The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?

• Author: Sullivan, Antony T.

This volume was not written primarily for the professional community of scholars of the Middle East or Islam. Rather than targeting specialists, John Esposito has chosen to address that sector of the educated public that may have some interest in foreign affairs in general and the Arab and Muslim worlds in particular. For such readers, Esposito makes special efforts to demonstrate just how misleading are so many of the stereotypes which continue to impede Western comprehension of Islam and contemporary Islamic revivalism. American media and governmental elites would do well to give his analysis careful attention. This book constitutes an excellent companion to Professor Esposito's Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press, 1988).

Esposito articulates gently and in detail how the application of such Christian categories as "fundamentalism" to Islam muddies understanding, how Communism has been replaced by Islam in the eyes of some as the West's principal enemy, and how Islam relates to contemporary Arab regimes and to democracy. He argues convincingly that to reify Islam is an egregious error, and that Western comprehension of Muslim activism requires a discriminating sense of the very different forms which the revival of Islam has assumed. Esposito deplores the plethora of erroneous public commentary on Islam in the United States, and is certainly correct that observers who are "not simply dismissive of Islamic activism [are] often viewed as being biased toward the enemy" (p. 173). Unfortunately, the author's discussion of those he holds primarily responsible for this unhappy situation manifests some of the same failure to make distinctions which he attributes to those he criticizes.

Like most other authorities on contemporary Muslim revivalism, Esposito rejects "fundamentalism" as a term too heavily laden with Christian connotations to be useful in explication of Islam. Islamicists seek authenticity and autonomy in faith, culture and society, Esposito suggests, and continue an indigenous tradition of tajdid (revival) and islah (reform) which reaches back to the very beginnings of their faith. The fact that Muslim "fundamentalism" is now commonly used in the West as a synonym for terrorism, he maintains, makes it an especially unhelpful category.

Esposito deplores the lack of attention by the American media to the fact that most "fundamentalists" are young, ambitious, upwardly mobile immigrants to the larger cities of the Islamic...