Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘. SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996, xii + 370 pp.

Abstract

Most studies of Islamist resurgence have focused on specific aspects of
the Islamist political agenda and have sought to identify their intellectual
roots in the writings of thinkers from the medieval period of Islamic history.
Influenced by Iran’s Islamic revolution, these authors have been concerned
primarily with political Islam. It is rare to find a book that seeks to establish
modem Islamist thought within the context of western critical theory
and indigenous political conditions, or that explains its ideas in light of a
conflict between revolutionary discourse and state hegemony. Abu-Rabi”s
book is thus all the more welcome, as it establishes a basis for consideration
of Islamist thinkers that will be an essential reference in the fbtwx.
The subject of this book is the thought of Sayyid Qqtb, considered
within the parameters of Islamic modernism, westernization, orientalism,
and the contemporary Islamist response to these factors. Abu-Rabi‘ says he
is undertaking an intellectual history of his subject, that of “a popular religious
movement . . . founded by lay Muslim intellectuals” often at odds
with the traditional political and religious elites. But he considers this question
in light of the “question of continuity and discontinuity in modem Arab
thought.” Influenced by Foucault, he argues that the question of epistemological
acts and thresholds, of conceptual ruptures in the development of
ideas, must be countered by the reality of continuities in Islamic thought,
by the fact of an ongoing Islamic discourse whose exposition may change
according to historical circumstances but whose essence and focus of concern
remain constant (pp. 5-6).
The idea of continuity and discontinuity is a valuable method for considering
various themes in Arab thought, ranging from the liberal thinkers
of the nuhdah (renaissance) to both secular and religious Arab responses to
the challenge of colonization and the question of how best could Arab-
Islamic societies survive foreign occupation. Essential here is the question
of Arab Muslim “decline,” how and why it occurred, and how this decline
may be reversed. Abu-Rabi‘ surveys a variety of Muslim thinkers to posit
three approaches to the relevance of Islamic tradition to the resolution of
the problem of decline: the rejection of tradition in favor of intellectual
stimulus from the West; a conservative approach calling for the “revival of ...