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• W4248698701 abstract "The world is evolving, and Islam is a religion that has been under scrutiny since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and more recently after the terrorist attacks in Europe, with regard to its future role in the process of democracy building in Middle East and North Africa and in relation to global politics. When viewed in this light, an analysis of the democratic aspirations of contemporary Muslims is an urgent philosophical and sociological task for scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies around the world.In this volume, Ali Mirsepaasi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and sociology at the Gallatin School at New York University and Todd Graham Ferneé, an independent scholar and specialist of the Maghreb, attempt to fill the gap that exists vis-à-vis the “study of citizenship, state and globalization in societies historically influenced by Islamic traditions and institutions” (1). This book, however, deals with more than just state-building and globalization in Islamic societies. Inspired by the nondualist and nonessentialist approach to the two concepts of reconciliation and pluralism, the authors aim to interlink three different perspectives, while arguing for nonviolent forms of national and global citizenship. These three interconnected domains are: “(1) the space-time of specific contexts of Islam as contemporary practices in everyday life; (2) the ethical framework of modern practices or the social virtue of nonviolence; (3) certain universal shared human experiences that ground cosmopolitanism” (4).The book is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter evaluates the idea of “belonging together in the public world,” through an analysis of Michael Polyani's “concept of a fragile public system of shared beliefs (reliant) on a chain of overlapping areas” (57), while theoretically incorporating Amartya Sen's nonholistic paradigm of modernity as a “decentred world.” This chapter also suggests ways to understand and subscribe to the Gandhian tradition of democracy as “the emergence of an alternative tradition of change and action, a rerouting of the democratic Enlightenment away from epistemic totality, the atomized subject, and the moment of violence as the basic method” (91). As a result, the authors suggest an alternative view of modernity and democracy, which has no necessary link to the two concepts of secularism and Eurocentric Enlightenment. However, while decoupling the idea of democracy from these two traditions of thought, the authors are very conscious about the multiple challenges facing Islamic individuals and communities in building a deliberative democracy with cosmopolitan sensibilities. According to Mirsepassi and Fernée, “a new cosmopolitanism must be grounded in the pluralism of everyday time or moral virtue, and not monolithic dreams of ultimate reality or absolute identity” (84). As such, the authors reject the ontological privilege of the modern state as the sole bearer of modernity.The second chapter of the book, therefore, presents as a critique of Aziz Al-Azmeh's “materialist and secular narrative of cosmopolitanism” (95). According to Mirsepassi and Fernée, Al-Azmeh adopts the Foucauldian rejection of “meta-historical deployment of ideal of significations and indefinite teleologies” and his opposing of “origins.” … [He] rejects the utopia of retrieved origin, while sometimes resting, his argument on the tacit embrace of a transcendent horizon. It is bounded to an inside/out genetic imaginary, upholding the ideal of universal modernity as the threshold beyond the false consciousness of religion…. [However] false consciousness or contingency, in Al-Azmeh's modernity, occupies a zone of ambiguity…. [Al-Azmeh] is a decided modernist in a world where multiple permutations are in the initial moment of undoing the clear definitions held in place, however imperfectly, by the Cold War. (96, 97, 98, 103) Therefore, unlike Aziz Al-Azmeh, who imposes the classical discourse of modernity upon the new social movements in the Islamic world, Mirsepassi and Fernée are more interested in analyzing the “self-reliant democratic transformations” in the Islamic context without grounding them in a necessarily modern universal threshold. However, a critique of a dualistic narrative that dichotomizes modernity and tradition does not lead the authors to abandon the experiences of democracy building in the Islamic context in favor of a new dualistic opposition between the authentic and inauthentic.Turning away from Al-Azmeh's dualistic narrative of modernity, the authors start the third chapter of the book with a study of Talal Asad's anthropology of secularism. As such, Asad's work is presented as an attempt to “combine Heideggerian being—as the autonomous community immersed existentially within its own patterns of tradition—with a radical Marxist commitment to justice” (114). From the point of view of the authors, Asad's research is occupied by strong “romanticized political patterns with anti-cosmopolitan trends” (115). It is [Asad's] categorical rejection of liberal Enlightenment and democracy, grounded in this unviable fusion of Heideggerian being and Marxist justice, that shifts his ideas away from the more practical and open-minded examples of thinkers committed to a new politics of reconciliation and democratic transformation—in John Dewey, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. (115–16) At this point, it is already evident that the authors totally dismiss Asad's political message as an “abstract binarism” that “follows inevitably from an essentialist line of thought” (118). Moreover, Mirsepassi and Fernée reject Asad's idealized construction of Islam as a simplification of the profound diversity that exists within the contemporary Muslim world: “This romanticism is highly irresponsible and unrealistic in a world where Muslims are profoundly divided over great contradictions on both intellectual and material levels. These meaningful differences are a matter of life and death for many ordinary Muslims today” (128).The central question to ask, therefore, is “that of combining cosmopolitan and community horizons within a dialogic and critical framework.” This is why the authors proceed in chapter 4 toward a detailed analysis of the Islamic thought of Mohammed Arkoun. As a humanist thinker, Arkoun is well aware of the idea of “self-reforming civic community” developed in the tradition of Kantian philosophy. What attracts Mirsepassi and Fernée, in the critical Islamic philosophy of Mohammed Arkoun, is that he “shifts from the conventional metaphysical question—is ‘Islam’ compatible with ‘modernity’ and ‘secularism’—to the practical and creative question of building a civil society and rule of law in ‘Islamic contexts’” (135). Thus Arkoun is attentive to the collective becoming of Muslim societies while refusing, in contradistinction to Al-Azmeh, to introduce a philosophy of history into his reading of Islam. The central focus of Arkoun's intervention, therefore, is to display the tension that exists between the thought and unthought in Islamic history: Arkoun raises the Foucauldian epistemological question. “What does a tradition of thought allow us to think in a particular period of its evolution, concerning a particular subject, within a particular domain of human existence?” The question is posed in relation to this practical consideration of collective agency: “To what extent are (Muslims) aware of the ideological dimensions of their discourse and historical actions?” “How is it possible to ‘develop a critical relationship to the past and present in order to have better control over their future?’” (141) By asking these questions, Arkoun distances himself from the conventional Orientalist study of Islam and employs the Foucualdian anti-essentialism in order to explore the ethical potentials of Muslim life experiences. In other words, Arkoun's “reading of Islam invites us to engage in dialog among Muslim scholars and with other religious traditions. The approach concerns both the revival of a violent Islamic community and a humanist-cosmopolitan intellectual perspective” (154). However, from the perspective of Mirsepassi and Fernée, Arkoun's humanist and critical philosophy takes place on an abstract level that stays away from the discussion of an alternative conception of Islamic public law. Therefore, the authors proceed in the following chapter of their book to the study of Islam in the context of political state-building and Shariʿa law-making through a discussion of the juridical work of Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʿim.The importance of An-Naʿim's work resides in his Lockean approach to the problem of civic reason in Islam. According to the authors, An-Naʿim holds that belief cannot and must not be imposed from the outside by force if it is to retain any quality of genuineness…. An-Naʿim upholds a principle of “civic reason” in opposition to the ideal of the Shariʿa as a total ideology to be implemented by the modern state…. By “civic reason” An-Naʿim connotes the “need for policy and legislation to be accepted by the public at large, as well as for the process of reasoning on the matter to remain open and accessible to all citizens.” It must be made legally impossible for any element of Shari'a to be imposed against the will of non-Muslim citizens. (165) An-Naʿim's critique of the totalitarian legacy in modern politics helps him to rethink, and go beyond, the enforcement of the Shariʿa as the state law while reformulating the Quranic concerns about human actions from a hermeneutical perspective. What An-Naʿim develops more clearly is that we cannot “speak of the exclusive sovereignty of God when we know that in practice it will have to be exercised by men.” It is on this Kantian ground that Shari'a is historically subjective and contingent, “Since Muslims may reasonably differ on what constitutes a proper Islamic state” (167). Furthermore, An-Naʿim's antitotalitarian Islamic law argues in favor of an open religious-ontological dimension that combines the Islamic political project with a peaceful and nonviolent dimension. As a result, Mirsepassi and Fernée are interested in the hermeneutical aspect of An-Naʿim's argument while being conscious about the “profound tension between a humanist historicity in An-Naʿim and an ontological mandate sent from the eternal. This greatly muddles the construction of political obligation” (173).It is no wonder why, then, the authors take their theoretical quest further and ask the central question of “whether a modern movement for democracy and nonviolence can be rooted in a single religious tradition, even one hermeneutically democratized” (176). The possibility of a tradition of Islamic humanism espousing nonviolent modes of political organization remains an open question. This is the subject of chapter 6, which is focused on the work of the late Moroccan feminist writer Fatima Mernissi in relation with the democratic potential of Muslim societies. “Mernissi's work on the political front,” say Mirsepassi and Fernée, courageously confronts the twentieth-century legacy of dogmatic totalitarianism linked to the one-party nation-state, or revolutionary statism in its various incarnations…. Mernissi's approach to the question of Islam and modernity follow a neo-Gramscian insight that the struggle for power is as much communicatory as territorial. This is more pragmatic and less totalizing than either Asad's defense of a pure identity or Al-Azmeh's conception of modernity as a single temporal threshold or spatial horizon. She ignores larger theoretical debates on Orientalism and postmodern charges that modernity is imposed West-centric ideological narrative. Mernissi rejects the view that in fighting for human rights-based democracy and national development, non-Westerners are rendered passive through internalization of the alien Enlightenment episteme correctly serving international capitalism. (181) Though Mernissi's outlook on development is comparable to that of Amartya Sen, she is, nevertheless, a political thinker who is closely interested in the life worlds of Muslims in the Islamic context. She, therefore, rethinks the relation between rationalist traditions of Islam and Muslim historical memory by reflecting on the long-standing rationalist currents in Islamic history. It follows, then, that “the critical remaking of collective memory in affirming a long-standing but embattled rationalist-humanist tradition of Islam concerns the debt to the historical victims and violence” (188).Mernissi, therefore, “rejects any ideal of purity in Islam and esteems its value in terms of openness and nonviolence” (189). As such, Mernissi applies the Ricoeurian concept of “task memory” to the roots of authoritarian history in Muslim societies, in order to open up a perspective of tolerance and respect for others in the process of the making of the Islamic public sphere. Mernissi's argument in favor of democratization in the Muslim world includes, thus, anecdotes of everyday experience as a “metamorphosing world of boundaries created by harems, public spaces, mosques, cinema, markets, schools, colonial and nationalist power centers” (196). These multiple spaces have much to offer in the understanding of a pluralistic and meaningful conception of Islamic societies in relation to Western modernity. Last but not least, Mirsepassi and Fernée's critical study on Mernissi's quest for Muslim life worlds opens up to a quest for a global ethic of reconciliation. Hence though lacking a strong critical cosmopolitan angle, the authors consider Mernissi's vision as “a powerful and open alternative to either Al-Azmeh's or Asad's approaches to the question of Islam and democracy” (198). This takes the reader directly to the conclusion of the book where the whole problematic of the book is addressed once again.In their concluding remarks, Mirsepassi and Fernée insist on affirming their theoretical positioning as nonessentialist, nondualist, and critical cosmopolitans. As such, their cosmopolitan mindset takes into consideration a critical view of both modernity and Islam. In addition, a particular attention to the priority of life worlds and social interests of Muslims around the world brings them to suggest a theoretical attitude that relinquishes “abstractions of ‘Islam’ in favor of how today's Muslims live their lives. ‘Islam’ in this context, is not a fixed textual or ontological essence. As a source of imagined or practical meaning and identity, Islam is more about our world today and how we perceive it” (202–3). In the same manner, Mirsepassi and Fernée consider cosmopolitanism as a nonviolent intercultural understanding that is neither West-centric nor Third World–centric. The cosmopolitanism they defend offers hope for nonviolent democratic changes in the Muslim world and beyond. That is why the book ends with an appeal to the responsibility of intellectuals in our world: We call upon intellectuals in all institutional contexts to cease to recycle empty but deadly discursive abstractions. Just as the Paris streets are filled today with anti–gay marriage demonstrations screaming for a return to the “moral sources,” and the nights are filled with gay bashers, so too many professional intellectuals speak in loudly prejudiced voices from behind their books, articles, and tv spots. (207) However, in spite of the interesting and refreshing arguments presented in their book, Mirsepassi and Fernée seem to fail to abandon their own massive conceptual framework and offer more practical initiatives and concrete action plans for the future of Muslim societies. As a matter of fact, a great challenge for the book's arguments is the Islamic State and the danger it represents for the future of democracy in the Middle East and the Maghreb. However, to be fair, we should not forget that the book was written before the rise of the Islamic State in June 2014, and the 2015 and 2016 suicide attacks in Europe. The book therefore leaves the readers with some unanswered questions, but these shortcomings do not diminish the great value of this book, which on the whole is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject and will be very useful for specialists of Islam, the Middle East, and global policymakers alike." @default.
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• W4248698701 date "2016-07-01" @default.
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• W4248698701 title "Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism: At Home and in the World" @default.
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