A Fundamental Fear-Eurocentrism and the Emergence of lslamism By Bobby S. Sayyid. London & New York: Zed Books, Ltd. 1997, vi + 185 pp.

Abstract

At first this book looks like another eye-catching, fear-mongering title about
Islam. Are these books promoted by profit-hungry publishers or by underpaid
fretful academics? Or has Islam become fair game for a wider unrestrained
academia replacing the Orientalist school with newer analytical tools? Some
preliminary remarks, or a contextualization, might be useful here.
Whatever its “resurgent” form, Islam is presenting something of an enigmatic
challenge for all. From the bazaars of the East to the sidewalks of the West,
it refuses to lie down or go away. Attempts to discount it, ignore it or even suppress
it have not succeeded. This hauntingly recurring phenomenon (p. 1) needs
to be relabeled and reassessed. But the doubt lingers that representing it as “terrorism,”
“theocracy,” “obscurantism,” “fundamentalism,” or “religious extremism”
has muddied waters even more. Feeding popular fears with such preconfigured
terminology has neither satiated curiosity, quelled fears, nor brought
anyone closer to the truth.
Compounding the picture is the “location” of the writers of such works: the
world-view, epistemology, discourse theory, or narrative framework from
which they approach Islam. The much-heralded objectivity of academia is
sacrosanct no more. Relativity, subjectivity, and the actor’s point of view are in
vogue. Old Orientalist views and definitions of the non-Occidental world are
being overwhelmed by an array of (neo-Orientalist) analyses from a variety of
discourse perspectives.
These analytical tools, even if applied with some success to their own societies
and disciplines this past century, don’t seem to have much of a shelf life
while some are less effective than others: positivist assertions fast give way to
realist or inteqretivist ones; modernist perspectives to postmodemist ones; and
structuralist interpretations to poststructuralist ones. And when applied to Islam
and Muslim societies, the results of these approaches can be bewildering (as
shown by Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), and so can their effects (as shown by
Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations prognostication).
From its side, the Muslim world is all the more perplexed at the persistence
of such stereotypical labeling and analyses. Generally unfamiliar with these
“new” tools, their reaction is either to ignore this “demonology of fundamentalism”
(p. 16) or to interpret it as another of the West’s conspiracies against Islam.
Sometimes it results in outright hostility (as shown by Khomeini’s fatwa and
Bradford’s book burning) or crude attempts at redress in reciprocal terms (as in
Akbar Ahmed‘s Postmodernity and Islam). To western experts, such reactions
can only seem woefully inadequate.
Furthermore, the apparently monolithic scenario of western experts with their
western critiques of the non-West is complicated by the emerging presence of
nonwestern migrants and their offspring on the westem academic scene. Taken ...