BOOKS
499
Fundamentalism
ENEMY IN THE MIRROR: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE LIMITS OF
MODERN RATIONALISM. Roxanne
L.
Euben. Princeton University
Press. $49.50'
JIHAD. EXPANSION
ET
DECLIN DE L'ISLAMISME. Gilles Kepel. Gallimard.
$20.00.
LEGACY OF THE PROPHET: DESPOTS, DEMOCRATS AND THE NEW POLITICS
OF ISLAM. Anthony Shadid. Westview Press. $26.00.
HUNDREDS OF BOOKS and articles have been published over the last two
decades upbraiding the West for profoundly misunderstanding the
revival of political Islam and of fundamentalism, to use the common but
not very precise term. They all accuse it of failing to appreciate the
intrinsic value of Islamic ideas, its deeply democratic and peaceful
essence, and of describing it as an irrational reaction to modernity and
a major threat to Western civilization.
The intensity and the number of these apologias are a little surpris–
ing, for there have been relatively few critiques of political Islam and
these have been, on the whole, in measured terms as befitting the rules
of academic discourse in the West. For truly fierce attacks one has to
turn to India or Nigeria, where cruder customs prevail and where the
habit of calling a spade an agricultural implement is not yet widespread.
But the Western apologists prefer not to deal with Bal Thackeray of
Mumbai, the fire breathing Hindu extremist, they prefer to focus on stu–
dents of Islam in Europe and America. Let us put aside for a moment
the question of whether their basic assumption is correct, namely
whether there is a true misunderstanding-or whether perhaps (as in the
Israeli-Arab confrontation) the problem arises from the fact that the two
sides understand each other only too well. Be that as it may, this indus–
try flourishes more in the United States and Germany tban in Britain
and France, and, after all these huge volumes pub lished about funda–
mentalism (Islamic as well as Christian and Jewish) all over the globe,
the question then arises whether much new remains to be said . Profes–
sor Euben, a student of political phi losophy who reads Arabic, devotes
most of her book to one specific Islamic thinker, Sayyid Qutb. An
Egyptian secular writer, he became a leading guru of Islamic radicalism
following a long visit to the United States in the 1940s; the confronta–
tion with American decadence and moral decay he witnessed there had
