Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: Middle East Quarterly
Date: Winter 2004
URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/584
Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon
and the Peace Process. By Marius Deeb. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 285 pp.
$49.95.
The title says it all: Deeb, an
instructor of Middle East politics at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has broken ranks with the pieties
of his field and asserted that the Syrian regime is engaged in a "terrorist
war" on Lebanon. Nor does he mince words in the text of his book:
* "The 'Alawi regime in Syria
never had any intention of making peace with Israel."
* "Syria has deliberately
kept Lebanon in an artificial domestic conflict at war with Israel for
over a quarter of a century, for the interests of its own regime."
Deeb even has the temerity to cast
aspersions at the "latter-day post-Orientalist scholars on the Middle East,"
a declaration of intellectual war on his fellow specialists.
In a furious but meticulous, well-grounded,
and powerful analysis, Deeb then establishes the above points, recounting
the era 1974-2000, showing how in the course of this era, using many devious
means, Hafez al-Assad gradually took over the once independent country
of Lebanon and turned the "Switzerland of the Middle East" into a viper's
den of extremism. It is not only an ugly tale but from an American viewpoint,
an embarrassing one, as he shows how U.S. diplomats and politicians consistently
misunderstood Assad's methods and goals.
Thoughts on two specifics: first,
while Deeb devotes plentiful attention to the Israeli Labor governments'
diplomacy with Syria, he flies through the Netanyahu years as though nothing
took place then, when in fact, it witnessed some of the most dramatic developments
in Syrian-Israeli relations. Second, even though the Libyan government
has finally acknowledged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over
Scotland in 1988, Deeb continues to believe that this atrocity "was linked
to groups with strong ties to Syria and Iran," and sees the Libyan culprit
as a "much needed punch bag to get Syria off the hook" and into the anti-Saddam
Hussein coalition two years later.
The Oxford Dictionary of Islam.
Edited by John L. Esposito. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 359
pp. $45.
In 1995, I wrote in these pages
about an earlier co-production by Esposito and the Oxford University Press,
the four-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, that
"Like many other reference works in the age of deconstruction, it faces
problems of identity and purpose. An encyclopedia used to be a straightforward
compendium of known and useful facts. But when scholars increasingly agree
that truth depends on one's vantage point (and especially one's gender,
race, and class), the encyclopedic function becomes far less obvious. A
large number of the 450 contributors to this work would seem to accept
the modern notion that objectivity being unobtainable, there's little point
in even trying."
Eight years later, the same problems
bedevil the much smaller Oxford Dictionary, but this time, the lack of
objectivity seems to have more of an agenda: namely, whitewashing Islamism.
This theme pervades the volume. Thus, Ahmad Deedat, the Islamist attack
dog against Christianity, while called "controversial," is described as
"widely respected" and noted as the winner of a prize for "outstanding
service to Islam." Hizbullah, the Lebanese Islamist group, is said to finance
a "wide range of social, economic, and media projects," while no mention
is made of its being a mainstay of the U.S. government's terrorism list.
The Tunisian Islamist Rashid al-Ghannushi might rant against conspiracies
by "Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs" but our dictionary respectfully
defines him as an "Islamic thinker, activist, and political leader." Steven
Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism, may say about the
Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that the organization,
"its leaders and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist
groups," but the Oxford Dictionary assures us it is merely "a civil rights
organization defending the right of Muslims to live and practice Islam
in America without having to suffer discrimination."
And on and on through the dictionary.
One wishes that this handsomely produced and practical volume could be
recommended but it should be strenuously avoided.
Tolerance and Coercion in Islam:
Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition. By Yohanan Friedman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. 233 pp. $60.
What does Islam say about non-Muslims?
The vast literature on this subject tends to wobble unsteadily on a narrow
base of evidence-namely the Qur'an itself. Or as Friedman, professor of
Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, delicately puts
it, "some of the more substantial works on our topic are based exclusively
on the few relevant Qur'anic verses and, surprisingly enough, have no recourse
to the enormous amount of material in hadith, tafsir, and fiqh." The preference
to focus on the Qur'an rather than the million or so hadiths (sayings and
actions attributed to Muhammad) is certainly understandable, but for a
true understanding of Muslim jurisprudence and ethos, the latter needs
to be taken into account.
In a tour de force, Friedman reviews
the hadith literature on a series of topics concerning pre-modern Muslim
attitudes toward non-Muslims, including equality before the law, religious
compulsion, apostasy, and interfaith marriages. The power of his analysis
lies in the distinctions he finds between eras and madhhabs (schools of
law). For example, he shows that whereas Muslims early on granted non-Muslims
equal protection from murder, with time, only one of the four Sunni madhhabs
held to this position. More broadly, he argues that this development over
time signifies that "the idea of Islamic exaltedness gained the upper hand
as the decisive factor in the determination of the law."
This theme of Islamic supremicism
has key importance; in the words of one hadith, "Islam is exalted and nothing
is exalted above it." With the most minor of exceptions, Friedman observes,
Muslims throughout the pre-modern period "faced the other religions from
the position of a ruling power, and enjoyed in relation to them a position
of unmistakable superiority." To a great extent, this also defined their
attitudes toward tolerance and coercion.
The Malady of Islam. By Abdelwahab
Meddeb. Trans. from French by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid. New York: Basic
Books, 2003. 241 pp. $24.
On the subject of Islam, Meddeb
presents a brave and insightful Muslim voice; on the subject of politics,
he is just another group-think French intellectual. Fortunately, his thoughts
on the first topic have real importance while those on the second do not.
On Islam, Meddeb (professor of comparative
literature at the Sorbonne) sees militant Islam as the religion's endemic
problem, comparable to fanaticism in Catholicism and Nazism in Germany.
His lament about "the malady of Islam" emphasizes the loss of scientific
creativity, cultural suppleness, and eros. Highly cultured in the French
tradition, he openly admits his puzzlement with militant Islam ("I must
confess that I cannot grasp the logic that predisposes a person to inscribe
humiliation in the innermost core of his being"). As a connoisseur of Muslim
culture-its poetry, mosque architecture, its tradition of travel, even
its drinking songs-Meddeb fills out the picture of Muslim life so sadly
missing from the "simplistic Islam, cut off from its civilization" that
characterizes the Islamists. He rightly derides Wahhabism as aiming ultimately
"to make one forget body, object, space, beauty."
For all its charm and erudition
on the Islamic topic, Meddeb's writing degenerates into self-indulgence,
quirkiness, and disorganization when he takes up politics. He blames the
9/11 hijackers, for example, in large part on a "world transformed by Americanization"
and elaborates his bizarre notion that as "the Americanization of the world
slowly began to replace its Europeanization," it spawned the Wahhabi sect.
In passages of surpassing idiocy, Meddeb states that "Wahhabite Saudi Arabia
and Puritan America were held over the same baptismal fonts" and "the Wahhabite
sectarian walks hand in hand with the American," the two sharing much in
common. And what Meddeb writes about Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and other
current issues is best left unsaid.
Zacarias, My Brother: The Making
of a Terrorist. By Abd Samad Moussaoui, with Florence Bouquillat. Trans.
from French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2003. 143 pp. $14.95, paper.
In one of the more complete and
insider accounts on the men of al-Qaeda, the elder brother of Zacarias
Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker," tells his brother's story in a slim
volume published by Noam Chomsky's and Howard Zinn's favorite press. The
tale has a long run-up-grandparents, parents, childhood, teenage years-and
a brief denouement, for the two brothers were close only until Zacarias
went Wahhabi. Born in 1968, Zacarias experienced a childhood in which his
parents (immigrants from Morocco) divorced; he moved from city to city,
had no education in Arabic or Islam, and did quite well in school and socially.
Still, he was increasingly alienated from French life ("they're all racists
and fascists") to the point that racism became his obsession.
Partly to flee this and partly to
learn English and become a successful businessman, Zacarias moved to London
in 1991. Over the next four years, however, he fell in with a militant
Islamic crowd. By 1995, he told his sister-in-law that she should not work
outside the house and responded approvingly to a television husband hitting
his wife ("Serves her right, that's what women need"). More generally,
he had "become a stranger" to his family. On a visit to Morocco, he physically
accosted the imam of a mosque in disagreement over his understanding of
Islam. After an absence of several years, the next Abd Samad knew about
his kid brother was his alleged complicity in the 9/11 atrocities.
Abd Samad draws some interesting
conclusions from his experience. One is that Muslim children in the West
need to learn their religion at home or they are susceptible to the extremist
forces of the sort that seduced his brother. Another is that the Muslims
with a public voice need to address the roots of the problem: "Though they
condemn attacks and assassinations, they do not denounce Wahhabi ideologists
. and Muslim Brotherhood ideologists."
Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation.
Edited by B.A. Roberson. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 262 pp. $27.50, paper.
What "Islamic Reformation," the
reader might correctly ask? Despite the eccentric title, this multi-author
work has an unusually interesting assortment of essays. Here are three:
Rudolph Peters traces the complex transformation of the Shari'a (Islamic
law) "from jurists' law to statute law." For centuries, the Shari'a consisted
of "open, discursive, and contractory" scholarly discussions of jurisprudence-not
something readily applicable in a court of law. Peters shows the wrenching
that this tradition underwent so as to fit the needs of a state system.
He also notes the improbable but possible eventuality of a democratic Muslim
state deciding the specifics of the Shari'a via the electoral box.
Ann Elizabeth Mayer adopts the tripartite
schema of Italian scholar Ugo Mattei, whereby the law is either traditional
(small-scale, families as the basic unit, gender distinctions emphasized),
political (law courts as the servants of the ruler), or professional (independent
judiciary, rule of law). She establishes that much of the Muslim world
suffers from political law; to escape it, Islamists are proposing an impossible
return to the golden age of traditional law via the Shari'a. In fact, she
asserts-and is roundly seconded by the Iranian dissidents she cites-the
real need is to move ahead to the rule of law.
Rodney Wilson reviews and explains
the grudging policies of the Egyptian and Saudi governments to the emergence
of Islamic financial institutions. So uneasy were the Egyptian authorities
with this somewhat out-of-control phenomenon that they prevailed on a leading
religious figure, Muhammad Sayyid at-Tantawi, to rule that interest paid
by conventional banks does not constitute usury. Ironically, the Saudis
have a hard time with Islamic banks because their whole system is supposedly
Islamic already; creating explicitly Islamic institutions implies that
the others are not.
