FOR those (and they are many) who are convinced by the thesis that the West and its values are under remorseless siege from a menacing and resurgent Islam, Ali Allawi’s antithesis may seem a little surprising, even absurd. But the author is a distinguished Iraqi who has twice served in post-Saddam governments in Baghdad and whose last, much-acclaimed book was a searing indictment of American (and Iraqi) failings. Though the two books tackle very different themes, what they have in common is their author’s intimate knowledge of both Islam and the West, and his unflinching honesty.
Mr Allawi calls his new book an “attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam”. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.
The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an “Islamic alternative”, they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb.
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