Review Article

Islamising Modernity, IndividualisingIslam?

LEEN BOER

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror

Mahmood MamdaniNew York: Pantheon Books, 2004

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West

Gilles KepelCambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004

Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Olivier RoyLondon: Hurst & Co, 2004

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

Tariq RamadanOxford: Oxford University Press, 2004

The slipstream of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the USA produced aproliferation of books on the relationship between Islam and the West(and similar concept pairs). Some delve deep into the history of ideas andphilosophy. Other books focus on phenomena like liberalism, (neo-)colonialism, eurocentrism and Islamism.1

In this review four books will be discussed. To ‘explain’ 9/11 and itsaftermath both Mahmood Mamdani and Gilles Kepel focus on recenthistory, particularly the USA’s strategy in the Cold War. They resort to whatOlivier Roy calls a diachronic approach in trying to understand ‘Muslimanger’. Knowledge of history is indeed indispensable, also because diverginginterpretations of it permeate the relationship between Islam and the West.Mamdani is an East African Muslim of Indian descent and Professor ofGovernment at a US university. Kepel is a French Professor of Middle EastStudies. Roy, a Frenchman too, follows a transversal approach to Islam,

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Leen Boer is in the Strategic Policy Planning Unit of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PO Box

20061, Bezuidenhoutseweg 67, The Hague, The Netherlands. This review reflects the author’s personal views.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 7, pp 1189 – 1199, 2005

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/071189–11 � 2005 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590500235793 1189

comparing it to the Western world, focusing on the increasing role of Islam inthe West. Of the four books his, full of insights, is most worth reading. Thereview concludes with Tariq Ramadan’s interesting vista on the future ofIslam in the West. Ramadan is a Swiss national, a philosopher and an Islamicpreacher. It has almost become a tradition to add that his Egyptiangrandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood.That 9/11 needs to be understood first and foremost as the unfinished

business of the Cold War is Mahmood Mamdani’s message. In Good Muslim,Bad Muslim he argues that political Islam emerged as the result of themodern encounter with Western power and that Islamist terrorism is an evenmore recent phenomenon, one that followed the USA’s embrace of proxywar after its defeat in Vietnam. The title of the book is intended to reflect thepublic debate in the USA after 9/11. In that debate President Bush set thetone in distinguishing ‘good Muslims’ from ‘bad Muslims’: unless proved tobe ‘good’, every Muslim was presumed to be ‘bad’. Mamdani’s focus in his‘interpretive essay’ is very much on exogenous factors: Western actions andperceptions. ‘Culture talk’ is his core concept. It assumes that every culturehas a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics as aconsequence of that essence. In post-9/11 America culture talk focuses onIslam and on Muslims who presumably made culture at the beginning ofcreation, as a prophetic act. In spite of this criticism of the US perspective,Mamdani proves himself somewhat blind to the inner dynamics of theIslamic world. Many salafist or neo-fundamentalist groupings are much moreadept and experienced than George Bush in denouncing fellow Muslims asbad or even as apostates and unbelievers, and in proclaiming themselves theonly true or good Muslims. Paradoxically that is rather un-islamic behaviouras the judgement of the validity of the belief of the Muslim is the perquisite ofAllah alone. The ‘culture talk image’ of an unchangeable Islam is not that farremoved from the one salafist or literalist thinking evokes.The founding father of contemporary ‘American culture talk’ is Bernard

Lewis, who coined the term ‘clash of civilisations’. According to Lewis lackof freedom underlies many of the troubles of the Muslim world. He arguedthat the West should remain a bystander while Muslims fight their internalwar, pitting good against bad Muslims. It was Samuel Huntington whosubsequently issued a clarion call to the West to get ready for a clash ofcivilisations. In Mamdani’s view he cast Islam in the role of an enemycivilisation: Muslims could only be bad. To Mamdani it does not make senseto think of culture in political—and therefore—territorial terms. Cultureshould be dealt with in terms that are both historical and non-territorial. ‘TheWest’ developed from a geographical location to a racialised notion referringto all peoples of European origin, no matter where they live and for howlong. Fundamentalism is a religious identity and should be distinguishedfrom political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Islam. Yetfundamentalism is not a throwback to some pre-modern culture but aresponse to an enforced secular modernity.Mainstream Islam lacks the problem of secularism, in Mamdani’s view,

since it did not develop a religious hierarchy parallel to a secular state

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hierarchy, as Christianity did. One might, however, as easily make a case forthe opposite. In the absence of secularism the religious domain will easily bedefiled by the political one. Politics and government take place in theimperfect reality of human life. There is thus a serious risk of ideologicalcontamination and consequently of an ‘islamisation of failure’.2 Mamdanihimself implicitly contributes to that argumentation by pointing out that thepioneers of political Islam were not the ulama but political intellectuals, suchas Sayyid Qutb, ‘with an exclusively worldly concern’.To distinguish cultural from political Islam Mamdani uses the remainder

of his book to place political Islam in the context of the Cold War. He wantsto make clear that terrorism is not a cultural trait, but a modern politicalmovement at the service of a modern power. The USA’s Vietnam experienceled it to a determined search for regional proxies to be used in thecontinuation of the Cold War against militant nationalism in different partsof the Third World, perceived by Washington to be a proxy for Sovietexpansionism. Part and parcel of this offensive roll-back strategy wascovert—alongside overt—support to (proto-)terrorist movements. There wasa learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late ColdWar, from southern Africa through Central America to its culmination inAfghanistan, Central Asia. The point of the Reagan policy was payback.Everything had to be done to turn the Afghan war into the USSR’s Vietnam.In close collaboration with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the CIA flooded theregion with the most radical Islamist recruits and created an armed jihad.3 Inthe process many madrassas were turned into politico-military trainingschools. The real damage the CIA did, Mamdani concludes, was to privatiseinformation about how to produce and spread violence capable of creatingterror. The CIA was key to forging the link between Islam and terror. Theimage evoked by Mamdani reminds the reader of the tale of the sorcerer’sapprentice. Current Islamist terror is the result of a triple confluence. It wasorganised by the Americans during the Afghan jihad. It is the ideologicalproduct of an encounter between Islamist intellectuals and Marxist –Leninistconcepts of armed struggle. It is the political consequence of thedemonisation of Islam and its equation with terrorism.Mamdani’s unbalanced focus on exogenous factors, especially US policies,

contributes to the image, if not the myth, of an Islamic Middle East as aplaything and powerless victim. It is carried to its extreme in Mamdani’sviews on the evolving relationship between the USA and Iraq. If truth betold, according to Mamdani, it was not the Saddam Hussein regime butsuccessive US administrations that freely resorted to using weapons of massdestruction, beginning with the 1991 Gulf war. The sanctions regime and theoil-for-food-programme ‘unleashed the mass murder of hundreds ofthousands, mainly children’, turning the United Nations into a US proxy.The reader is kept guessing as to what the USA (or states in the region)should have done (or not done) after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. After9/11 proxy war gave way to outright invasion. The US objective, however,remained the same as under Reagan: to target and liquidate militantnationalism through regime change. Mamdani perceives a growing common

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ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it called‘the war on terror’. Both sides understand justice as revenge. Both sides dishout collective punishment, disregarding collateral damage. The USA needs tolearn to live with nationalism in an era of imperialism, is the somewhatsimple message in the end. But ‘live and let live’ appears to be antithetical tomilitant nationalism as well as to imperialism.Al-Qaeda is primarily engaged in a War for Muslim Minds, according to

Gilles Kepel. 9/11 was meant to show that Islamist militants were irresistablypowerful and the USA abhorrently weak. In the years to come the battle inthe war for Muslim minds will also be fought in the communities of believerson the outskirts of London, Paris and other European cities. Just likeMamdani, Kepel recounts history, be it from a more European, if not Frenchperspective: the failure of the Oslo peace process, the neoconservativerevolution in the USA, the evolution in Al-Qaeda’s strategy from the nearbyto the faraway enemy, and in its make-up, the role of Saudi Arabia, theattempt at nation building in Iraq and the ‘battle for Europe’.The Oslo peace process came to an end in September 2000, when Ariel

Sharon visited the Temple Mount and Yasser Arafat triggered the Al Aqsaintifada. The latter’s aim was not only to checkmate Israel, but Hamas andIslamic Jihad as well. To survive politically Arafat had to take over thediscourse of Islamist politics. President De Gaulle is portrayed as havingforeseen the long-term risks of the 1967 occupation and the threat ofterrorism in the region. The support of the USA for Israel began as a short-term opportunity to score a victory against Moscow in the Middle East.Kepel too describes US support to the jihad in Afghanistan as a means tobeat the USSR. In the process it promoted radical Sunni Islamismthroughout the Middle East. From there Kepel goes on to sketch the impactof the neoconservative revolution on US foreign policy.4 Huntington’s viewson the ‘clash of civilisations’ were used to transfer the strategic hostility theWest had inherited from the Cold War to the Muslim world. The conceptualtools designed to apprehend the communist danger were transposed toapprehend the very different reality of the Islamist ‘menace’. It was wrong,Kepel emphasises, to compare the Muslim world with the communist one.The Muslim world is neither homogeneous nor monolithic. It has manycentres, all competing for hegemony over political and religious values.The 9/11 attacks were not a thunderbolt out of the blue. In Kepel’s view

they were part of a carefully considered programme that combined the logicof jihad, the operational tactics of guerrilla warfare, the opportunisticadvantages offered by the Al Aqsa intifada and the political influence ofneoconservative ideology on US foreign policy. These factors togetherworked to the advantage of radical Islamism. The jihadists persuadedthemselves that their defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan had beencrucial. Having brought down one superpower, they recommitted theirefforts to wreaking havoc on the remaining one, the USA. Moreover, in the1990s these Islamist radicals had not been able to mobilise popular supportto overthrow established regimes in the Middle East. Spectacular attacks onWestern targets were intended to resolve that problem. In Kepel’s opinion

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Zawahiri is the central figure in Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden his acolyte.Zawahiri’s worldview is comparable to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’.Infidels, apostates and hypocrites must be subjected to a merciless jihad untilthey accept Islam or face extermination. There is no exception for the ‘peopleof the Book’, Jews and Christians. Zawahiri was trying to buttress the feelingof anxiety and humiliation that was widespread in the Muslim world.The means adopted by the USA to fight terrorism appeared to be

inappropriate. As in the Cold War, terrorism was seen as something linked tostates. Kepel is bubbling with irony. The USA required a worthy adversaryfor its war on terror: a nation with real estate to be occupied, militaryhardware to be destroyed and a regime to be overthrown; not a terrorist NGO

without status or headquarters, however devastating that NGO might prove tobe. Washington’s strategic planners were culturally incapable of grasping anactor that was not a state. The first phase of the war on terror did noteliminate Al-Qaeda. The organisation appeared to consist of internetwebsites, clandestine financial transfers, international air travel and aproliferation of activists ranging from the suburbs of Jersey City to the ricepaddies of Indonesia. A series of attacks after 9/11 demonstrated Al-Qaeda’sresilience. In 2003 Al-Qaeda became a franchise, with Bin Laden merely thelogo for independent terrorist entrepreneurs. Taking stock in the summer of2004, Kepel concludes that up until then the US government’s war againstterror has been unsuccessful. His remark that Guantanamo is to the state oflaw what offshore tax havens are to trade clearly suggests that the evidence isdefinitely on the side of failure. Kepel considers the phenomenon of Osamabin Laden and his associates to be the offspring of the marriage betweenSaudi wahhabism and international Islamist activism, facilitated at thehighest echelons by the complicit mediation of the USA and Saudi Arabia.The image of the sorcerer’s apprentice pops up again. The US offensive inAfghanistan, and especially the war in Iraq, set about cutting out the visibleparts of the terrorist tumour, but it did not have a systemic cure for thecancerous cells that were metastasising throughout the world. The expectedsequence of events in Iraq was supposed to follow the script of the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe: after crushing the tyrant Iraqi civilsociety would emerge.Before 9/11 Europe had provided Al-Qaeda’s planners with a sanctuary.

The bombings in Madrid on 11 March 2004 established Europe as the newfrontline for terrorist attacks. Germany had become a favourite home base,because—as a reaction to fascism—the German legal system requires a verystrict burden of proof of wrongdoing before any conviction can take place.France, a victim of earlier waves of Islamist terrorism, tried to protect itselfby consistently refusing to grant political asylum to radical Arab Islamistleaders. The UK had adopted a diametrically opposed policy (‘Londoni-stan’). An optimistic view of the future would see the vast majority of youngMuslims in Europe as the ideal bearers of a modernity bestowed upon themas western Europe’s newest citizens and as potential purveyors of these valuesto the Muslim countries from which their families emigrated. A morenegative view of the future would imply an embrace of cultural separatism,

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with some people passing into violence. Unlike the salafists, who preach self-imposed apartheid, the associations that emerged from the MuslimBrotherhood have chosen to root themselves in European civil society. Forthe past 14 centuries Muslim societies have been torn between two poles,jihad and fitna. Fitna signifies sedition, war in the heart of Islam, a centrifugalforce threatening the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegrationand ruin. Fitna undermines Muslim society from within. Jihad sublimatesinternal tensions and projects them outward, toward the land of unbelief.Since 9/11 the world has been trapped in a vicious dialectic of jihad and fitna,according to Kepel’s bleak picture.Olivier Roy’s declared aim in Globalised Islam is to open up some new lines

of intellectual inquiry. The result is a thought-provoking book, full of ideas,based on well considered analysis and interpretation. However, Roy is alsooften tempted to go into too much detail and distinction. The title of his bookrefers to the way in which the relationship of Muslims to Islam is beingreshaped by globalisation, Westernisation and the impact of living as aminority in a context where religion has lost its social authority. The Islamistmovements of the last decades of the 20th century have run out of steam asrevolutionary forces. Their aim was to unite the ummah in one Islamic state,not restricted to a specific nation. Roy perceives a nationalisation of Islamismin most Middle Eastern countries. It is more likely, however, that nationalismhas never really left the stage. In the current era of ‘post-Islamism’ somemovements have evolved into ‘normal’ political parties. Others gave way towhat Roy considers to be neo-fundamentalism. Part of the rootless Muslimyouth in the West is attracted by a new sectarian communitarian discourse,advocating multiculturalism as a means of rejecting integration into Westernsociety. Some young people radicalise. Some resort to jihadist militancy.Radical and militant neo-fundamentalism has developed in parallel with theburgeoning of salafist madrassas throughout the Muslim world and the‘deterritorialisation’, particularly through migration, of a large proportion ofthe Muslim population. It is an agent of acculturation rather than a return tolost authenticity.Neo-fundamentalism is (a major) one of many forms of religious revival

and as such might be understood as an attempt to ‘Islamise modernity’, as anegative of Westernisation. Post-Islamism has debunked the myth of theformer Islamists, that the religious and the political could be unified. Bothspheres have appeared to be autonomous, despite the wishes of fundamen-talists and secularists alike. There is no decline of religion, but there is a trendtowards fragmentation of religious identity and authority, a blossoming ofnew and different forms of religiosity that might very well be antagonistictowards each other, and paradoxically a blurring of the lines betweenChristian and Muslim religiosity. Mainstream Muslims in the West arerecasting religious norms in terms of values and tend to align withconservative Christians and Jews. Contemporary religious revival in Islamis calling to the individual’s spiritual needs. The self, and hence theindividual, is at the core of contemporary religiosity. The shift in emphasisfrom religion to religiosity implies that theological debate gives way to a

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personal relationship to faith, deity and knowledge. Religion itself is notchanging, but the relationship of believers to their religion. There isincreasing competition, which is reflected in an increase in sectarian andreligious feuds. Neo-fundamentalists by definition reject the idea that therecan be different schools of thought. They consider themselves the only trueMuslims. They tend to reconstruct the self itself in its relationship to Islam, insome sort of staging of the self, in what Roy tellingly calls a sort ofexhibitionism in dress and language. Neo-fundamentalists themselves aredivided as well. Maybe literalism inevitably leads to divisiveness.In Europe secularisation sprang from the rejection of the overwhelming

ideological domination of religion. One wanted to save politics from religion.In the current Muslim world Islam, which almost everybody considers to bepredominant, is trying to live up to its de facto political marginalisation. Thefact that politicians have to pay lip-service to Islam does not make it adominant political factor. When everything has to be Islamic, nothing is.Politics prevail over religion, not religion over politics. Moreover, politicisa-tion of religion appears to entail desacralisation. Empowerment leads tocorruption, compromise and the loss of utopia. Traditional clerics acquiredan interest in saving Islam from politics. While many observers focus onIslam having missed a European-style Enlightenment, they tend to overlookthe way in which Islam is adapting to contemporary, individualised forms ofWestern religiosity. In many Muslim countries political actors haveinstrumentalised and ossified religion. Consequently forms of Islamicrevivalism and expression tend to bypass or ignore the state and to reflecta privatisation of faith. In sociological terms Muslim societies tend to align,in the medium term, along Western society lines. Everywhere women aremore educated and marrying later. Muslim women are increasingly escapingfrom traditional patterns. The fecundity index is dropping dramatically.There is a growing assertiveness among young people and consequently agrowing generation gap. Re-islamisation has led to an increase in theappearance of veils and beards, but not to a reversion to polygamy or theextended family. Everywhere extended families are giving way to nuclearfamilies. Islamisation should be analysed as a contemporary expression of theglobalisation and Westernisation of the Muslim world.Just like Mamdani, Roy rejects the culturalist approach of people like

Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Islam cannot be the issue, simplybecause Islam is not a discrete entity embodied in a common society, historyand territory. However, he immediately points out that the culturalistapproach is shared by conservative Muslims, for whom everything pertainingto Islam is or should be related to something in the Koran. You might saythey go a long way together in a kind of perverse coalition. Not to the end,however. Many Western culturalists say they carry the banner of democracy;many ‘Islamists-turned-conservatives’ reject democracy as a tool of Westernimperialism.Deterritorialisation is a crucial concept in Roy’s analysis. Islam is less and

less ascribed to a specific territory and civilisational area. The Muslim ummahhas to be considered more and more in abstract, imaginary or virtual terms.

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A third of the world’s Muslims now live as members of a minority. Muslimsin recently settled minorities have to reinvent what makes them Muslim.The globalisation of the traditional Muslim world may give Muslims theexperience of ‘deterritorialisation’ without leaving their own country. Theneed to formulate what it means to be a Muslim is a logical consequence ofthe gradual disappearance of the social authority of religion, within Muslimcountries too, as a result of Westernisation and globalisation.Individualisation might be considered an even more important core

concept in Roy’s analysis. In a deterritorialised context the emphasis is on theindividual’s faith and religiosity, on personal choice. Community is based onindividuals. Information technology is having an impact. Real communitiesare being replaced by virtual and even imagined ones. Strictly speaking,religion is everybody’s business in Sunni Islam, as there is no institutionalisedintercessor. Of course, there are ulama with a de facto influence on religiousissues. Nevertheless, the task of reformulating what Islam means falls mainlyon the shoulders of the individual Muslim. One would almost have expectedRoy to conclude that Sunni Islam especially provides very fertile ground forthe current trend towards individualisation that he perceives among Muslimbelievers. Description prevails over explanation here. Do social andeconomic changes brought about by globalisation necessarily lead toindividualism? Is that the reason why social patterns in Muslim societiestend to align with those in Western societies? Might it be then that individualchoice and freedom are the ultimate, irreducible and therefore universal corecharacteristics of modernity? Could it be that there are now different layers ofmodernity evolving around that irreducible core, diverging, for example,from the Western—real or imagined—‘triumph of reason’? The reader ofGlobalised Islam might start wondering about these and similar issues, beingconfronted with the rising importance of the individual in Islam throughoutthe book, but unfortunately in this respect Roy does not dig deeply.Islamist movements have contributed to individualisation. They addressed

individuals rather than traditional solidarity groups. Both liberal andfundamentalist views are based on the individual, not the collective. Thereis no dearth of reformist thinkers and writers in the Muslim world, accordingto Roy. The problem is that they tend to be too intellectualist and do notappeal to born-again Muslims, who prefer gurus to teachers. Roy points toanalogous developments in Jewish and Christian (especially Catholic)revivalism.The new jihad is in the end also an individual and personal decision. Most

militants are engaged in a personal jihad. They cut the links with thecommunities they come from and join an imagined one. Roy considers thepattern to be reminiscent of most West European radicals of the 1970s and1980s. Al-Qaeda is at a crossroads between this Third Worldist and Marxisttradition and current Islamic radicalisation. Most of the militants forgedtheir own Islam in a small cell of fellows who broke with their past. Al-Qaedadoes not have real roots in the Middle East, despite the fact that most of itsfighters are ethnic Arabs. In Roy’s view Al-Qaeda is a security problem andnot a strategic threat. Bin Laden’s thinking is pre-Leninist. Just like the

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Russian socialist revolutionaries of the end of the 19th century he expectedthe alienated masses to rise up because of a spectacular attack at the heart ofpower. Roy is a bit too quick, however, in making this comparison. It may betrue that Al-Qaeda does not have a strategic vision and that most of itstargets have no military value, but the psychological and therefore alsopolitical and economic effects of conceivable terrorist attacks may be so greatthat they can easily blur the distinction Roy makes between a security threatand a strategic one.Deterritorialisation has an important impact on the production of the

Muslim discourse. As already mentioned, resettled Muslims often have toreassess their identity answering questions and pressures from a non-Muslimenvironment. And, perhaps more importantly, Muslims in the West oftenenjoy a greater freedom of speech and belief than in many Muslim countries.That does not necessary lead to a more ‘liberal’ Islam. Neo-fundamentalismis using that space as well, as is its militant variant, perfectly fittingindividualisation, as Roy shows. The tendency of neo-fundamentalists toisolate themselves as true believers from the rest of society might be theirAchilles heel. Apart from that Roy is convinced that, at least in Europe, neo-fundamentalism will exhaust itself through its inability to provide Muslimswith long-term solutions.Tariq Ramadan acknowledges the greater freedom of belief of Muslims in

the West than in most Muslim countries. His book, Western Muslims and theFuture of Islam, consists of two parts. The first is a treatise on Islamicprinciples and juridical instruments. The second focuses on the practicalapplication of these principles and instruments in the context of Westernsociety from three perspectives: the principles to respect, the reality of thesituation and the reforms he considers necessary to face the challenges of lifeas a Muslim in the West.The first part appears to be an attempt to convince Muslims that Islam

and Western society are compatible. Drawing on original sources Ramadandescribes the fundamental principles of ‘universal Islam’, because Muslimsneed to know what is unchangeable when confronted with diversity andchange. Many non-Muslims will not find it easy to get through this part ofthe book. Yet it would be a pity if they left the second part unread becauseof it. The core message in the second part of the book is that Muslims inthe West should not isolate themselves and become stuck in a defensive‘minority consciousness’, an unhealthy victim mentality and an inferioritycomplex. On the contrary, they should integrate, albeit armed with theirown faith and identity. A Muslim in a non-Muslim society should be opento the good things in that society that do not contravene Islam’s universals.For that purpose s/he needs thorough knowledge of that society as well asof his/her own identity. On the basis of such (self-)consciousness the Muslimis able to decide on the particulars of his/her ‘inclusion’ in that non-Muslimsociety.The problems Muslims are faced with in the West are mainly of a spiritual

nature: how to keep faith alive in a secular society dominated by the logic ofproduction and consumption. In such a context their behaviour has to

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express their faith. The main practicalities discussed by Ramadan areeducation, social commitment, political and economic participation andinter-religious dialogue. The pros and cons of separate or parallel Islamicschools are extensively reviewed. Muslim children should attend publicschools and get complementary Islamic education. It makes no sense toreinvent what the public system already provides. Moreover, existing Islamicparallel education is often completely unconnected to US or Europeanrealities, focusing on the countries of origin instead of on the countries inwhich the children are growing up. With regard to the status of women toomany Muslims in the West are tempted to follow what was customary in theircountry of origin or what ‘the ulama from back there’ said or say they shoulddo. Ramadan’s position is that there is broad scope for interpretation of thescriptural sources. There is an Islamic feminism on the march. Muslimwomen will define their own Islamic feminity.Ramadan maintains that there is a difference in nature between the Islamic

principles related to religious ritual and those that concern the affairs of theworld and society: the first are very detailed and precise, while the second aremostly giving guidance in a certain direction rather than fixing a restrictiveframework. From that perspective Muslims do not have a particular problemwith the principle of distinguishing the various orders of things, the religiousand the political. Islam is a social religion. Practising Islam meansparticipating in the social endeavour, also in the West. The Muslim shouldparticipate in Western democracy and not refrain from it, as advocated bythe traditionalist ulama supported by the ‘petromonarchies’. Ramadan is lessclear on the particulars of political participation. Should there be separateIslamic political parties or not? ‘Economic resistance’ is the title of thechapter on economic participation. It is a plea for resistance to neoliberalism.Islam acknowledges property rights, but also prescribes sharing andgenerosity. Muslims have to be creative in devising alternatives to capitalism,in close collaboration with other Western, but non-Muslim opponents of thedominance of the market economy. In this respect Ramadan seems to havebeen influenced more by Western social critique than by Islam.Islam is not a culture, but Western Islamic cultures are coming into being.

This is Ramadan’s conclusion. The migrants’ children are moulding thesecultures as new arrangements between religion and society. As fully fledgedWestern citizens they need to free themselves of their double inferioritycomplex, in relation to the West as well as to the Muslim world. They shouldreject the status of second-class citizens and demand respect. Like Kepel,Ramadan expects the dialogue between Huntington’s ‘clashing civilisations’to take place within Europe and North America and not at the geopoliticalborders between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’. Tariq Ramadan’s message is acontroversial one. Muslim critics tend to see him as too westernised. Non-Muslim Western critics often suggest he has a hidden agenda, theislamisation of the West. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam is,however, an important contribution to the debate on the integration ofMuslims in Western society, precisely because it addresses balancing theissues of adaptation, assertiveness and identity.

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Roy’s and Ramadan’s books are by far the most thought-provoking.Taking a more conceptual approach they delve deeper—explicitly orimplicitly—into the heart of the issue, the degree to which modernity canbe styled differently and whether there is some irreducible core, such as thefreedom of choice of the individual, or not. The books by Mamdani andKepel (and the like) are, however, required reading as well. History, andespecially the many different perspectives on it, permeate the relationshipbetween Islam and the West. Al-Qaeda’s genesis and its ongoing permuta-tions can indeed not be understood without analysing the late Cold War andits echoes.

Notes

1 Leen Boer, ‘Struggling with -isms: Occidentalism, Liberalism, Eurocentrism, Islamism’, Third WorldQuarterly, 25 (8), 2004, pp 1541 – 1548.

2 Graham E Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.3 For an excellent example of investigative journalism, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History ofthe CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, New York: PenguinPress, 2004.

4 For an interesting overview, see Stefan Halper & Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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