Islamism As Religionized Politics

In his book review of Bassam Tibi's new book, Islamism and Islam published over at The New Republic, naughtily entitled "Term Warfare", Samuel Helfont, a Ph.D candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, hunkers down in a cognitive war trench and effectively snipes away.  He is critical but the book has a contribution to make.

Extracts:

IN FEBRUARY, The New York Review of Books’ website hosted a debate in which several prominent feminists criticized Human Rights Watch for issuing a report that whitewashed the record of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists poised to take power in the Middle East. Human Rights Watch responded by stating that this critique amounted to, among other things, “intolerance for Islam.”...

Bassam Tibi...spends most of the book bravely arguing against Islamism from a liberal Islamic perspective. The meaning of “bravely” here is not to be confused with its normal usage in Western intellectual discourse. Tibi is brave in that as a prominent Muslim critic of Islamism, religious fanatics have threatened to kill him (a threat that likeminded extremists have carried out against others in the past).

...Islamic tradition contains seeds which could form the basis of a modern humanistic Islam. Yet this humanistic understanding of Islam’s past and potential future has been routinely undermined by Islamists who have been somewhat successful in monopolizing Islamic discourse...what Tibi terms, “religionized politics.”

...Islamism clearly shares an intellectual heritage with European totalitarian movements of the last century. He correctly stresses that Islamism is not a “revival” but an invention of an Islamic past. In fact, many of the terms that Islamists employ, such as “Islamic State” or “Islamic System,” are neologisms that do not exist in traditional Islamic sources...many Islamists have appropriated the worst of European views toward Jews...

...Tibi offers no way out of this puzzle...he sees no difference between al-Qaida and Turkey’s Freedom and Justice Party (AKP), which rules a NATO member-state currently fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Nor does he distinguish between intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan and the Taliban...Tibi’s lumping of these groups and intellectuals together results from his failure to take his own argument about Islamism as an “invented tradition” to its logical conclusion. If Islamists neologisms such as “Islamic State” and “Islamic System” did not exist in classical Islam, then it follows that they have no intrinsic meaning. One cannot look to Islamic history and find an example of an “Islamic system.” Therefore Islamists need to define these terms...

...Probably the most problematic aspect of Tibi’s depiction of Islamism is the future it portends: there is no way forward except conflict. What else is the reader to infer about his depiction of a totalitarian movement that he equates to Nazism and Stalinism; a movement which he claims is by its nature incapable of reform or moderation, and with which engagement is impossible? He never says it, but the only future one could resonably imagine is drenched in violent confrontation. That conclusion is neither favorable nor necessary...

An interesting read, it seems, criticism notwithstanding.

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