Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of AJISS we present a diverse number of articles that deal
with a wide range of issues. The thorny and continuously debated relation
between Islam and the West is the subject of four contributions: Ralph
Coury’s “A Neoimperial Discourse on the Middle East,” Charles Butterworth’s
“On Others as Evil: Toward a Truly Comparative Politics,” Ali A.
Mazrui’s “Islam in a More Conservative Western World,” and M. Hazim
Shah ibn Abdul Murad’s review essay on “Islam and Contemporary
Western Thought.”
Commonly, it is the reports of missionaries, travel literature, colonialist
memoirs, or orientalist texts that have been the main field of research for
studying western attitudes toward Islam. In contrast, Ralph Coury’s contribution
takes an uncommon approach to exploring these attitudes by using
the works of Paul Bowles, the American expatriate novelist, as a principle
research tool. Bowles has spent most of his productive life in Morocco,
where the Arab and Islamic constitutional elements of the people and their
life make up the fabric and background of his novels and his other writings.
In this penetrating analysis of Bowles’s views of Islam and of Arabs, Coury
links the inner psychodramatic self of the novelist to his political and cultural
unconscious in order to provide an alternative insight to his works.
Looking at the issue from a different perspective, Charles E. Butterworth
brings to the fore a variant reading of the western cultural heritage.
Butterworth begins his study by emphasizing that, as far as the relation
between Islam and the West is concerned, “for exchange to be fruitful, each
party needs to look at the best in his or her own tradition, rather than at the
worst, or even the ordinary, and ask that the interlocutor do the same for his
or her tradition.” By this, Butterworth endeavors to recover the other, the
lost and forgotten dimension of the westem mind: the mind of Homer, of
Socrates, and of Albert Camus. It is the tentative mind that is seen as relevant
to Islamic-western dialogue, the self-doubtful mind, where the human
traits of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice lend themselves very
prominently to a particular part of the western discursive tradition.
Instilled with the wisdom and insight of a keen observer of the human
condition, Ali A. Mazrui treats the subtle ideo-political transformation of
the West as well as that of the Muslims living in the West, not as students
or travelers, but as members of this society. His findings rest on three main ...