In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (Paperback)

by Daniel Pipes (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
One of the better introductions to the contemporary Muslim world - mainly because of its informative historical sections. Skillfully moving the reader through material often tainted by second-hand information and prejudice, Pipes, a State Dept. official and scholar, carefully lays out the connections between Islam and Judaism, and the ways both differ from Christianity. The key elements are the body of written law and the accompanying (originally oral) body of interpretation: in Judaism, the Pentateuch and the Talmud; in Islam, the Qur'an and the Hadith Reports. The Shari'a, Islam's sacred law, touches all aspects of public and private life - from diet to taxes, usury to criminal punishment - as does the Jewish Halakha. Christianity, contrastingly, shifted the focus of religion from law to faith, making possible a separation of religion and politics - especially impossible for Islam. Islam, Pipes emphasizes, took hold in a tribal society where identities were incompletely formed (whereas the Hebrews had a common language and customs before Moses gave them their law); so Islamic law has been the main factor holding the disparate Islamic people together. From these laws, a second element of cohesion has developed: what Pipes calls "Islamicate" civilization, or the relatively uniform cultural practices that distinguish Muslim communities. (The seclusion of women, for example, is an Islamicate practice, not an Islamic one.) The relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, Pipes notes, are determined by a combination of these religious and cultural factors. Among the latter is hostility toward Europeans - the result, in part, of European hostility toward Muslims. First came the Crusaders, religious rivals roughly equal in belief, technology, and civilization; next came the secularizer Napoleon, with advanced military techniques and new principles of social organization. Europeans represent modernization and secularization, and Pipes' main argument is that Islam is particularly incapable of meeting the challenge of either. Here, he begins to slide into predictability. Shari'a is a commendable but impossible code to live by, he says. Surveylng the Muslim and part-Muslim nations, he describes the Islamic revival of recent years as a reaction against modernization by the faithful, buttressed by Islamicate predispositions and supported by the Arab oil resources. But the revival is doomed to failure, in his view, because Arab economic power is waning and Islamic fundamentalism cannot challenge the modern world. By this reading - more trenchantly put forth in V. S. Naipaul's Among the Believers - the shift from fundamentalists to secularists and back will more likely continue than lead to an unprecedented accommodation. A good descriptive account with a weak conclusion. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
The attention of Americans suddenly focused on Islam and Muslims in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and to many in the United States this felt unprecedented. But Islam and Muslims had dominated American public life once before, during the period of the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, from 1979 to 1981. On both of these occasions, Americans found themselves targeted for reasons stemming from a militant interpretation of Islam. It was in response to that first heightened interest in Islam that Daniel Pipes wrote In the Path of God. His intention was to present an overview of the connection between in Islam and political power through history in a way that would explain the origins of the current crisis. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465034535
• ISBN-13: 978-0465034536
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,020,832 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Islam's political repercussions, September 5, 2002

By	Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Few writers, Thomas W. Lippman wrote in the Washington Post, have explained so lucidly the complex developments of Muslim history.

It is difficult to address the questions of Islam, the Arabs and their relations with Israel and remain nonpartisan. But Business Week's Ronald Taggiasco called Pipes' scholarly explanation of events and faith in that little-known, volatile, and important part of the world well worth reading.

Pipes' reasoned, literate explanation of what generated the Islamic resurgence goes a long way to explaining recent events. Written in 1983, this book provided the first comprehensive political study of Islam's extraordinary role in modern world. We are fortunate indeed that Transaction has rescued the political and global implications of the Islamic revival, revealed here, from the out-of-print category, complete with a new preface for 2002.

The book is divided into three sections. The first covers the premodern legacy of Islam's sacred laws and its failure to implement the public ideal represented by those laws--as existed in the single state for Muslims (Dar al-Islam) from 622 to 753 A.D. According to Pipes, for most of Muslim history, traditional Muslims were willing to accept the gap between the ideal and the actual, to live with a less-than-complete implementation of Shari'a, although the Muslim approach to politics derived from the "invariant premises of the religion" established more than 1,500 years ago.

The second section covers Islam's encounters with the West, beginning with the matched powers of Crusaders against the Ayyubids, and proceeding quickly to Napoleon's 1789 invasion of Egypt. (This prompted the Ottoman Sultan Selim III to declare Jihad against the French and join the infidel British and Russian empires to keep his own in tact).

Muslims had ruled millions of Christians in Europe for 450 years before being displaced by Turkey. Then the western cultural onslaught began in the first half of the 18th century, and ran from Umma's eastern end (China and Indonesia) to its west (Crimea). By the end of 1919, only Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Arabia and Yemen retained political independence, the first three by balancing the claims of Britain against those of Russia and the latter two simply by being remote and completely barren. Meanwhile, the Muslim Empire had also lost battles of scientific, technical, mechanical, geographic and historical knowledge. Even daily Western life differed markedly from that of the Islamic east. Thus fundamentalists began lobbying for strict Shari'a everywhere in the Umma.

In contrast, reformist Muslims argue that traditional Shari'a is hopelessly illiberal and conflicts with the true Qur'anic values. They reject Shari'a traditions emanating from Hadith, consensus of the 'ulama and reasoning by analogy as inauthentic and outdated, respectively. Similarly, they approve of parliamentary systems of government, but view hold their record in Islamic society in contempt. On some fronts, liberal views conflict with themselves. While they admire pan-Islamic solidarity they are not committed to it; and they recognize national interests but disapprove of Muslim states fighting one another. And as for non-Muslims, according to Pipes, reformists are caught by ambiguity, between their desire for equal status for all and the wish for Dhimmi laws that traditional Islamic states use to bestow a special place on Muslims, while relegating all non-Muslims to inferior, even slavish conditions. The fact that Westernization did not markedly improve the Muslim world in the 1970s led to increasing fundamentalism.

Pipes devotes the third section to Islam in current affairs, detailing the effects of the fundamentalist surge on 22 Muslim-dominated nations from Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Central Asia and Asia to Algeria, Morocco and Egypt in Africa and Syria, Iran and Iraq, in the Middle East. In at least 8 other nations, from Malaysia to Nigeria, Muslims vie with non-Muslims for power. In one of these--the Sudan--the conflict has grown bloody since this book was written, forcing millions into subjugation and slavery. Pipes also reviews 20 areas, including the former Soviet Union, where Muslims account for less than a quarter of the population but are asserting themselves. Pipes includes an extensive 50-plus page look at the means that the oil boom provided to promote Islam. Oil is behind the political importance of Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian Revolution, for example.

But Pipes also concludes that an Islamic revival dependant on oil constitutes a mirage, for the cash that oil provides cannot last forever. This, Pipes predicts, will leave the Islamic world with a choice that has become increasingly urgent--to adapt and come to terms with global Westernization, or to accept apologetics, introversion and poverty.

This broad treatment remains as helpful in understanding current events as when it was written nearly 20 years ago. Alyssa A. Lappen

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful book, better then the newer one, July 15, 2003

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (Paperback)

Mr. Pipes, eminent scholear and great inflamicist of Islam most recently completed his book 'militant Islam reaches America' but this book is by far more scholaraly and gives a more complete picture of the Islamic world. This read has several shortcomings. Mr. Pipes attempts to survey many Islamic countries where Islam is the vast majority or the near majority. In these short paragraph length studies he does not touch on one subject that needs to be touched on, namely the fate of minorites in Muslim societies. He does not explain the ethnic cleansing carried out in many Muslim countries that helped create a homogeneity within nations like Turkey. Nevertheless he provides a wonderful appendix that includes a list of Muslim populations of countries throughout the world. What one will realize when reading this list is that the number of minority populations in a Muslim country is directly proportional to the time the country has been Muslim. I recommend this book wholeheartedly in light of our need to understand and critique the Islamic world. A good companion to 'The Rage and the Pride'.

5.0 out of 5 stars oil is correlated with the recent growth of islam, October 16, 2006

By	jeremiah aram (new york) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (Paperback)

a tour de force. this title is one of Pipes' early works when he was preaching about the "comimg storm" but no one in DC would listen.