Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity, Malise Ruthven, IB Tauris, 267pp, £57.50 (hardback)
The challenge which Islam, Muslims, terrorism, as well as the many forms of political Islamism, have posed to western policy-makers, particularly in the years after 9/11, has led to the explosion of a literature looking at Islam. An academic discipline – formerly restricted to a small scholarly community interested often in the recherché details of the caliphate, or the dating of events in the early Islamic community – has been blown open by work done by a range of counter-terrorism specialists and figures from within the West’s military and security establishments. Not all of this work has demonstrated much subtlety. Far too much of it has lacked the profound understanding of language, religion, politics and history which marks the best of older Orientalist traditions.
Ruthven’s Encounters with Islam is an exception, since Ruthven relates to a scholarly tradition where an understanding of the basic texts and history of Islam is combined with a profound insight into how the religion has shaped and been shaped by the politics of the modern Middle East. This book takes the form not of a textbook or a synthetic survey of the religion – for which one might refer to his excellent Islam: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford – but a collection of long-form review essays written over the last thirty years, mainly for either the London or New York Reviews of Books, a form at which Ruthven excels. It is this form which enables him to set his critique of the debate that has developed on these issues within a scholarly framework – one that acknowledges the significance of the contributions of history, literary studies and sociology.
Although this is no systematic account, the collection is carefully structured so that any reader who gives this work the serious attention it deserves will come away with a rich understanding both of the key political and religious issues facing the Middle East and the ideas driving the academic and professional debate around them.
Ruthven develops his arguments from a key text or texts – most of them the main works of generalist interest published in this field over the last thirty years. He uses these as a gateway to explain some of the key issues relating to Islam in our time. We range from essays which reflect on those scholars looking to challenge the accepted version of the origins of Islam, such as John Wansbrough of SOAS and his former colleagues, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (these, amongst others, have tried to apply the sorts of textual and linguistic close criticism long regarded as normal in biblical studies to the Qu’ran and other early Islamic texts) to reflections on the origins of terrorism and the ideas which underlie Islamic militancy.
Most often Ruthven presents us with questions, not answers. In an essay from 2008 looking at a range of books by securocrats he looks at the issues of Islamic jurisprudence, the role of sharia law and how it does and should interact with both modern Islamic and non-Islamic states. The question he poses – and the historical context of how sharia developed from the time of the Prophet up until today – is an important one, and he does not shy from asking how sharia can be made compatible with the state, particularly a democratically accountable state. Nor does he shy from controversy, for example in his examinations of the dynamics of the affair surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. He sets this in the context of an Islamic ‘ummah (community) which is no longer local in its orientation and in which the distinctively regional forms of piety which marked out Islam in its medieval guise are resolved by the forces of globalisation.
By understanding these issues Ruthven is able to take a properly critical look at the works he reviews. One example amongst many is his criticism of Albert Bergsen’s Reader on Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian thinker and activist vital in the formation of the strand of modern Islamist thought on which the Muslim Brotherhood is founded. He notes that this work has no mention of Qutb’s notorious anti-Jewish 1950 diatribe, Our Struggle with the Jews. At the same time he dissects Qutb’s thought to lay bare the Western origins of much of what Qutb claimed as authentically Islamic.
In doing so he uncovers the fragile intellectual underpinnings of Islamism and its failure to acknowledge its debts to the very society against which it rails.
The interest in intellectual genealogy runs through many of Ruthven’s essays. So, we find historical reflections on the divide which developed in early Islam between Sunni and Shi’a alongside a rich set of essays trying to understand just what happened in Iran in 1979 with the fall of the Shah and the eventual declaration of the Islamic Republic under the charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. Ruthven is careful to unpick the collision of factors which led to this. He looks at the brutal leadership of the Shah, supported by the West, and his desire to use petrochemical wealth to transform a traditional society in only a few years. Ruthven also notes that Khomeini’s ideas about the role of the clergy in politics not only drew on Shi’a themes but were revolutionary within this. We also find reflections for today’s policy makers in Ruthven’s account of how Iran’s experiences during its long war with Iraq provided an impetus for the development of its nuclear programme.
One of the joys of this collection is that there is space for reflections on some of the more marginal forms of Islam, those often ignored in the securocratic discourse. Whether it is the creative force of Ismailism within Islam or reviews of books such as William Dalrymple’s delightful To the Holy Mountain (a travelogue which employs the whimsical structure of the voyages of the Byzantine monk, John Moschus, around the East Mediterranean as a means of unpicking the relationships between Christians and Muslims), Ruthven is interested in Islam as a civilisation, not just as a religion. For the most part he is a generous reviewer, able both to see merit in the bulk of what he reads and to suggest where a thesis might be a little too narrowly drawn. That said, one of his earlier review essays, from 1981, on V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, is waspish in its critique:
Despite his [Naipaul’s] striking apercus, his quiet sympathy for individuals and his intelligent grasp of political and social realities, he is not entirely at ease with the Muslim world and its culture. He does not appear to be widely read in its literature, even in translation.
Fortunately, Ruthven himself lives up to the standards implicit here. It is a tribute to his sensible, humanist engagement with these issues that the essence of so many of the essays within his collection had remained with me since reading them in their first appearance in literary periodicals.
An excellent example of how Ruthven uses his understanding of the Islamic past to interpret its present is in his essays seeking to understand the clannish, Alawite-dominated Syrian political system. He sets it within the native Islamic/Arab intellectual categories created by the fourteenth- century Arab historiographer, Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqqadimah. So, rather than seeing either Bashar Al-Assad or his father Hafez as owing anything real to the socialist principles espoused in their Ba’thist rhetoric, Ruthven prefers to set their ‘ruling family takes all’ form of rule within the category of asabiyya, a Khaldunian concept developed to describe the patriarchal, clannish societies he encountered in fourteenth-century North Africa. This works equally well for a Syrian state in which the real decisions are taken by a small group of family members around the President, and in which ministers and state officials are merely ciphers.
Of course it is in the nature of any collection of essays written over thirty years that some of its constituents become period pieces. Of all the regions of the world, the Middle East and South-East Asia are never short of ‘events’, and there is always more to be said. There are a few themes under- represented here: the extraordinary growth and influence of the pan-Arab news media in the last decade – principally Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya – goes without analysis, perhaps because Ruthven is a sharper analyst of the textual and the historical, rather than visual broadcast media. Yet both these outlets are at the same time players in the politics of the region and tools in the hands of their sponsoring states (in one case Qatar, in the second Saudi Arabia). Moreover, most of these essays were written before both the death of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 and the US policy of drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas. There will, therefore, be room for Ruthven to reflect elsewhere on whether either of these ‘events’ represent the ‘game-changers’ so eagerly sought by Western policy makers. Judging by events at the time of writing – the affair of the amateur anti-Islamic film, which has been seized on by militants keen to attack the United States, and the violence against US embassies in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt – themes very familiar from the last thirty years – there are grounds for thinking they do not.