Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory

By Roxanne L. Euben

A firm grasp of Islamic fundamentalism has often eluded Western political observers, many of whom view it in relation to social and economic upheaval or explain it away as an irrational reaction to modernity. Here Roxanne Euben makes new sense of this belief system by revealing it as a critique of and rebuttal to rationalist discourse and post-Enlightenment political theories. Euben draws on political, postmodernist, and critical theory, as well as Middle Eastern studies, Islamic thought, comparative politics, and anthropology, to situate Islamic fundamentalist thought within a transcultural theoretical context. In so doing, she illuminates an unexplored dimension of the Islamist movement and holds a mirror up to anxieties within contemporary Western political thought about the nature and limits of modern rationalism--anxieties common to Christian fundamentalists, postmodernists, conservatives, and communitarians.


A comparison between Islamic fundamentalism and various Western critiques of rationalism yields formerly uncharted connections between Western and Islamic political thought, allowing the author to reclaim an understanding of political theory as inherently comparative. Her arguments bear on broad questions about the methods Westerners employ to understand movements and ideas that presuppose nonrational, transcendent truths. Euben finds that first, political theory can play a crucial role in understanding concrete political phenomena often considered beyond its jurisdiction; second, the study of such phenomena tests the scope of Western rationalist categories; and finally, that Western political theory can be enriched by exploring non-Western perspectives on fundamental debates about coexistence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781400823239

Book preview

Enemy in the Mirror

Enemy in the Mirror

ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE

LIMITS OF MODERN RATIONALISM

A WORK OF COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY

Roxanne L. Euben

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1999 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Euben, Roxanne Leslie, 1966-

Enemy in the mirror : Islamic fundamentalism and the limits of modern rationalism / Roxanne L. Euben.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-05843-1 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-691-05844-X (pb : alk. paper)

1. Islamic fundamentalism. 2. Islamic countries—Politics and government. 3. Rationalism. I. Title.

BP166.14.F85E93 1999 320.5'5'0917671—dc21 99-10153

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-1-400-82323-9

R0

FOR MY PARENTS

My First and Finest Teachers

Let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchanneled by any native myth; a culture without any fixed and consecrated place of origin, condemned to exhaust all possibilities and feed miserably and parasitically on every culture under the sun. Here we have our present age, the result of a Socratism bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? Let us ask ourselves whether our feverish and frightening agitation is anything but the greedy grasping for food of a hungry man.

—Friedrich Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy

Contents

Preface xi

A Note on Spelling xv

CHAPTER ONE

Re-Marking Territories 3

Comparative Political Theory and Foundationalist Political Practice 8

The Politics of Naming: Defining Fundamentalism 16

CHAPTER TWO

Projections and Refractions: Islamic Fundamentalism and Modern Rationalist Discourse 20

The Irrational Rational Actor: Theories of Islamic Fundamentalism 25

Meaning and Power: A Dialogic Model of Intepretation 36

Toward an Understanding of Islamic Fundamentalism 42

CHAPTER THREE

A View from Another Side: The Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb 49

Sayyid Qutb: Radical and Martyr 53

Modernity as Pathology: Analysis and Exhortation in Signposts along the Road 55

Rationalism and Reenchantment 84

Conclusion: Beyond Orientalism 88

CHAPTER FOUR

A View across Time: Islam as the Religion of Reason 93

Afghani and Islamic Philosophy 96

'Abduh and The Theology of Unity 105

Through the Back Door: Rationalism and Islamic Modernism 114

Coda: Khomeini and Shi'ite Fundamentalism 117

CHAPTER FIVE

Inside the Looking Glass: Views within the West 123

The Crisis of Authority 127

The Decay of Morality 133

The Decline of Community 142

Modern Anxieties and Metaphysical Urges 150

CHAPTER SIX

Conclusion: Cultural Syncretism and Multiple Modernities 154

Notes 169

Bibliography 217

Index 233

Preface

THIS BOOK reflects the nexus of two political and intellectual interests or, perhaps I should say, preoccupations. The first interest really presented itself to me as a question, sparked by a paradox in contemporary politics: why is it that secular liberal democracies such as the United States are witnessing sharply declining rates of voter turnout and increasing alienation from politics at the very moment that religio-political movements are galvanizing peoples into extraordinary attempts to remake the political world?¹ For observers who see in the fall of the Berlin Wall the triumph of democracy or, at the very least, the triumph of the liberal capitalist state, this might seem an inappropriate question. Yet it is by now well recognized that the end of the Cold War has not revealed such a tidy landscape; those who wish it did, it seems, must attend to precisely these political paradoxes. This is especially so because in the late twentieth century it has become almost commonplace to unmask science, secularism, and rational accounts of nature and human nature as but several narratives among many that may or may not capture partial truths about the world in which human beings live. Such claims suggest that the search for knowledge must include forays into experiences and phenomena heretofore forced into the shadows by the discourse of rationality. Religious experiences and answers to questions about what makes life worth living, how humans ought to live, and what institutions are best for living with each other—experiences once relegated by reason to the periphery of politics or consigned to a period of historical immaturity—now press upon the consciousness of a remarkable variety of political actors, commentators, and intellectuals across cultures, demanding and receiving new consideration.

The second interest arises from a tension within Western political theory. This is a tension between, on the one hand, political theorists’ aspirations to engage questions about the nature and value of politics that, if not universal, are at least pressing to a broad range of peoples and cultures and, on the other, a political theory canon almost exclusively devoted to Western texts. Such an observation has been the occasion for a myriad of debates about multiculturalism and the canon in countless academic fields. This tension at no time suggested to me that political theory must fail to illuminate the broader world in which human beings live; on the contrary, my central argument is that this tension can recall students of politics to the promise contained in an older, yet never quite lost, understanding of theory as inherently comparative, one defined by certain questions about living together rather than particular answers.

These preoccupations at first blush bear an uneasy relation to each other; perhaps at second and third blush as well. Yet they have occasioned for me an extraordinarily rewarding journey across disciplines. This book is the result of that journey and it is thus interdisciplinary in several senses of the word. It is interdisciplinary because I define fundamentalism in a way that leaves open the possibility that dogmatic disputes about foundations, fundamentals, are not solely the purview of religious activists but also capture an aspect of ostensibly secular debates where the sacred text in question is, say, a constitution. It is also interdisciplinary in the sense of engaging literature from a variety of fields and subfields: in the course of this work I draw on political, social, and critical theory, poststructuralism, Islamic thought, anthropology, comparative politics, and Near Eastern studies. I draw on such literature not only to make a substantive argument regarding an interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism, but also to demonstrate how and why an adequate understanding of concrete phenomena such as Islamic fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the study of political theory, on the other, demands an integration of theoretical and comparative approaches to the study of politics.

In the end, then, this work blurs the academic boundaries commonly demarcated by the terms comparative politics and political theory. Indeed, my own view is that such boundaries often obstruct our ability to see the ways in which comparativists must, and at their best often do, incorporate the study of political thought into explanation, and how comparative questions militate against the danger of Western political theorists theorizing in a historical and cultural vacuum. It is nevertheless the case that some chapters here are more concerned with what are commonly understood as questions of comparative politics, and others will be identified as chapters of political theory. Chapter 2 and to some degree chapter 3 are concerned with both the substance and methodology of social scientific explanations of Islamic fundamentalism and an interpretive approach to understanding. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are primarily concerned with political theory and comparative political theory: in them, I analyze Islamic fundamentalist political thought, Islamic modernist political thought, and Western critiques of modernity in contemporary political theory. The project is intended, however, as an integrated whole: if the chapters do not neatly fall into groupings by discipline, I have achieved some measure of success in this.

Any broadly interdisciplinary work takes certain risks by traversing several academic terrains into which other scholars have burrowed specifically and deeply. There is always the lurking danger of becoming the Lenny Bruce of scholars: "Is there anyone in the room whom I haven't offended?" It is in this connection that I must express my profound gratitude to the various colleagues and mentors who have greatly assisted me in my effort to do justice to the disciplines and arguments I engage in the course of this work. Foremost among them are Abdellah Hammoudi, Alan Ryan, and John Waterbury, all of whom struck a remarkable balance between the roles of intellectual partisan and serious critic. Their guidance, breadth of knowledge, and intellectual engagement made this interdisciplinary project not only possible but enjoyable. My discussions with George Kateb and my father, J. Peter Euben, have been extraordinary: always attentive to the political and moral stakes in even the most academic of arguments, they have both, on several occasions, not only recalled me to the reasons I undertook this project in the first place but helped me recognize them.

I have also benefited enormously from the close and critical readings of portions of this manuscript at various stages provided by Shahrough Akhavi, Shlomo Avineri, James W. Bailey, Lawrie Balfour, Judith Barish, Seyla Benhabib, L. Carl Brown, Edmund Burke, III, Fred Dallmayr, Amy Gutmann, Jeffrey Isaac, Ann and Warren Lane, Daniel Sabia, William Shepard, Emmanuel Sivan, and Keith Topper. I am particularly indebted to Hilary Persky, and not only for her friendship; her encouragement and intellectual engagement have contributed immeasurably to this project over the years. Of special note is Jonathan Perry, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude far surpassing words. His intensity of imagination, creativity, and moral compassion never cease to inspire me; he has taught me to listen in novel ways, and to hear in new registers. Without his patience, love, and sheer human kindness, this book would not have been possible.

Finally, I am grateful to the University Center for Human Values, the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, the Center of International Studies, and the Program for Near Eastern Studies, all at Princeton University. They have not only provided generous financial support, but also furnished me an invaluable opportunity to confer with students and faculty from a variety of disciplines in and beyond the Princeton University community. I am also beholden to Donald Puchala and the Walker Institute of International Studies and the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, for their support, financial and intellectual. For their efficient assistance in checking citations and reviewing transliterations in preparation for publication, I thank Sherry Marousek and Aisha Musa. Last but most certainly not least, I would like to thank the members of the Department of Political Science and the Committee on Academic Research at Wellesley College for their immediate and extraordinary support as this project drew to a close.

A final note is perhaps in order about the image on the cover of this book. The image is referred to as Raising a Ghost by Magic Lantern in an 1870 book entitled The Magic Lantern: How to Buy and How to Use It, also How to Raise a Ghost.² It depicts a later incarnation of the phantasmagoria, the precinematic effect originally popular in France in the late eighteenth century. As Barnouw describes it, the phantasmagoric effect involved the projection of lantern light through a slide onto layers of gauze, which appeared translucent to the audience. The area around the image was blacked out so that the projected figure floated as if without context and spectators could not tell its distance from them. By moving the lantern around, the projectionist could make the image appear to grow or diminish or suddenly black out. Used primarily by magicians and mediums, by the mid-nineteenth century the phantasmagoric effect was achieved more precisely by the use of a sheet of glass tilted at an angle, the use of limelight, and the involvement of a living person rather than a slide. The effect was that the stage seemed to be occupied by both actors and ghosts, interacting with each other, while the sheet of glass, the lantern, and the lantern operator were invisible to the audience.³

Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others have used the word phantasmagoria to refer not only to these precinematic forms of representation, but also to the "occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product. . . . [T]his outer appearance can lay claim to the status of being. Its perfection is at the same time the perfection of the illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis that constitutes itself in the realm of the absolute without having to renounce its claim to image the world."⁴ In other words, it comes to indicate the concealment or mystification of the mechanisms by which an image is produced, so that the image appears as reality.⁵ This phantasmagoric effect captures a central argument of this book, that is, that the post-Enlightenment rationalist methods scholars use to study politics actually produce an image of Islamic fundamentalism while concealing such mechanisms of production within claims of rationalist objectivity. The fact that the ghost in this particular depiction of the phantasmagoric effect is shrouded evokes perhaps the most common visual image of Islamic fundamentalism in Western scholarship and media: the Muslim woman covered head to foot in the Iranian chador. The image thus says less about what Islamic fundamentalism really is than about the ways in which rationalist assumptions derived from Western history and experiences—and the fears they express and repress—produce our understandings of fundamentalism.

A Note on Spelling

There are complex transliteration systems by which scholars have rendered Arabic terms into English. This book is intended for readers with a variety of backgrounds and interests; for the sake of uniformity and accessibility, then, I have opted to use the common spellings of proper names and terms available to a nonspecialist. For the sake of consistency, with less familiar terms, titles, and names I have striven to follow the spelling conventions that guide common transliterations of Arabic into English. To accomplish this, I have used minimal diacritics: in particular, ' is used to represent ‘ayn and ’ is used to represent hamza.

Enemy in the Mirror

CHAPTER ONE

Re-Marking Territories

DESPITE a diversity of political sensibilities and theoretical concerns, political theory in the late twentieth century can in many ways be characterized as postfoundational. Rawlsian and other liberal theorists are concerned to show that the basis of the well-ordered society need not presume a metaphysical conception of the good.¹ This need to rebut charges of metaphysics is driven by political imperatives, in particular plural and conflicting theories of the good and the understanding that any defense—rational or otherwise—of metaphysical foundations has become an anachronism in post-Enlightenment theoretical discourse. Theorists grouped roughly under the umbrellas of postmodernism and hermeneutics share this understanding despite radical differences with liberal premises. For Michel Foucault as for Hans-Georg Gadamer, the very possibility of political knowledge requires debunking notions such as science and epistemology that refer to and therefore presume the existence of truths outside of language, history, and human interests. Even someone like Jürgen Habermas, who is simultaneously critical of the postmodern repudiation of the Enlightenment and aspects of liberal discourse, shares this unease with the very concept of transcendent foundations. Contemporary political theory is thus embedded in what could be called an antifoundationalist discourse; within the parameters of this discourse, the particular problematic of political theory is how to construct a just society without the transcendent foundations thought to have previously sustained it.

The paradox, however, is that these attempts to theorize community without recourse to metaphysical truths take place in a world where political practice is increasingly dominated by those who take such truths as a given. That is, at the very moment political theory is coming to terms with the end of foundations, political practice is spinning off into a world driven by foundationalist certainties and the attempt to remake political, cultural, and economic power in accordance with them.² From abortion-clinic terrorism in Pensacola, Florida, to settler violence in the Occupied Territories, to the Islamic governments of Iran and the Sudan, to the American embassy bombings in Africa, to the establishment of a shadow system of medical clinics and banks by the Islamic groups in Egypt, religio-political fundamentalists in particular have made their influence felt in local, national, and international arenas. Importantly, the surge in fundamentalist activism transcends any one geographic area or particular religious tradition. Fundamentalist power is certainly nowhere more evident nor more threatening to advocates of democracy and/or a Western-driven post-Cold War order than in the Middle East. Yet in January 1994 former Vice President Dan Quayle met with religious-right activists in Florida and pledged allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Saviour, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.³

How do we,⁴ as Western students of politics, make sense of the increasingly foundationalist turn of political practice within a theoretical discourse that no longer sees any place for metaphysics in political life? While framed in terms of the more explicitly theoretical approaches to the study of politics, this question captures a dilemma facing political science generally. For while debates about epistemology and foundations may be associated with the more explicitly normative disciplines, self-styled descriptive disciplines are always wedded to an epistemology. In particular, nonnormative descriptions are wedded to a post-Enlightenment epistemology defined by the commitment to reading the political world as understandable, explicable, and knowable by way of human reason and methods. Such an epistemology at once determines how we come to know the world and constitutes the range of what is knowable. This suggests that the more our stories about politics—whether explicitly normative or apparently descriptive—are committed to a rationalist epistemology, the more difficulty we may have in compassing the significance of practices guided by and defined in terms of belief in divine truths unknowable by purely human means.

We can see examples of these difficulties in two recent theses about the demise of the Cold War and the trajectory of future international conflict. There is, for example, Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism, and the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.⁵ Echoing the Enlightenment’s faith in the march of progress through history, Fukuyama suggests that all conflicts will be resolved within a universalizing narrative of liberalization and modernization. Nationalist, ethnic, and religio-political conflicts and ideologies appear in this light to be the virulent but ultimately doomed expression of peoples and states still in history in what is inexorably becoming a posthistorical world. Such conflict and violence will continue as impulses incompletely played out,⁶ but the implication remains that, in Didier Bigo’s words, as they are devoid of sense, they will exhaust themselves with the actors.⁷ While Fukuyama concedes that Islam does in fact constitute a systematic and coherent ideology, just like liberalism and communism, with its own code of morality and doctrine of political and social justice, he concludes that Islamic cultures cannot challenge liberal democracy on its own territory on the level of ideas; on the contrary, the Islamic world has revealed itself to be manifestly vulnerable to the conquest of universal liberalism.⁸ The martial metaphor for the tensions among ideas and principles is familiar but nevertheless revealing: Fukuyama’s language here reifies complex phenomena in the service of Western triumphalism and elides important distinctions among Islam, Islamic fundamentalist ideas, and Islamic fundamentalist militarism.

Contrary to Fukuyama’s optimism, it is of course now abundantly clear that the end of the Cold War has presaged not a world in which the challenges to Western liberalism have been exhausted, but one apparently quite hospitable to the survival and increasing stridency of movements and people who reject it. The demise of Cold War politics and categories has laid bare loyalties, identities, affiliations, and commitments supposedly rendered obsolete by the ascendancy of ideological conflict. Those of us living in the West do not have to go as far afield as the Middle East to see this point; we have only to look around us to see it is so. Thus at the other extreme from Fukuyama’s Hegelian reading of the post-Cold War trajectory are theories that draw more on a Hobbesian paradigm of international politics to underscore the inevitability of international conflict.⁹ As represented by scholars such as William Lind and Samuel Huntington, the Cold War is interpreted as the last in a series of Western civil wars’’ (the phrase is Lind’s) that began in the conflict of seventeenth-century Europe.¹⁰ In this narrative, the passing of this stage in history, and of the Cold War in particular, has laid bare a Hobbesian as revised by Morgenthau¹¹ world, one dominated by curiously immutable and constitutively antagonistic cultural entities.¹² On Huntington’s post-Cold War map, old ideological dichotomies of West versus East are reinscribed along the lines of culture: the Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe."¹³

In Huntington’s schema, Islamic militancy is cast as one significant dimension of the final evolutionary stage of international conflict, the clash between the West and the rest.¹⁴ Here the West is defined in terms of a commitment to individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, and arrayed against it are often opposing identities and movements implicitly understood to be united as agents of disorder in the post-Cold War interstate system, an expression of particularisms and differences over universality and equality.¹⁵ We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both.¹⁶

Huntington’s thesis captures, I think, a popular mood: to many in the West, Islamic fundamentalism seems a particularly foul emanation from that netherworld of fanaticism, where disciples of the violent and the irrational abound, a prejudice catalyzed by the bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Huntington's clash of civilizations has found expression in an even darker vision whereby the rise of fundamentalism is portrayed as the threat to the New World Order. Here the confrontation between religio-political insurgency and secularism is understood as part of a New Cold War, global in its scope, binary in its opposition, occasionally violent and essentially a difference of ideologies.¹⁷ Indeed, Islamic fundamentalists have been described as religious Stalinists,’’ language that replicates the very Manichaeanism for which fundamentalists are rightly criticized.¹⁸ In its most extreme formulation, this vision has devolved into a caricature of Islam as the Green Peril’’ (green is the color of Islam) advancing across the world stage, an image that echoes both the Red Menace of Cold War discourse and anti-Asian polemics about the Yellow Peril. This, in turn, has been expressed in and reinforced by the selective application of the highly mechanistic determinism of domino theory to Islamic fundamentalism by American policy analysts—just as it was applied to communism in the Cold War.¹⁹ Broadly speaking, green has replaced red as the rising force, but we concentrate our attention and our decisiveness on a secondary front facing a defensive opponent; and we spare our means on more sensitive fronts with potentially offensive opponents. Tense in a calm zone, relaxed in a tense zone, we can, as usual, be attacked from the rear. The nuclear and rational North deters the nuclear and rational North, not the conventional and mystical South.²⁰

While characterizations of Islamic fundamentalism as the Green Peril and part of the New Cold War are by no means universal,²¹ it is nevertheless striking that this sense of inevitable danger from the South (or East, depending upon one’s vantage point) closely resembles the former menace from the Communist East and that, furthermore, these fears should find such strong expression at the very moment many argue the West has reached a pinnacle of international power.²² I suspect that this sense of danger is only partially related to a genuine sense of Western military, political, or cultural vulnerability; it also reflects a growing sense of alarm and surprise that phenomena such as Islamic fundamentalism have survived into the modern era at all—the flip side of Fukuyama’s insistence that such fundamentally archaic impulses are destined to extinguish themselves in a flash of predictable but nonsensical violence. Indeed, the repeated invocation of terms such as resurgence, revival, and reemergence to describe religio-political militancy suggests a will to believe that the disenchantment of the world has truly reduced the purchase of such irrational commitments, rather than having just pushed them underground or out of sight. We are taken off guard, alarmed and frightened as if confronted by a ghost that should not be. Old specters haunt modern politics in new guises: if the Soviet Union disintegrates into warring republics, Lind prophesied in 1991, the twenty-first century could once again find Islam at the Gates of Vienna, as immigrants or terrorists if not as armies.²³

Neither of these two apparently contradictory theses, the end of history and the clash of civilizations, occasions discussions about the status of truth or the tension between politics and metaphysical conceptions of the good on the part of their authors; they are intended as persuasive, realistic reflections of the world as it is and will be. And as descriptive accounts of contemporary international politics, both narratives acknowledge and find a place for the persistence of political practices such as fundamentalism, if only in passing. Yet they too seem finally unable to encounter the content or import of such political practices in any meaningful way. By this I mean that both pessimistic and optimistic prognoses of the post-Cold War world are content implicitly to assume and thus reinforce the idea that religio-political movements (among others) stand in relation to Western, secular power and international order as the chaos of the particularistic, irrational, and archaic stand in relation to the universalistic, rational, and modern. My point is not, of course, that such a subtext in some sense originates in these accounts. On the contrary, they are only the most recent expression of it. Similar assumptions pervaded coverage of the Iranian Revolution in 1979: images of figures clad in black, faces distorted by fury, fists thrust out in defiance of the great Satan fulfilled many Western fears about the lethal chemistry of religious militancy and Islam. My point is rather that in such narratives political Islam is registered primarily if not exclusively as a threat to modern, legitimate politics, a phenomenon to be contained or overcome. It is not so much that these theories are wrong, but that the very definition of legitimate politics presupposed by them overdetermines the equation of political Islam and menace.

Post postmodernism, it is perhaps obvious to point out the ways in which our scholarly categories and narratives at once express and reproduce particular historical and cultural assumptions about the world (although that is not all that they do); yet these post-Cold War theses reveal the anxieties and presuppositions at work in the intersection of Western social scientific scholarship and Islamic fundamentalism in particular. Such anxieties in part originate in and are exacerbated by the cultural distance and historical antagonism between East and West, between what is understood to be us and Islam. But they are also written into the paradox with which I began this chapter: the disjuncture between a world that is more, rather than less, marked by what I have called foundationalist political practices, and a profoundly this-worldly scholarly discourse that sees no place for such foundationalist certainties in modern political life or, by extension, regards such political practices as a threat to modern politics. This paradox suggests, of course, that along with others who study the non-Westernworld,²⁴ students of Islamic fundamentalism must worry that the tried and true tools with which we in the West study political life may distort our understanding of practices cross-culturally. But it also suggests that many of our descriptive and theoretical tools for understanding are inadequate to the task of studying foundationalist political practice in particular, whether we seek to explain practices of Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria or Christian fundamentalists in America.

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY AND FOUNDATIONALIST POLITICAL PRACTICE

To rephrase the question I posed earlier: given the way our intellectual categories reflect and reproduce ambivalences and preconceptions about the relationship between metaphysical truths and politics, East and West, legitimate and illegitimate politics—in short, prejudices (to use Gadamer’s meaning) that are part of our Western tradition—how do we make sense of the increasing power of Islamic fundamentalism in the modern world?²⁵ This book is intended, in part, as an answer to this question. The answer, like the question, works on two levels, substantive and methodological.

I offer an interpretation of Islamic fundamentalist political thought in an attempt to provide a window into fundamentalists’ own understandings of the movement’s meaning and purpose. In chapter 3 I analyze the ethicopolitical worldview of one particularly influential Islamic fundamentalist thinker, Sayyid Qutb. I concentrate on Qutb as the thinker whose systematic analysis of Islam, modernity, and political action has shaped the commitments of a generation of Sunni fundamentalists. I argue that Qutb’s political thought is an indictment not just of Western imperialism and colonialism, the corruption of Middle Eastern regimes, Arab secularist power, or modernity per se, but also of modern forms of sovereignty and the Western rationalist epistemology that justifies them. The remarkable impact of Qutb’s ideas on the contemporary movement narrows but does not bridge the gap between Qutb’s intent and how his arguments are disseminated, received, and reinterpreted. My reading is not a substitute for such a genealogy, nor is it intended as an analysis of Qutb’s complete oeuvre.²⁶ I approach Qutb’s final stage of thought with a particular set of purposes. As a highly influential theorist of fundamentalism who was himself a part of the early fundamentalist movement in Egypt, Qutb’s work is an opportunity to bridge the theory and practice divide: it is instructive on its own terms as a text of fundamentalist theory and symptomatically, as a guide to understanding the appeal of fundamentalist ideas in the modern world.

Indeed, although Qutb was an Egyptian Sunni Muslim, his critique of modernity arises out of a widely shared experience of colonialism and cultural imperialism whereby modernization and modern political thought were intimately intertwined with the experience of foreign domination.²⁷ The breadth of this experience provides the context for my argument in chapters 3 and 4 that Qutb’s critique is neither unique nor idiosyncratic: despite crucial differences, Qutb shares with other Islamic fundamentalist thinkers a rejection of modern forms of sovereignty and of human claims to knowledge that justify them, and an insistence that, by contrast, God’s knowledge of the deepest meanings of human existence justifies divine rule over both moral and political life. Thus, although Aziz al-Azmeh is in some ways right to point out that there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it, I want to claim that there are unifying patterns at least to Islamic fundamentalists’ constructions of tradition out of the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet and that, moreover, Qutb’s worldview lends crucial insight into them.²⁸

My argument here must be distinguished from the contention that there is a monolithic Islamic tradition, a single place or uniform culture called Islam that reacts uniformly to a unilinear process of modernization throughout the Islamic world.²⁹ On the contrary, any religious tradition is inevitably a site of contestation informed by the cultural, historical, geographical, and political context in which it is located.³⁰ Moreover, as Nicholas Dirks argues in regard to India, in a postcolonial world, such a simple opposition between tradition and modernity makes little sense because much of what has been taken to be timeless tradition is, in fact, the paradoxical effect of colonial rule, where culture was carefully depoliticized and reified into a specifically colonial version of civil society.³¹ Thus, in invoking an Islamic fundamentalist worldview, I refer not to the revival of an essential Islamic tradition, but rather to the ways in which the global ascendance of Western cultural, political, and economic norms has presented a common set of dilemmas and problems to prevailing understandings of Islamic tradition,³² an interaction that has produced a particular remake of things traditional, one among other possible remakes of things traditional, themselves impossible to apprehend as substances and in an unmediated way.³³

My analysis of Qutb’s political thought is also an occasion to elaborate, by argument and example, what I call comparative political theory. Generally