Confronting Political Islam
Six Lessons from the West's Past
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
How the conflicts of Western history shed light on current upheavals in the Middle East
Political Islam has often been compared to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas—and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts—John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong.
Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise.
Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.
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University of Virginia professor Owen (The Clash of Ideas in World Politics) aims with this comparative history to lend perspective to the Muslim world's contemporary political aims. Secularists in the West underestimate Islamism's global force, he begins, yet Islam is not a monolith. Owen considers past ideological struggles and explores the nature of the ideological state, using such examples as Napoleonic France and Maoist China. Watch Egypt, Turkey and Iran, he says, since how each of these states turns will signal Islam's political future. And don't overestimate Arab secularism. "Even moderate Islamists are Islamists, not liberals," Owen stresses, to explain why the secularism of an Ataturk or Nasser is simply not feasible in the future. By this reading, U.S. relations with the Muslim world cannot be as cordial as with the Anglosphere or France, and Americans should not expect too much in the way of commonality. Overall, Owen is generous, rational and balanced, more perhaps than the subject can bear. In the current world of racial and religious strife, nuclear fears, and expanding terrorist capacity, some of his historical connections seem far-fetched. While Owen clearly wants to transcend the present Islamist-secularist struggle, he is also astute enough to understand the vast real-world differences that block the resolution of conflict.