Confronting Political Islam.

• Author: Quainton, Anthony
• Position: Book review

Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past by John M. Owen IV, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2014, ISBN: 978-0691163147, e-book ISBN: 978-1400852154, 232 pp., Hardcover $29.95, e-book available on Kindle and Apple IBook.

There is no topic more likely to attract public attention than the challenge presented for world stability and international order by radical, jihadist political Islam. Professor John Owen in this provocative and scholarly work has sought to deal with this problem by embedding it in an historical context. He focusses his analysis on three historical periods 1) the experiences of Europe after the Reformation and through the end of the 30 Years War, 2) the post Napoleonic transformation of European politics from absolute monarchies to liberal political systems and 3) the struggle between communism, fascism and democracy in the mid-20th Century. Each of these periods was characterized by intense ideological debate, among Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics in the first instance, between absolute and constitutional monarchists and the forces of revolution in the second and in the third the seventy years conflict between communism, fascism and the forces of liberal democracy. From these three case studies, explored in each of his separate chapters, he draws six lessons. 1) Islamism is not a short or transitory phenomenon, 2) Ideologies are (usually) not monolithic, 3) Foreign interventions are normal, 4) States may be both rational and ideological at the same time, 5) no one ideology will necessarily triumph, and 6) Iran and Turkey are the models of Islamism which deserve our closest attention.

While the author struggles mightily to draw parallels with the major periods of political and ideological conflict over the last half millennium, drawing on a wealth of historical detail, the analysis in many cases seems strained. The distinctions between Sunni and Shia Islam are far less radical than between Catholics and Calvinists. Understanding the Islamic vision of a the good society and natural political order, while varying within Islam, is not of the same order of magnitude as those issues that divided Europeans and the Western World throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. As professor Owens repeatedly makes clear Islamists of virtually every persuasion have a common goal: the ordering of society according to the precepts of Sharia law. All followers of Islam favor Sharia to some degree. To be sure...