Freedom and Orthodoxy Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age by Anouar Majid (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 270 pages.)

Abstract

Freedom and Orthodoxy is a brilliant apology for dismantling the hegemonic
and false pretensions of western universalisms in favor of a world in
which local groups (e.g., religious communities, regions, and nations) are
allowed to construe their own strategies for cultural, political, and economic
flourishing. A Moroccan intellectual teaching in the United States
(chair of the Department of English, University of NewEngland) and a leading
young cultural critic who writes in a lucid and often elegant English
prose,AnouarMajid’s French cultural background also shines through, judging
by his abundant use of French sources (though not one in Arabic).
Building on his previous book, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam
in a Polycentric World (Duke University Press: 2000), Majid expands and
deepens his historical and philosophical analysis, exhorts both Muslims and
westerners to search their souls, remove the roots of their own cherished certainties
that exclude the Other (i.e., fundamentalisms), and engage in the path
of creative dialog. Yet as the book unfolds, it turns out that over 90 percent of
the material relates to the western universalisms born of the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment – ideals that, in fact, cannot be separated from the historical
realities of the Reconquista, the Spanish conquest of Latin America, the
Anglo-American colonization of North America, and the subsequent genocide
of the native population. Even the revolutionary ideals of the American
and French revolutions, however universal the reach of freedom and human
rights might have been in theory, came to be wedded to a capitalist ideology
that has, in the postcolonial era, become an economic and cultural steamroller,
a globalization process that consolidates western hegemony and
imposes its secular and consumerist values on the non-western world.
Besides the already heavy toll in human suffering,Majid argues that far
greater clashes loom on the horizon if this scenario continues. This brings
us to the remaining 10 percent of his book: although Muslims must take
responsibility for their own extremists and find ways to reinterpret the traditional
Shari`ah in a polycentric world, nevertheless, contemporary
Islamic militancy should be seen as an offshoot of “the triumph of capitalism
and its ongoing legacy of conquest” (pp. 213-14). Hence, most of the
book unveils what he has coined “the post-Andalusian paradigm,” or the ...