A Fundamental Fear Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism by Bobby S. Sayyid (London: Zed Books, 2003, 2d ed. 212 pages.)

Abstract

A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism uses
critical theory to examine the Islamists’ political projects and their depictions.
Scholars are divided between those who believe in a religious or
national essence to the Muslim community (essentialists) and those who
reject this assumption (anti-essentialists). In regards to a Muslim essence,
Sayyid identifies two existing scholarly camps: Orientalists assume an ahistorical,
acontextual Islamic essence that drives and shapes Muslim society
and activity through most places and ages. Anti-Orientalists, as manifested
in such writers as Hamid El-Zien, assert that there is not one “Islam,” but
only many “Islams.” According to this view, Islam and indeed all religion cannot exist as an analytic category having a self-sustaining, positive, fixing,
universal, and autonomous content; rather, religion is only manifested
through particular contexts.
While acknowledging an intellectual debt to Edward Said, whose critiques
fed the anti-Orientalist camp, Sayyid argues for a middle path
between Orientalist and anti-Orientalist understandings. Orientalists claim
that the relationship between Islam and Islamism is direct, whereas anti-
Orientalists claim that the relationship is merely opportunistic – Islam is
what Marxists might call “superstructural” (a surface action over deeper,
more real material contests) and is driven by a false consciousness.
Picking theoretical fruit from writers who explored signs, ideas, and
language, among them Slavoj Zizek, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan,
the author asks Zizek’s general question: “What creates and sustains the
identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its ideological
content?” (p. 44). Analysts typically find themselves unable to
answer this question without reasserting a new Orientalism. Sayyid asserts
that despite the malleability of Islamic symbols and Islamist programs,
Islam has retained its specificity, a term by which he means the traces of its
original meaning articulated at the foundation, traces that have been
invoked repeatedly. Islam is a crucial nodal point, à la Jacques Lacan, retrospectively
giving meaning to other elements, be they Sufi discussions,
debates on fiqh, or other discourses (p. 45) ...