Books
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Louay M. Safi
Tensions and Transitions in the Muslim World, |
Comments by Distinguished Scholars
After September 11, 2001, there has been a flood of books on Islam--good, bad and indifferent. Now, with Louay Safi's new book, we have an outstanding and perceptive analysis of what is happening in and around Muslim society. This is a must-read book for anyone seriously interested in studying one of the most important issues of the 21st century.
Akbar S. Ahmed
Ibn Khaldun Chair and Professor of Islamic Studies
American University, Washington D.C.
The reform movement within Islam deserves the greatest attention of serious scholars, for it promises to be the best way to transform traditional Muslim society so that it becomes modern and democratically inclined. In this fine and well-argued book, Louay Safi shows how the reform movement accomplishes such a task. He thereby makes an important contribution to our understanding of Islam today and in the recent past.
Charles E. Butterworth,
Professor of Middle East Political Thought, University of Maryland
Post 9/11 has made more urgent questions like: "Are there moderate Muslims?" "What is the attitude of Islam and contemporary Muslims towards secularism, modernization, democratization, and globalization?" Dr. Louay Safi addresses these issues and provides a clear and direct voice, one that will shed light and heat. Tensions and Transitions in the Muslim World will both inform and challenge Muslims and non-Muslims, policymakers and academic experts to understand and respond to the "realities and issues" that are critical to relations between the Muslim world and the West, and between non-Muslim and their fellow Muslim citizens in Europe and America.
John L. Esposito
University Professor & Director
Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University
Can a state be both Islamic and secular? In the global debate between Islamic revivalism and Islamic reform, this book is bound to occupy a unique place. It draws a much needed distinction between the rules of the Shariah and the values of the Ummah, and uses that distinction to reconnect democracy with Islam. Drawing from the intellectual history of both Islam and the West, Louay Safi gives us a book of both solid scholarship and ethical guidance.
Ali A. Mazrui
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
and Director of Institute of Global Cultural Studies
Binghamton University, SUNY
Louay M. Safi offers a sensitive, timely study for rethinking modern Islamic political thought. By reconsidering the relation between religion and politics and the inherent goals of secularism, Safi invites Muslims to grapple with the complexities of modernity and reevaluate Islamic precepts and practices in today's world. Safi encourages Muslims to forge their own authentic positions towards democracy, civil society, and social justice while simultaneously promoting new analytical scholarship in Western political thought.
Abdul Aziz Said
Director, Center for Global Peace
American University, Washington, DC
Review by Murad Wilfried Hofmann (Bonn, Germany) for The Muslim World Book Review, 25:1, 2004.
This book by a well-known Syrian-American civil engineer turned political scientist was highly acclaimed by authorities like Akbar Ahmed and John Esposito. And rightly so. Under a title as academic as unpromising, the author indeed answers the boiling questions: How do we Muslims get out of the mess we’re in?
In the process Safi tackles issues like Islam and secularism, radicalism, democracy, human rights, globalization, and US foreign policy (before and after 9/11), using arguments, and arriving at solutions, that reform-minded Muslims whole-heartedly support. Yet he does not argue like certain “liberals” with a cavalier attitude toward the Islamic sources. Rather, he argues like a true fundamentalist (in the original sense), after a thorough, imaginative, and principled reassessment of the Qur’an, Sunnah, ijma and Muslim classical jurisprudence. In fact, his is the only effective way of rejuvenation, i.e. to seek movement from within the system, guided by the eternal and universal maqasid of Islam, and not as an ideology but as a religion.
The book comes with 332 end notes and useful annexes like the Covenant of Madina (622), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949), and Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (1981). Thus, in terms of subject matter and design it is addressed both to a sophisticated Islamic and an open-minded non-Muslim audience.
Non-Muslims might profit most from Safi’s analysis of the three main Islamic reform movements: nationalist secularists on the left, radical moralists or Islamists on the right, and mainstream moderate traditionalists occupying the middle ground—all three of them modern—in their approaches. For him, the secularists, slavish Europeanizers like Taha Hussein and Mustafa Kemal, only managed to introduce Western tastes and consumption habits without Western creativity, productivity or scientific curiosity (47f.). On the other hand, most Islamists epitomized by Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, critically lacked comprehension of the complexity of modern society and the historicity of Islamic models, thereby reducing all societal problems to moral ones (p. 84).
Of capital importance is the authors insistence that Muslims (like followers of Hizb al-Tahrir, Sayyid Qutb, and Mawdudi) stop identifying (or collapsing) the Islamic state with the Islamic ummah. The Islamic state, as in al-Madinah, must by confessionally and doctrinally pluralistic, limiting itself to providing (and not imposing) the ideal condition for the realization of the Islamic ideal by the ummah. (With that proviso, even the Islamic state can be seen as ‘secularist’.)
In turn, Muslim readers might be intrigued by Safi’s analysis of the decline of Muslim civilization, attributing it to:
(i) the failure to institutionalize shura,
(ii) the discrediting of the natural sciences by the mutakallimun,
(iii) the psychological consequences of a merely transcendental and fatalistic world view, and
(iv) the fatal taqlidi assumption that classical Islamic jurisprudence had become infallible (p. 92).
In this interpretation, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali appears as a most disastrous intellectual culprit for his denial of casualty, which is seen as having destroyed rationality in general and the physical sciences in particular. But the author also identifies modern villains like sati Husari and Michael Aflaq, who, after importing romanticist German nationalism (via J. G. Herder and J.G. Fiche), helped to destroy the prevailing pluralism of the ummah with their Ba’athist version of Arab nationalism. (53 ff.).
For overcoming the stagnation, Safi considers legal reform as essential for which he proposes a principled maqasid approach, i.e.
(i) dropping the Hanbali literalist technique of non-interpretation;
(ii) establishing the Divine reason behind Islamic norms;
(iii) applying individual norms only if they fit the totality of Islamic normatively; and
(iv) returning to the view that the Qur’an supersedes or derogate the Sunnah.
Following this methodology, the author asserts total religious freedom for Muslims, absolute gender equality in the public sphere, and equal rights for men and women to freely enter or leave marriage (in view of which he considers the Shari’ah-based differentiations of their rights and duties in the family context as compatible with Occidental Human Rights). This picture—drawn with a broad brush—might have to be revised in detail. For instance, given the male duty to pay mahr without compensation for it in cases of divorce it would not be equitable to allow wives to quit marriage without giving the reason (or returning her mahr).
Non-Muslims should take to heart Safi’s critique of US foreign policy seen as egotistic, unilateralist, inconsistent, short-sighted, counter-productive and even immoral in as much as it no longer seeks to make the world safe for democracy but only safe for new-imperialist America (157 ff.)
The book is not always easy to read because of paragraph-long sentences of this kind: “If the stipulation of explicit agreement for the fulfillment of communicative action is relevant to cultures that share common intersubjective, it is more urgent in a cross-cultural dialogue.” Wow.
Alas, the book’s truly remarkable content is marred by grave shortcomings of from: Sloppy editing, unbecoming from a former editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences and the current president of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists in the US. The problem is not only that some parts are dated. Who is not tired of Fukuyama and Huntington? Do we want to focus on Erbakan years after Erdogan has come to power? A propos Turkey: when Turkish names are Arabized (Muhammad II instead of Mehmet II; Kamil for Kemal or Salim for Selim) Turks rightly feel annoyed and non-Turks perplexed.
Worse, one frequently re-reads passages found earlier in the book, most of them verbally identical. This is true of sections found in pages 15 and 133, 15f and 137 (with 35 identical lines), 26 f. and 101; 44 f. and 70; 96 and 116; 111 and 137, 131 f. and 138; and 163 and 172. On page 116 a whole line is repeated from the previous one. Alas, this s not untypical of books composed from previously published articles. These repetitions might have been signaled to the editor had the volume been given decent indexes instead of only a flimsy alibi of a subject index. Thus one is not surprised either by spelling mistakes like Fuzlur (Fazlure, p. 230), Tibe (Tibi, p. 211), Khadun (Khaldun, p. 145), antagonistic (antagonistic, p. 162) or Brelefeldt and Biefeldt (Bielefedt, pp. 106, 206). Finally, careful with the French! a la stand for a la mode (according to the model) and must not be followed by a particle. It is particularly amusing to read on page 51, ‘a la the moralizing model’ or ‘a la the secular model’.