Term Warfare: ‘Islamism and Islam’
IN FEBRUARY, The New York Review of Books’ website hosted a debate in which several prominent feminists criticized Human Rights Watch for issuing a report that whitewashed the record of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists poised to take power in the Middle East. Human Rights Watch responded by stating that this critique amounted to, among other things, “intolerance for Islam.” A year and a half earlier, numerous right-wing American activists launched a fierce campaign to stop the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. In doing so, many of them argued that Islam was to blame for the attacks of September 11 and rejected the idea that Muslims could also have been victims on that fateful day. At first glance, the views of these right-wing activists and those of Human Rights Watch appear diametrically opposed. In fact, they have a good deal in common. Most importantly, both consider Islam and Islamism to be indistinguishable. Only on that basis can they consider the construction of an Islamic cultural center to be a threat, or regard opposition to an Islamist political party to be the same as opposition to Islam as a religion.
Bassam Tibi takes up this problematic misconception in his new book. As an Arab Muslim who has lived in the West for several decades (first in Germany and now in the United States), he makes an important argument against conflating his religion with the political ideology of Islamists. As he aptly states, “It is no contradiction to defend Islam against prejudice and to criticize Islamism.” Thus he spends most of the book bravely arguing against Islamism from a liberal Islamic perspective. The meaning of “bravely” here is not to be confused with its normal usage in Western intellectual discourse. Tibi is brave in that as a prominent Muslim critic of Islamism, religious fanatics have threatened to kill him (a threat that likeminded extremists have carried out against others in the past).
Tibi is successful in demonstrating that the Islamic tradition contains seeds which could form the basis of a modern humanistic Islam. Yet this humanistic understanding of Islam’s past and potential future has been routinely undermined by Islamists who have been somewhat successful in monopolizing Islamic discourse. But Tibi’s arguments are undercut by a lack of nuance when describing Islamism. This ultimately undermines many of his claims and, I fear, will turn off many of the people who ought to take note of the difference between Islam as a religion and Islamism as, what Tibi terms, “religionized politics.”