Book Review: Is There An Islamic Problem?
By Khalid Baig
Posted: 27 Rabi-u-Thani 1424, 5 June 2005
Title: Is There An Islamic Problem?
Essays on Islamicate Societies, the US, and Israel
Author: Shahid Alam
Publisher: The Other Press, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Year: 2004
Price: $16.95
223 pages.
In the imperial war on Islam, the battle for the hearts and minds
of Muslims takes many forms. There are zealous holy men whose books
always follow the bombs. There is a huge propaganda machinery assuring
the Muslims that the war on Islam is not against Islam. There are music
and entertainment channels targeting the youth and Muslim family. And
there are dedicated intellectuals like Bernard Lewis and their acolytes
in the Muslim world like Pervez Hoodbhoy who assure their readers that
the problem is with Islam; it is obscurantist, anachronistic, rigid,
and impotent; and to get out of their predicament Muslims must reform
Islam and replace it with secular humanism.
The very first essay in this
collection of twenty essays --- which also provides the title for the
book --- dissects these arguments and shows them to be the intellectual
nonsense that they represent. When did the Muslim decline as a world
power begin? Pervez Hoodbhoy puts it in the 12th century; Bernard Lewis
even earlier, in the 11th century. There's purpose behind this
falsification of history: to show that Muslim societies declined
because of deep flaws in their beliefs and outlooks i.e. in Islam
itself. The earlier dates also help cause greater despair. If the
problem has persisted for a thousand years, what hope can anyone have
that it will be fixed tomorrow?
What actually happened was that
beginning in the fifteenth century, Europe started to get ahead in
gunnery and shipping. This launched Atlantic Europe on the path of
global ascendancy through deepening cycles of cumulative causation. "In
the long run, Europe's command of the high seas produced vast new
sources of wealth through plunder, trade, shipping, banking, and
overseas investments." This wealth stimulated manufactures as well as
interest in science and technology. By the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Europe was ready to start its project to dismantle Islamicate
empires and states in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
The Industrial Revolution enabled it to
produce better machinery of war. This ascendancy was then used to
vivisect the Muslim world so it would be left without a core, to impede
its industrialization, and to suppress formation of governments in it
that would reflect the interests and aspirations of their people
instead of the colonial masters. These historical developments, not the
alleged flaws in Islam, caused the decline of Muslims concomitant with
the rise of Europe.
After this engaging analysis, which
demolishes all the foundations of pithy secularist arguments, Shahid
Alam observes, "After more than eighty years of Kemalism, a military
clique still calls the shots in secular Turkey, wages war against a
fifth of its own population, trembles at the sight of women in scarves,
and grovels to gain entry into the margins of European society. Do we
want to litter the Islamicate landscape with yet more half-baked
Turkeys?"
The analysis of Bernard Lewis's What
Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity is contained in
Shahid Alam's essay, "Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry." It
exposes the Zionist propagandist who tries to disguise himself as an
objective scholar. Bernard Lewis never locates the problem of
Islamicate backwardness in its global setting, where backwardness has
been endemic to all societies in the Periphery --- the non-western
world --- including the Indian, Chinese, Islamicate, African and Latin
American. His book is strewn with contradictions. He himself refers to
ten accounts of Muslims travelers to Europe between 1665 and 1840, yet
blames the Ottomans for being uncurious about the rising European
power. He talks about failure of industrialization in the Muslim world
but never mentions Europe's success in curbing it with military power.
The author then turns the question
round (What went wrong?) to ask what went wrong with good old Jewish
orientalists. Before the rise of the Zionist movement European Jews
took the least bigoted positions in the field of oriental studies.
Their discussion of religious and racial tolerance in Islamdom, toward
Jews in particular, may have been an invitation to Europeans to
incorporate the same. Yet, they could not survive the logic of the
Zionist movement. The Zionist camp, led for half a century by Lewis,
has a vested interest in demonizing Islam to justify usurping Muslim
land as well as secure western support in this task.
The five essays on Israel trace the
history of the creation of the racist, colonial, settler-state,
established on the backs of imperial powers. This is straight talk:
undeniable facts, reasoned analysis, logical and powerful presentation.
The articles showcase clarity, courage, and character. The essays can
be helpful to anyone with an open mind but with illusions about the
nature of the entity. Other essays look at US foreign policy and show
how the Periphery has been living in a US straitjacket. Such talk from
an American Muslim invites the question, why are you here? --- answered
beautifully in the beginning of "A History of September 11."
Writing for the mainstream audience on
issues that have been framed with a thorough distortion by a
sophisticated propaganda machine is not easy. Should one repeatedly
tell one's audiences that everything they know about Islam and Islamic
history is wrong? Or should one knowingly concede some points in order
to focus on some others? On some issues, Alam seems to have made the
second choice, but it leads to troubling results. The issues of
secularism (p. 72) and women (p. 74) are cases in point. His invocation
of extremist and other derelict sects as a defense of Islamic treatment
of women is unnecessary. If Kharjites were right then Islam does have a
problem. Similarly, his acceptance of the myth that nineteen Muslims
armed with box cutters successfully hijacked four planes on the same
morning, flew them perfectly into tall buildings, and caused these
steal and concrete behemoths to disintegrate neatly --- just as they do
in controlled demolition --- is ill-advised.
Nevertheless, this is a good book. In
the days of the Patriot Act, the rise of the neocons, and their unholy
alliance with the Zionists, Is There An Islamic Problem? by
Shahid Alam (who is Professor of Economics at the Northeastern
University, Boston, MA) is also an act of exceptional courage.
The book has a memorable ending: "The
two American victories --- over Nazis and the Soviets --- do not
translate into an ineluctable law of invincibility. The Islamicate
peoples are not defending outmoded systems or some unnatural tyranny.
They are defending something more basic: their lives, their livelihood,
and the way they want to live." These are words of encouragement to all
those involved in the noble resistance to imperialism. Shahid Alan
aptly dedicates his book to "all the victims of Empire, who die and are
maimed by the thousands every day of the year, including September 11."
Excerpts:
In the final analysis, the historical
verdict on the Arab national awakening is clear: it failed. While the
leaders of the Arab nationalist movements created a discourse of Arab
nationalism - a concept of nationhood founded on language and history -
they failed to create a deep consciousness of Arab unity, one that
would seek its goal in Arab political unity, in a single Arab statehood
. . . Not even the successive defeats inflicted by Israel on various
combinations of Arab states - in 1948, 1956, and 1967 - could create
the impetus for unity, the desire to restore Arab honor, or mobilize to
face the massive threat that Israel posed to Arab security. (p. 17)
Once again, we live in a world whose
rules have been restructured to the advantage of the richest, both
globally and within each country. Globalization and global poverty do
not mix well. A growing cabal of billionaires, more visible and more
united than before, now confronts growing masses of starving desperate
and angry people in every quadrant of the globe. (107-8)
This book is available at the Albalagh
Bookstore. Click here
to view.
Book Review