Islam and the West - The new with the old

Islam and the West

 

Oct 14th 2004
From The Economist print edition

 

AP

How Muslim fundamentalism has a thoroughly modern streak

Get article background

 

MAYBE it is a by-product of academic Marxism, or it may go right back to the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages: the best French scholars seem to have a natural advantage over their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in the business of ideological anatomy. With relish and sharpness of mind, they can take a huge body of thought, most of it baffling to outsiders, and tease out the main strands, showing the bizarre ways in which they diverge and converge. Another gift of French academia is a keen sense of the way in which almost any impulse—in philosophy, politics or any other field—tends to generate its opposite; and, hence, of the paradoxically close relationship between people, movements and trends which appear to be radically opposed.

 

The results of this high-octane brainwork are not always appealing to English-speakers; but when the topic is political Islam, and the authors are among the leading French (and international) authorities on the subject, people who care about the future of the world can hardly fail to prick up their ears. They will not be disappointed. Neither Olivier Roy nor Gilles Kepel conforms to any stereotype of the Parisian egghead, yet they make full use of Gallic gifts in their latest analyses of the Islamist response, whether peaceful or violent, to the liberal, capitalist West.

 

 

At the heart of both works is an understanding of a central paradox: in all its varieties, whether political, pietistic or warlike, Muslim neo-fundamentalism is an essentially modern phenomenon. The more stridently it calls for a return to the “old-time” religion of 1,400 years ago, with all later additions removed, the more contemporary this movement looks.

 

In “Globalised Islam”, published in French in 2002 and newly issued in an updated and revised English version, Mr Roy takes a broad look at the way in which militant Islam is expressed and organised in a world where people, ideas and electronic messages move swiftly across borders that used to be sealed. As he convincingly argues, the striking revival of outward piety among the second generation of families which have moved from Islamic countries to the West does not in any way imply a slowdown of modernisation. Precisely because traditional cultures, societies and extended families are breaking down, both among immigrants and in their home countries, a younger generation of Muslims in the West is attracted by the idea of a simple, stentorian version of their faith, stripped of the cultural accretions that were built up in the “old country” over many centuries, and compatible with modern patterns of consumption.

 

To take one crude example, young European Muslims are more likely to demand halal hamburgers at their school than to take an interest in the elaborate recipes by which forebears in Pakistan or Algeria broke their fasts. For angry, restless young Muslims, a back-to-basics version of the faith can be a way of protesting against their parents as well as against their host societies; it fills the same space as radical leftism did in a previous French generation, and as counter-cultural rap does in America's ghettos. Even suicide bombing, whose indifference to individual life might seem deeply unmodern, is presented by Mr Roy in a contemporary light. As he argues, the culture of suicide attacks—as fostered by al-Qaeda and its imitators, and promoted on their websites—has a self-indulgent, me-generation flavour about it. The narcissistic characters who carried out the September 11th attacks were no exception to this.

 

Mr Kepel's book is less about ideology and culture and more about war and geopolitics; with a full account of the Madrid bombings last spring, and the upsurge of fighting in Iraq at around the same time, it is remarkably up to date. The book includes a succinct anatomy of America's neoconservative camp, along with that camp's bitterest enemies in the world of ultra-militant Islam. It shows how both these parties were intensely frustrated by the Oslo peace process, and relieved by its collapse. In an extended look at the psychology of Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor and second-ranking figure in al-Qaeda, Mr Kepel argues that there, too, is a ruthlessly modern mind. Far from being a bone-headed, backward-looking nihilist, the strategist who conceived the September 11th attacks on America is credited with an up-to-the-minute sense of global trends and opportunities. His top priority, in Mr Kepel's view, was not nearly so much to inflict devastating damage on the western enemy, as to galvanise the Muslim masses against their own governments. He wanted to show the spectacular results that jihad could achieve.

 

Neither Mr Roy nor Mr Kepel has a trace of visceral anti-Americanism, but Mr Kepel is unsparing in the way he contrasts Iraq's present situation with the post-Saddam vision once promised by the neoconservatives: an ever-widening virtuous circle of democracy, peace and economic reform with Baghdad at its heart. He also insists that ultra-militant Islam has not won either. From the West Bank to Baghdad to Kabul, there is fitna—disintegration and chaos—in the land of Islam.

 

Yet Mr Kepel ends on an unexpectedly upbeat note. It is possible, the author suggests, that European Islam might evolve in new ways that could co-exist with modernity, asserting its distinctiveness without pretending, dishonestly, to live in another century. If that happy scenario were to unfold, Muslims and non-Muslims alike would need a keen sense of what modernity and tradition really mean. In the development of such an understanding, both these books can make a large and highly intelligent contribution.