Customer Reviews

Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire

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Historian and theologian, Hamid Dabashi is forthright, organized and thorough. The introduction is a bit repetetive but, as a life-long teacher, I understand his continually bringing us back to the outline. His is the story of an ancient people whose theology/religiosity and life style are so integrated as to be inseparable. The breadth of his world view makes this book a must read. In no uncertain terms, he defines the battle between unholy global domination and all of its victims. Here is a writer who knows we can learn to co-exist as indterdependent communities promoting a sustainable planet if we can resist and overcome the power-over paradigm in which we live.

James Cone's Theology of Black Liberation, Gustavo Gutierrz and Juan Segundo's Liberation Theologies for Latin America began the conversation. Hamid Dabashi continues the dialogue by explaining the struggle of Muslims, by identifying their primary enemy, and by joining their struggle with those of the aforementioned and others to maintain the unique characteristics of their communities in a modern and cosmopolitan world as co-creators of a future with an equal, respectful, playing field.

It is impossible to do this book justice in a short review. For me, the book is an invitation to join the human race, not as dominator nor as submissive nor as a passive but interested spectator. The world needs reflective, passionate participants who believes in what is possible, who can compromise with integrity and who can tell the difference between truth and propaganda. Thank you, Mr. Dabashi.

I was impressed by the depth of knowledge that Dabashi uses to make his argument. Not as clear as I would have liked and it drags on a bit, but a good read.

The title of this volume by Dabashi, the contentious Columbia University professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature, calls to mind an argument made during the 1980s by traditional Catholics opposed to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Since all the monotheistic religions are founded on principles of liberation, why should a new "liberation theology," as imagined by the Sandinistas and other Marxists, be grafted onto any of them? Did not the defiance of pharaoh by Moses and the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus--undertaken by personalities who are both honored in Islam--along with Muhammad's battles against corrupt rulers, constitute an original and sufficient theology of liberation?

The motives for the novelty of liberation theology among Third-World Christians and in Dabashi's version of the Islamic intellect are the same. For protagonists of this outlook, traditional religion has proved wanting in addressing recent political questions, especially those posed by colonialism. Thus Catholic clerics in South America believed themselves impelled to armed action in guerrilla formations; thus Dabashi prescribes a reordering of Islam that would more clearly identify the faith of Muhammad with leftism. The parallel is boasted by the author, who, defying historical continuity, does his best to make the two variants, Christian and Muslim, inseparable.

Still, Dabashi seeks Islamic religious legitimacy for his conception. He therefore associates it with the 150-year old Salafi movement for modernization of the Muslim world. He writes that "the rise of Islamic liberation theologies dates back to the early nineteenth century" and the aftermath of "British, French and Russian colonial adventures." But with his specialization in Iran, he devotes a good part of this work to the ideology of the Islamic Revolution although offering little more than a rehash of Iranian religio-political literature. Overall, this volume is so clogged with fashionable but digressive references to everything popular in the contemporary academy, from the Frankfurt School to diatribes against George W. Bush, that it will be of little consequence to serious observers of the Middle East.

As with the Christian liberation theologians, Dabashi presents religion as a cover for a political extremism that courts being an apologia for terrorism. He begins the book with an equation of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, with what he calls "terrorizing U.S. military campaigns" and, in the footnotes, rants against "dilettantes" who link the views of the Egyptian radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb with "the actions attributed to Osama bin Laden." Such rhetoric, and little more, fills Dabashi's pages and, apparently, his mind. Such, it seems, is Dabashi's distinctive da'wa (proselytism).