ABSTRACT
In their preoccupation with Islamic “militancy,” “extremism,” “fundamentalism,” “jihadism,” and so on, Western pundits, political scientists, and policy-makers have until recently paid scant attention to a truly astounding variety of (re)interpretations of Islam over the past few decades.1 This Western preoccupation with “violent and irrational” aspects of modern-day Islamic/Islamist ideology, especially with its forceful rejection of Western political, cultural, and economic values and institutions, is understandable.2 It is determined by the sensationalism of extremist Islamism that captivates the imagination of the Western public at large anxious to know “why they hate us.”3 Hence, the consistent academic and media foregrounding, in Western societies,4 of the extremist, militant aspects of contemporary Islamic/Islamist movements.5 Simultaneously, the richness and diversity of the Islamic/Islamist intellectual discourse in the recent decades is all but ignored. This focus on Islamic “violence” and “radicalism” has inevitably contributed to the widely held Western image of Islam as being uniformly hostile to Western values, institutions, and lifestyles-a religion allegedly impervious to change; “stuck” in the Middle Ages; and generally incompatible with, or unwilling to embrace, modernity, change, and progress. The dramatic and tragic events of the past two-and-a-half decades, especially several Middle Eastern wars, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and acts of terrorism in the name of Islam the world over, have done little to change this deeply ingrained Western perception. If anything they have reinforced it. At the same time, they have prompted many Western politicians and experts in various Western think tanks to initiate a pragmatic quest for a “good Islam,” namely one that is friendly to the West, shares its values, appreciates its freedoms and institutions, and thus one that can be used to offset the influence of “radical” (“militant,” “fundamentalist,” “jihadist,” etc.) ideas on the Muslims both at home and abroad.6 This quest is, of course, a purely utilitarian, political enterprise that we should leave to those better trained (and paid) to pursue. As students of Islam by now steeped in the vicissitudes of its historical evolution, our goal here is to dispassionately examine the latest trends in the interpretation of Islamic legacy by Muslim intellectuals residing both in the East and in the West.
