Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform?

• Author: Sullivan, Antony T.
• Position: Review

John L. Esposito, Editor. Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? Boulder: Lynne Riener Publishers, 1997. 281pp., including bibliography and index. Hardcover $55.00.

It is only on rare occasions that one encounters an edited volume whose varied contributions are uniformly of excellent quality. Perhaps even more unusual is the edited collection of essays which makes both an important contribution to Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and at the same time deserves assignment as required reading by those charged with the formulation of American foreign policy. On all counts, Political Islam qualifies as that rare compendium deserving of the most careful attention by scholars and government officials alike. In assembling and tightly editing these papers, John L. Esposito has once again rendered a signal service to objective understanding of the relationship between religion and politics in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

In discussions of the relationships between state policy and Islamic radicalism and those among Islamic groups themselves, Lisa Anderson and John O. Voll do much to dissipate the cant that so often deforms discussions of these subjects. Especially during the past decade, Anderson notes, most Arab regimes have opted to repress all varieties of Islamist opposition rather than attempt to vitiate that opposition by including in public policy formulation those Islamist moderates willing to trade in the political souq. This policy of repression, she notes, has been adopted despite the experiences of such countries as Tunisia and Egypt during the 1980's, where qualified toleration of al-Nahda and the Muslim Brotherhood contributed to the ideological moderation of both movements. The "closer [such] movements were to the prospect of sharing power," Anderson states, "the more pragmatic they appeared to be" (p.26). The recent wave of persecution by Arab regimes which refuse to accept the uncertainty of political outcom es inherent in democracy and treat all dissent as illegitimate, she argues, is likely to result only in radicalization of "illegal" Islamist opposition and increase the likelihood of a "desperate resort to violence on the part of the regimes and their opponents alike" (pp. 28-29).

Rejecting the working assumption of beltway geostrategists that the relevant linkages among Islamists are those between Iran and Sudan or such putatively "terrorist" groups as Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, John Voll...