Eastern studies, who originated the term in an article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in 1990 and whose baleful influence on the Bush administration helped spur the American occupation of Iraq in 2003. <b>It is a distinguished Arabist's response to the academic and policy-making drum beaters of American empire whose misunderstanding of Islam and Middle Eastern history have led to talk of a generations-long war with radical Islam and trying to make Mesopotamia safe for democracy. </b> 
      <b>To this task Bulliet brings many a qualification.</b> For more than three decades he has taught at Columbia University, establishing a reputation as an innovative scholar in Islamic and Middle East studies. Since the publication of his first book, The Camel and the Wheel (1975), he has demonstrated time and again an ability to see things in a new way, to take a view from the edge, and in doing so has enriched the fields of medieval Islamic and modern Middle East studies. His contributions to world history include a survey, The Earth and Its Peoples (1997), an essay titled "Themes, Conjunctures, and Comparisons" in Teaching World History: A Resource Book (1997), and editing The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century (1998). He has also published four novels, and he recently returned to where he began with Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The History of Human-Animal Relations (2005). 
      <b>His case is composed of four essays, each of which can stand alone but taken together make an ingenious argument that Islam and Christianity should be thought of as two versions of a common socioreligious system, like Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom.</b> Recalling that <b>"Judeo-Christian civilization" is a term originally coined by Nietzsche to deride both </b>and was adopted only after World War II, when its acceptance changed the master narrative, he hopes to do the same by proposing an Islamo-Christian kinship that will help Americans find a common ground with the Muslims in their midst. <b>Against perceptions of the "otherness" of Islam, he argues the two are sibling civilizations, actually fraternal twins, sharing more similarities than differences. While it seems a stretch to argue for a twinned relationship when they were separated by births six centuries apart, Bulliet's re-narration demonstrates how the two civilizations exhibit similar historical trajectories, went through the same developmental stages, and confronted similar internal challenges. From the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, Latin Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims traveled parallel, even overlapping, paths, until divergences developed in the later Middle Ages</b>. 
      Bulliet founds his case on a slow model of religious conversion, arguing that both faiths had roughly the same start lines as they expanded into regions beyond their core areas.<b> "Islamization" and "Christianization" were centuries-long processes that only gradually won over the vast majority of populations in the Middle East and Europe north of the Mediterranean. From the ninth century onward, they mirrored one another in the growth of bodies of religious specialists, the ulama and monks; the adoption of a single language of religion, Latin and Arabic; organization of religious studies in madrasas (religious colleges) and universities; and the rise of lay religiosity that spawned Sufi brotherhoods and the Beghards and Beguines. These innovations offended religious authorities, but whereas in Christendom the confrontation with popular piety led to the Protestant Reformation and split, in Islam though the ulama often opposed Sufism they couldn't stamp it out. "Islam bent and accommodated" (p. 38) as Sufism became a primary focus of Muslim piety.</b> 
      <b>After about 1500 the two parted ways, "like fraternal twins that are almost indistinguishable in childhood but have distinctive and not necessarily compatible personalities as adults" (pp. 15–16). Muslim dynasts tried to recreate the Eurasian land empire of Genghis Khan, while Europeans other than the Russians expanded overseas. By proselytizing new-caught peoples deemed idolatrous, Islam and Christianity became the world's dominant religions, a success at least as great as the triumph of European empire.</b> In the conventional narrative, while the West surged ahead, the Muslim world went into decline. But there is another way to measure success: compare percentages of the two faiths made up of descendants of converts between 1500 and 1900. The answer for Islam would be 50 percent, versus 20 percent for Christianity. "In the great Afro-Asian land bloc and the adjoining region of southeast Asia," says Bulliet, "European Christianity and Islam went head to head in a contest for the souls of the indigenous peoples, and Islam unquestionably won" (p. 41). For Islam, this is what went right. 
      "What Went On," the second chapter, is another rejoinder to Bernard Lewis, who also coined "What Went Wrong?" <b>Justice, stresses Bulliet, is the supreme value in Islamic political discourse. Traditionally, the threat of tyranny was restrained by Sharia law, upheld by the ulama monitoring rulers, interpreting the law in judicial proceedings. In Christian civilization, the contest between crown and clergy ended in separation of church and state, but in its sibling it developed into "a malignant rivalry in which personal tyranny, accompanied by suppression of critical religious voices, developed as a self-fulfilling prophecy" (p. 62). Modernizing reformers seeking to emulate Europe adopted authoritarianism and anticlericalism—mislabeled "secularism" by Western observers—and sought to eviscerate Sharia and the ulama. By the 1960s, most governments in the Muslim world had become "secular" dictatorships. Their policies of marginalizing the ulama, promoting print media to disseminate government views and modern knowledge, and instituting mass education had unintended consequences. New religious interpreters, their authority established by publishing and able to reach an international readership through print and other media, have supplanted the credentialed religious authorities. Anticlericalism and modernization backfired on the authoritarians, empowering a new generation of Islamic revivalists, including the likes of Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden, and Ayman Zawahiri, who have issued a flood of fatwas (nonbinding religious opinions) against the tyrants and their foreign supporters. That's what really went wrong</b>. 
      The third chapter, "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places," is a critique of Middle East studies in America, reflecting on Bulliet's student years in a fledgling field, then later as executive secretary of the Middle East Studies Association. <b>In the shadow of the Cold War, under the spell of the magic words "development" and "modernization," academics created an American Orientalism that assumed Islam was a relic destined to pass away. Westernization was inevitable, and the future was being shaped by men on the move. In their quest for an Arab or Iranian Mustafa Kemal, "the founders of Middle East studies ignored recommendations that they focus on contemporary Islam and focused instead on Middle Easterners trying to act like westerners. There weren't a lot of these just as there hadn't been a lot of converts, but the conviction was strong that those few would be pioneers in bringing western modernity to the region. . . . The people we supported as agents of modernity became tyrants, their societies police states" (p.123). </b>Completely missed were "the middle ground of people deeply wedded to their religious traditions, but eager to share in at least some of the benefits of the modern world, [who] gave birth to the Iranian Revolution, a multitude of Islamic movements and political parties, and, sadly, the jihadist plots of Osama bin Laden. But with rare exception, Islamic activism went unobserved and unanalyzed in the early days of Middle East studies, and remains disturbingly puzzling to the present day" (pp. 111–112). <b>This blinkered approach continues, as policy makers and their academic advisors such as Bernard Lewis persist in trying to find a "Shia-in-a-suit" to lead Iraq and "shun alternative visions of modernity that might embody a Muslim rather than a western perspective"</b> (p. 115). Though the Japanese developed their own model of modernity, "policy circles seem incapable of imaging a Muslim model of modernity.... Like later day missionaries, we want Muslims to love us, not just for what we can offer in the way of a technological society, but for who we are—for our values. But we refuse to countenance the thought of loving them for their values" (p. 116). 
      Chapter 4, <b>"The Edge of the Future," takes a long view of what lies ahead. Islam, says Bulliet, is in a "crisis of authority" that will take several generations to resolve (p. 135)</b>. For Sunni Islam in particular, which lacks an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the radical breakdown in the structure of authority has created a free market in belief, leading many Muslims to believe that they are free to whatever brand of Islam best suits their situation. <b>Resolution will come eventually, but this period of crisis is also potentially a time of renewal. Islamic renewal movements have historically emerged on what he calls "the edge," interfaith frontier zones that have given rise to remarkable diversity under the name Islam and spawned institutions such as madrasas and numerous Sufi brotherhoods. Predicting that the next Islamic revitalization movements will come from the peripheries, he identifies the Islamic diaspora communities of America and Europe, democratic Islamic political parties in certain Muslim countries, and new religious universities in Indonesia and Turkey as sources that could generate the creativity and vitality to transform the Islam of the twenty-first century.</b> He further expects that "conservative voices from the center—including both governments in majority Muslim countries and the marginalized traditional ulama—will weigh less in the future spiritual balance than some of the new expressions of Islam on the edge" (p. 146). Islam, now at the beginning of its fifteenth century, awaits its renewer. <b>The next two or three decades should, he thinks, "see religious leaders of tolerant and peaceful conscience, in the mold of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, eclipse in respect and popular following today's advocates of jihad, intolerance, and religious autocracy" (p. 161). </b> 
      Short, thought provoking, and available in paperback, this is a perfect piece for generating lively discussion in world history, Middle East studies, and comparative religion courses. 

HOWARD J. DOOLEY 
Western Michigan University

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Sort of explains the US search for en-mo leaders in Pakistan- Ayub, BB and Mushy- Its Enlightened Orientalism American style.