Islamic Fundamentalism.

• Author: Ahmad, Imad-ad-Dean
• Position: Review

Abdel Salam Sidahmed and Anoushiravan Ehteshami. Editors. Oxford: Westview Press, 1996. xiiii + 284 pp., including index. Hardcover $69.00, paperback $24.00.

Reviewed by Imad-ad-Dean Abroad

The desire of today's publishers to thrust the suspect title "Islamic Fundamentalism" on every book that deals with the subject of political Islam has brought us to the point where this book entitled Islamic Fundamentalism cites another called Islamic Fundamentalism.

The editors of this uneven anthology confront the problematical nature of the book's title directly in the introduction. They accurately summarize the debate over the utility of the term "fundamentalism". The editors approvingly quote Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby of "Fundamentalism Project" fame as observing that as "lay scholars of Islam, leaders of . . . fundamentalist movements are not theologians but social thinkers and political activists." But this has been the general rule in Islamic history. Muslims take for granted that man's understanding of the incomprehensive God is limited to what we are told in the Quran. Ever since the Asharites came to dominate Muslim philosophy, attempts to impose doctrinaire interpretations of the divine attributes has been understood to be a form of idolatry - substitution of an image of God for a nameable but transcendent reality. No wonder that Muslim leaders are seen as social thinkers and activists rather than as theologians in the Christian sense of the term. Not a few Western observers of early Islamic history, including G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells, had held the same option about the Prophet Muhammad himself.

The editors note that the terms usuliyya and usuli have totally different connotations in the Arabic language than do "fundamentalism" and "fundamentalist" in English. They sensibly, if ironically observe that what distinguishes the Islamist leaders is "political activism rather than a dogmatic or literalist attitude toward Holy Scripture." Notwithstanding the title of their book they conclude that "the word 'fundamentalism' with its original Christian implications should not be brought into an Islamic context."

This volume is divided into three parts of differing merit. "Part One: General Framework and Themes" is a state-of-art description of the approach taken towards the study of the subject by most western academics rather than an effective framework for identifying and understanding the themes in the case studies which comprise the...