Postmodern obscurantism and 'the Muslim question'

Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies

Volumn 2, Issue 5, 2003, Pages 21-47

  Al Azmeh, Aziz ^a  

^a CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY   (Hungary)

Author keywords

Identity; Muslim question; Orientalism; Political culture; Political Islam; Postmodernism

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149270613     PISSN: 15830039     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. For the term "postmodern obscurantism" I am indebted to a conversation in Beirut with Aijaz Ahmad, to whom this article is dedicated
2. For a clear statement of the radical position, see William E. Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism, Leiden, Brill, 1996;
3. Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and the Pharaoh, translated by Jon Rothschild, London, Al-Saqi Books, 1985
4. Paul Valéry , 'Orientem Versus', in idem., History and Politics, New York, 1962 (Bollingen Series, XLV.10), pp. 380-381
5. We also have now an 'Islamic archaeology': Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam, Oxford, Blackwells, 1999, proposes that there are 'islamic' archaeological traces which find their unifying principle in the Muslim religion as a total and ineradicable 'way of life'. That the empirical evidence sketched in the book (on the domestic environment, dress, war, visual imagery, and much else) indicates conclusions that are almost wholly directly in contradiction to the basic proposition of the book does not dent the spirited enthusiasm with which this proposition is repeated
6. Aziz Al-Azmeh, 'Culturalism, Grand Narrative of Capitalism Exultant', in idem., Islams and Modernities, 2nd. ed., London, Verso, 1996, chapter 1
7. Various facets of the relation between Islamism and universal irrationalism in politics are explored in Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 2nd. ed., passim
8. Cf. Sascha Lehnarzt, 'Auch Muslime müssen müssen', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 December 2001, p. 53
9. Cf. Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory. Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War, London, 1992
10. Much uninformed writing has been devoted to this historically very complex notion by Islamist as well as by western authors. See the exemplary historical account of Mahmud al-Rahmuni, al-Jihad. Min al-Hijra ila'-d-da'wa ila'd-dawla [Jihad: Emigration, Proselytism, State], Beirut, Dar at-Tali'a, 2002
11. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966 , pp. 215, 225 ff.
12. Cf. Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 263 ff.;
13. Mark Juergenmeister, ed., Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, London, Frank Cass, 1992, pp. 106 ff. and passim
14. Franklin L. Ford, 'Reflections on Political Murder: Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', in Wolfgang Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld eds., Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, London, The German Historical Institute in association with Berg Publishers Ltd., 1982, pp. 182 and passim
15. Cf. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, p. 299
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, edited by Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988, pp. 387 ff., 130 ff.
17. (English translation by A. V. Miller, Phenomenology of the Spirit, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1977, §§ 585-6, 184 ff.)
18. For instance, the memoir of a former member of one such group: Khaled al-Birri, al-Dunya ajmal min aljanna [The World is Preferable Paradise], Beirut, Dar an-Nahar, 2001
19. Cf. Roger Caillois, L'homme et le sacré, Paris, Gallimard, 1950, pp. 223, 231 f.
20. For instance, Roger Caillois, 'Guerre et sacré', in idem., L'homme et le sacré, Appendix III;
21. Juergenmeister ed., Violence and the Sacred, passim
22. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna. A Dictator's Apprenticeship, translated by Thomas Thornton, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 pp. 206 ff., 236 ff.
23. E. B. Tylor, The Origins of Culture; Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith,1970, p. 16
24. For an exemplary analysis of a comparable phenomenon, see Aijaz Ahmad, 'Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva' in idem, Lineages of the Present. Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia, London, Verso, 2000, ch. 5
25. Antonio Negri and John Hart, Empire, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University press, pp. 13 ff.
26. On the character of religious radicalism in Saudi Arabia, see Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, Islamic Resurgence in the Arab World, New York, Praeger, 1982, ch. 9;
27. A. Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 2nd. ed., ch. 7;
28. Mahmud A. Fakhash, The Future of Islam in the Middle East, Westport and London, Praeger, 1997, ch. 5. The best study of this and other aspects of saudi arabia remains Waddah Sharara, Al-Ahl wa'l-ghanima: Muqawwimat as-siyasa fi'l-mamlaka al-'Arabiya al-Su'udiya [Clansmen and Booty: The Pillars of Politics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], Beirut, Dar at-Tali'a, 1981
29. Cf. Serif Mardin, 1989, p. 118.
30. A similar development took place in modern Buddhism and Judaism, and in other religions as well; see Aran, 1986, p. 122 and passim and Swearer, 1991, pp. 649 f.
31. On this theme, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, 'The Middle East and Islam: a Ventriloqual Terrorism', in Third World Affairs 1988, London, Third World Foundation, 1988, pp. 23-34
32. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, ch. 5, passim
33. See particularly Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth. Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Ninetenth-Century France, Oxford, Oxford University Press,1993, ch 5, pp 192-3 and passim
34. This is perhaps most poignantly apparent in the cultural determinism of Margaret Mead, which has had a truly structuring impact on cultural anthropology - a cultural determinism empirically built on an 'aberrant' construction of the object of her field-work in Samoa, a construction based upon the credulous acceptance as serious of a prank played upon her by local adolescent girls, which 'produced such a spectacular result in centers of higher learning throughout the western world': This 'wonderfully comic' matter is traced in detail by Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and the Heretic, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1996, pp. xiii, 107, and passim
35. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p 62
36. quoted in Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth , p 193
37. On this constellation of topics, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship, London, third World Centre for Research and Publishing, 1981, ch. 5
38. For ethnography, see particularly Martha Mundy, Domestic Government, London, I. B. Tauris, 1995, especially pp 52-54
39. Aziz Al-'Azma, Al-'Ilmaniyya min manzur mukhtalif [Secularism from a New Perspective ], Beirut, Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-'Arabiyya, 1992
40. Aziz Al-Azmeh, 'Civilization, Culture and the New Barbarians', in International Sociology, vol.16, no. 1 (2001), pp. 75-94