Allah in the West.

• Author: Greer, Herb

Gilles Kepel is director of research at the French National Science Research Council and a leading Western authority on the world of Islam. The 1994 English-language version of his most recent opus, The Revenge of God, as well as his 1985 book The Prophet and the Pharaoh, were well received by the best of the American and British Orientalist academies. A new book by Kepel is therefore bound to generate expectations, and let it be said at once that Allah in the West has at least one important merit: His description of the fissiparous Islamic movement in the West is a convincing corrective to media scare-stories that portray Islam as a kind of religious cognate to the defunct Communist Conspiracy, a monolithic threat to the West.

But Allah in the West is not really an extended essay on Islam in the West. Nor is it (claims on the dust jacket notwithstanding) an analysis of the relationship between Islam and the West, a subject around which it delicately skirts. It is instead an extended sociological treatise on what Kepel calls "communalism" (la demarche communautariste) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

Kepel offers a number of definitions, varying in complexity, for this phenomenon. What they amount to is the tendency of certain minorities (usually ethnic, sometimes religious) in Western society to establish a kind of self-protective apartheid. In the book's extreme examples - the American black Muslims, the fundamentalist Muslims of Britain and France - this involves a conscious attempt to denigrate and, where possible, exclude the dominant religious and cultural values of the wider majority society. Kepel's method of analysis, he says,

owes much to Weberian sociology in the importance given to the construction of ideal types which are not necessarily representative of the whole of society, but which reveal underlying patterns and enable us to interpret changes within society.

As to the communalism itself, this is manifested in

assertions of community identity which are taking place within societies which are moving in the opposite direction . . . toward a growing indistinctiveness [l'indifferenciation croissante] of inherited cultural identities.

By this he means that as older sources of identity, and especially of class and the polarities of Right and Left, are weakening in the "post-industrial" consumer societies of America, Britain, and France, forces such as Islam exert themselves as high-profile cultural impulses countering this tendency. This is, in essence, Kepel's guiding thesis, and the bulk of the book's narrative is meant to illustrate it.

The thesis is parsimonious, the book's structure is symmetrical, and on a more or less platonic level the package, taken together, has a superficial plausibility. But when Kepel turns to cases he gets into real trouble, the sort of trouble that shows the difference between being a master of Islam and Islamic societies (which Kepel is) and a master of the fractious sociology of Western societies within which Islamic communities are a small part (which Kepel is not). His internationally respected expertise in Islamic matters simply does not extend to their infusion within Western politics and society.

Once across this boundary, Kepel finds himself writing not as a scholar but as an intellectual - that is, on the basis of apercus rather than data. Even this would be fine if the settings for his argument were in the real world. Unfortunately, he has instead cobbled up a sort of sociological theme-park America, Britain, and France. His "ideal types" do not reveal underlying...