The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam

In a finely analytical introduction to this volume, Ibrahim Abu-Rabi' - Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta until his death in 2011 - finds in Islamism primarily a response to the challenges of western political modernity. While 18th century Wahhabism is cast as "pre-modern" (xiv), Islamism and its movements came of age in the 20th century; the emphasis in this Reader is very much on "contemporary" expressions. Abu-Rabi' firmly rejects the idea put forward by Olivier Roy in The Failure of Political Islam (1994) that the phenomenon is "dominated by a single paradigm: that of the first community of believers at the time of the Prophet and of the first four caliphs" (xx). This reduction not only fails to account for the complexity of Islamist aspirations, and what Edward Said in Covering Islam (1981) noted were the "political actualities" that a "return to Islam" entails (ix). Those aspirations tend to focus around the centrality of the shari'a in public life, frequently as a template for State governance; but opinions about how this should work in practice are informed at least as much by socio-political context as by theology. Some of the personalities and stances in this collection will be familiar to Western readers. Rashid al-Ghannoushi and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, both highly influential in the Middle East, are self-critical about Islamist movements and the tendency to extremism. The no less influential Muhammad al-Ghazali is scathing here about the social repression of women in Muslim societies - "a woman with religion is much better in the eyes of God than an ungrateful bearded man" (33) - though his admiration of female political leaders in India and Israel still leaves him "not keen to elect women to high positions"... because "they rarely speak up" (32). Kamal Habib, a former member of Egypt's lihad movement and now a contributor to Al-Iazeera's Arabic service, regards the shari'a as "the straight path to salvation" protected by divine favour (178), but aside from matters of ritual and worship, as subject to interpretation (ijtihad) in the service of "contemporary reform" (183).