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Enemy in the Mirror

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It has always been more than a little embarrassing that scholars of political thought who purport to address "universal" and "timeless" questions of political life have displayed such provincial disregard for political texts, thinkers, and traditions that are located beyond the shores of Western Europe and North America. It is no less embarrassing that so many contemporary representatives of this "tradition" of political thought have either ignored powerful religio-political movements in the "West" and "non-West," or have sought to interpret those movements from within the tired and familiar analytic frameworks that have dominated Anglo-American political science for at least the past half-century. In this impressive and remarkably ambitious book, Roxanne Euben makes considerable headway in correcting both of these parochial tendencies, while also casting considerable light on the nature and significance of Islamic fundamentalist challenges to the commitments of Western rationalism.

As its subtitle indicates, this book explores and analyzes Islamic fundamentalist critics of modern rationalism. What distinguishes Euben's analysis from the torrent of recent work on this topic is the extraordinary breadth of knowledge and sophistication of understanding that she brings to her topic (Euben reads Arabic and has fully absorbed the relevant literatures in social and political theory, comparative politics, and Middle Eastern Studies). This virtually unparalleled scope and depth of knowledge enables her to detect important limitations in prevailing social scientific explanations of fundamentalism and to develop a variety of unique perspectives of her own. Euben, for example, persuasively argues that most social scientific studies employ models of instrumental rationality that exclude from analysis the substantive ideas that animate fundamentalist thought and action. As a result, they tend to view fundamentalist movements as an irrational, "convulsive reflex" prompted by one or another condition (or combination of conditions) of modernity itself: urbanization, commercialization, industrialism, etc. Rather than starting with a set of methodological directives that dictate a conception of the Islamic fundamentalist as an "irrational rational actor," Euben develops what she terms a "dialogic model of interpretation." This model, she argues, "places fundamentalist ideas at the center of understanding yet insists that there is a perspective sufficiently distant from that of the participants to, first, recognize material conditions that constrain and enframe their actions, and , second, critique and evaluate their experience of the world" (p. 25).

Using this model to excellent effect, Euben explores the work of key nineteenth and twentieth century Islamist thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afgani, Muhammad `Abduh, and, particularly, Sayyid Qutb. Writing against stereotyped, "orientalist" images of Islamist thought as consisting of fanatical, incoherent responses to conditions of modernity, Euben carefully charts the ways in which writers like Qutb develop views of Enlightenment rationalism that, far from being unintelligible or pathological, reveal strong resonances with leading "Western" critics of modernity such as Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Bell, and Richard John Neuhaus. This, of course, is not to say that Islamic critics of modernity and rationalism articulate views that are identical to those of Western students of politics--if this were truly the case, it would be difficult to imagine what might be gained (apart from shoring up the conviction that non-Western writers have nothing original to say) by engaging them. Rather, Euben argues, writers like Qutb and `Abduh are distinctive participants in a common conversation about "the leaching of meaning from modern life" (p. 155). By simultaneously reconstructing and revealing a conversation about modern rationalism that includes conservatives and participatory democrats, communitarians and critical theorists, postmodernists and (Christian and Islamic) fundamentalists, Euben not only undercuts the thesis that differences between Western and Islamic thought are so dramatic that any real conversation is impossible, but also dissolves the easy opposition (invoked by everyone from Samuel Huntington to prominent neoconservatives in the Bush administration) between Western and non-Western political thought. In short, she does a tremendous service to contemporary debates about Islamist challenges to modern rationalism by showing precisely what is familiar and distinctive about them.

While many readers might be primarily interested in Euben's careful and sophisticated explication of leading Islamist thinkers, her book also constitutes an important contribution to what might broadly be called "methodological" debates about the nature of political theory. Drawing on the growing literature in what is termed "comparative political theory," Euben argues that political theory should again become what it once was, specifically, a truly comparative enterprise. More than any other recent study, this book exhibits the clear advantages of an approach to questions of political thought that engages the full range of political practice and experience. It should therefore be "Exhibit A" in future discussions of the value of comparative political theory.

As noted previously, the events of the past several years have produced an overwhelming number of books that purport to engage either Islamist thought or non-Western perspectives more generally. To be frank, much of this work, written by both distinguished public intellectuals and younger scholars, is embarrassingly bad. Composed quickly and without adequate knowledge of the traditions and experiences (or, importantly, facility in the languages though which those traditions and experiences are transmitted) the authors set out to assess, they are at best unhelpful and at worst dangerously distortive. Euben's book, on the other hand, manifests none of these deficiencies. It is an intellectual tour-de-force, the product of a first-rate mind that has devoted itself to the difficult task of understanding the diverse currents of thought that it engages. If one is interested in a reading a highly sophisticated discussion of Islamic fundamentalist thought, one that stimulates rather than deadens reflection on a host of extraordinarily important issues, there is no better place to start than this book.

Drawing on postmodernism, critical theory, comparative politics, Islamic thought, and anthropology, Euben situates Islamic fundamentalist thought within a transcultural theoretical context.

Her main objective is to explain how the rationalist discourse explains the appeal of fundamentalist ideas by reference to their function as conduits for processes and tensions in the material and structural realm thus deriving meaning from function.

Because of this tendency to derive meaning from function, our understanding of Islamic fundamentalism has taken certain shapes. In other words, there are epistemological issues at stake. How do we know what we know? The rationalist paradigm sets the epistemological framework, within which Islamic fundamentalism is explained as something people turn to because it can fulfill material needs.

According to Euben, Islamic fundamentalism should be analyzed not only for its function, but also for the value of its ideas. Her treatment of Sayyed Qutb is excellent and a must-read for any expert on political Islam. Euben suggests that Qutb's preoccupations with questions about the moral foundations of political communities challenges narrower, ethnocentric definitions of political theory, and a reading of political theory as a distinctively secular enterprise.

Euben lays out her opposition to the imposition of a Western rationalist analytical paradigm to explain and categorize Islamic Fundamentalism. She critiques the assumptions and worldview of Western rationalism and the types of analyses it therefore undertakes and attributions to essentialism, socioeconomic causes, etc. because it takes IF as epiphenomenal. She says we should instead discover IF's own categories through dialogic analysis, which takes Habermas' framework of intersubjective meaning creation (Gadamer) and distance from the subject through critical deconstruction of language and power (á la Foucault).

Her critiques of rational actor and rational analysis is that it presupposes a one-to-one correspondence with an objective, outside reality/truth as opposed to seeing how it is constructed through language. For anyone seeking to understand postmodernism, Islamic thought and the application of a postmodernist analysis to a real-world, contemporary issue this is a must read. If you want more postmodernism and Islam check out Cultural Revolutions: Reason Versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, And Jihad

For any reader seriously interested in a sophisticated, nuanced, and intensely informative analysis of a political and religious movement and culture that now dominates the world stage, Prof. Roxanne Euben's "Enemy In The Mirror" is a bracing, eye-opening work of depth and power. Euben examines Islamic Fundamentalism on its own terms, and with its own series of definitions and directions, rather than opts for the distinctly "Western" reading that so reflexively and arrogantly permeates so much discussion of this subject. It's the difference between the author who is content to point a finger at her subject and say "they're different!" and an author of Euben's intelligence and caliber, who finds it infinitely more compelling to ask, "WHY are they different?" and then goes about trying to answer the question and , perhaps more importantly, understand the answer. Enriching and essential reading.