Political Islam and the New World Disorder.

• Author: VanDenBerg, Jeffrey A.
• Position: Review

Bassam Tibi. The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 282 pp. Hardcover $29.95.

Liberal Muslim scholars in the 1990s face a dilemma. On the one hand, they reject the absolutism and tendency toward extremism of Islamic fundamentalism. Yet the ideological enmity and misguided policies of the West toward the Islamic World, the Middle East in particular, make many liberal Muslim intellectuals loathe to provide any grist for the "green peril" propaganda mill. In this context, Bassam Tibi's The Challenge of Fundamentalism is a provocative undertaking, for it not only offers a powerful theoretical critique of Islamic fundamentalism, but also argues that this phenomenon is a threat to the West and international stability.

The author's central thesis is that Islamic fundamentalism is a contemporary political ideology distinct from Islam as a religion, and that Islamic fundamentalism, but not Islam, poses a challenge to world order. Tibi, a prolific scholar of Islam and Arab politics, repeatedly warns against the abuse of his argument: "we must never lose sight of the distinction between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism; any promotion of hostility to Islam itself in the guise of a clash of civilizations would unwittingly play into the hands of the fundamentalists in their efforts to antagonize the West" (p. xii).

The foremost contribution of this book is its penetrating examination of the intolerance and misrepresentation of Islam inherent in Islamic fundamentalism. The violence against liberal Muslims and others who question the fundamentalists' orthodoxy is well known. Cases such as the murder of Egyptian writer Farag Fuda, the stabbing of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, and the infamous apostasy ruling against Egyptian professor Nasr Hamid Abu-Zaid attest to the terror tactics, perversely justified as religiously mandated, by some fundamentalists. In fact, as Tibi reports, "there is not one revelation in the Qur'an that sanctions the killing of murtad / apostates. The command to slay reasoning Muslims is un-Islamic, an invention of Islamic fundamentalists" (p. 155).

Condemnatory fat was only one manifestation of Islamists' selective understanding of Islam. Refuting the standard interpretation of the essential unity of religion and state (din wa dawla) in Islam, an interpretation promoted by fundamentalists and many Western scholars, Tibi makes a persuasive case...