Skewering Stephen Schwartz and Paul Berman

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Review of Books, Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003

Which Way to Mecca? Part II
By Clifford Geertz

AMONG THE BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW

Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
by Gilles Kepel
Harvard University Press, 454 pp., $29.95

Militant Islam Reaches America
by Daniel Pipes
Norton, 307 pp., $25.95

The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror
by Stephen Schwartz
Doubleday, 312 pp., $25.00

Terror and Liberalism
by Paul Berman
Norton, 214 pp., $21.00

The Future of Political Islam
by Graham E. Fuller
Palgrave, 227 pp., $29.95

After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy
by Noah Feldman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 260 pp., $24.00

Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society
by Riaz Hassan
Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $35.00

The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
by Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Princeton University Press, 293 pp., $29.95

1.
Since the end of the cold war, when a lot more collapsed than walls and 
regimes, many of the large-scale concepts by means of which we had been 
accustomed to sorting out the world have begun to come apart. East and 
West, Communist and free world, liberal and totalitarian, Arab, 
Oriental, underdeveloped, third world, nonaligned, and now apparently 
even Europe have lost much of their edge and definition, and we are left 
to find our way through vast collections of strange and inconsonant 
particulars without much in the way of assistance from finely drawn, 
culturally ratified natural kinds.

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Stephen Schwartz, who has also run into political difficulties in the 
capital, and stirred thereby a teacup-storm on the right, is a strange 
and outlandish figure. He grew up in San Francisco as part of the City 
Lights literary crowd around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom his father had 
published; he became a so-far-left-he's-right Trotskyist-anarchist under 
the nom de guerre "Comrade Sandallo," worked for a while as an obituary 
writer and street reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, shifted his 
affections and his energies to Reagan during the micro-war in Grenada, 
and ultimately made his way as a freelance journalist to Sarajevo in the 
1990s, where he converted to Islam and joined a Naqshabandi Sufi order. 
He changed his name again, at least for some purposes, to Suleyman 
Abmad, and found the Medusa's head every conspiratorialist needs: 
"Wahabism."

Wahhabism (so called after an eighteenth-century legist, Muhammad bin 
'Abd al-Wahhab, who wrote and preached in northwest Arabia, largely, it 
seems, to an empty desert) is the name generally given to the radically 
puritanical version of Islam dominant to the point of absolutism in 
present-day Saudi Arabia—the sort that stones adulterers, decapitates 
apostates, forbids female car-driving, and, apparently, breeds such 
people as Osama bin Laden. Rather little is known about Wahhab, whose 
scholarly output seems to have been both small and unoriginal. But he 
has become, since the petroleum rise of the House of Saud, which has 
taken him on as its spiritual totem, the exemplary figure just about 
everywhere of severe, ultra-orthodox, totalistic Islam—what Schwartz, 
whose rhetoric has survived his allegiances, calls "Islamofascism."

His book consists in a monomaniacal tracing out, laborious and 
repetitive (the word "wahhabi" or "wahabbism" appears in almost every 
paragraph), of the thousands of ways, ingenious, insidious, and 
implacably relentless, in which the machinations of the House of Saud in 
the service of this mad creed reaches out to poison the souls of 
Muslims, turn them against one another, against us, against everybody. 
Mobilizing their petro-dollars to found religious schools all over the 
world, set up popular-front-type propaganda foundations, finance 
lobbying efforts, bribe the powerful, infiltrate legitimate 
organizations, recruit supporters, eliminate enemies, and most 
especially to finance jihad, terrorism, and the destruction of Israel, 
the Saudis work tirelessly to turn Islam, in its essence a peaceful, 
mystical, unifying force "preaching love and healing," into a 
world-dividing, world-destroying "two-faced" one.

There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this, as there is in 
any comprehensive indictment of faction-ridden politics, and the Saudi 
factions, like the Ayatollahs, Hamas, Syria, and Mubarak are, surely, 
playing for keeps. But Schwartz's discussion (he has virtually nothing 
to say about the concrete details of intra-Islamic conflict and, except 
for the Koran, he does without source references) is a prime example of 
how to transform an arguable argument into an obsessional fantasy:

"With the collapse of the Soviet State, Wahhabism effectively replaced 
the Communist movement as the main sponsor of ideological aggression 
against the democratic West.... The ideological division of humanity 
into 'two worlds' has been promulgated on different bases: Wahhabism 
applied a religious distinction, Communism a class standard, and Nazism 
a racial criterion.... Wahhabism, like the other totalitarian 
ideologies... compelled members of the new middle classes in the Saudi 
kingdom and the Gulf states to eagerly kill and die, rather than to 
procreate and live.... The conduct of the Saudis was devious. They 
assured the West of profound affection, while fomenting worldwide 
adventurism and seeking to bring every Sunni Muslim on the face of the 
earth under their control.... The Wahhabi-Saudi regime...embodies a 
program for the ruthless conquest of power and a war of 
extermination.... [Its] face...is a great deal uglier than that of a 
general Islamism, or radical Arab nationalism,...or even of Soviet 
Communism, and its threat to the peace of the world is immensely greater."

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Paul Berman's book Terror and Liberalism, which is a rambling, 
one-thing-and-another discourse on what he takes to be the general 
direction of liberal political thought since the 1930s, differs from 
those of Pipes and Schwartz only in being somewhat better written and 
coming, ostensibly, from "the left"—another of those seemingly natural 
categories that appear to have lost, along with its mirroring twin, a 
certain amount of force and definition. Carrying forward political ideas 
developed on the non-Communist, "vital center" left in Europe and 
America just before and just after World War II—Camus, Orwell, Arendt, 
Koestler, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Leon Blum, André Glucksmann—Berman 
sees Islamism as a continuation of anti-rational ideologies arising all 
over the Continent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 
ideologies that led on to Italian, Spanish, and German fascism, as well 
as Russian Bolshevism. Drawing on Dostoevsky and Baudelaire, Luigi 
Galleani and Martin Heidegger, modern terrorism was born in the salons 
of Europe. The Muslim version is a mere derivative.

In extending this dark genealogy to the Near and Middle East, Berman 
relies mainly on a deep reading of Sayyid Qutb, whom he regards as a 
major, if malefic, thinker, a figure comparable, he says, to "the 
greatest of mod-ern authors." In Qutb, born seven years before Camus, 
"his fellow North African," can be found, transformed into a koranic 
idiom and turned toward the regeneration of a fallen world, all the 
great themes of European irrationalism: the hatred for capitalist 
culture, the integralist view of society, the purificatory function of 
death, the conception of a moral vanguard, the call to direct action, 
the dream of a purified world. The terror war is neither new nor 
unprecedented: "It is the same battle that tore apart Europe during most 
of the twentieth century—the battle between liberalism and its 
totalitarian enemies."

Perhaps. It would be comforting to think so. Better, surely, a devil you 
know. But the thought arises, as it does with Pipes and Schwartz, that 
what is going on here is less an attempt to "understand Islam" than an 
effort to describe it in such a way that an approach to dealing with it, 
moral, necessary, clear, and proven, emerges of itself—one which, now 
that we are the only Supergrand and the Force is really with us, should 
prove quicker, less costly, and altogether more effective than it was 
the first time around. Berman writes:

"The point [has] to be made clear to everyone around the world that, no, 
you cannot fight the United States; no, you will be clobbered; no, you 
won't survive; no, crowds of adoring people on the street will not chant 
your name—you will lose, and lose again, and lose still more."

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16419


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