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Paul Berman

The Flight of the Intellectuals Hardcover – April 27, 2010

by Paul Berman (Author)

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Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be “moderates.”

How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman—“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)—conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.

Berman’s investigation of the history and nature of the Islamist movement includes some surprising revelations. In examining Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he shows the rise of an immense and often violent worldview, elements of which survives today in the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman also unearths the shocking story of al-Banna’s associate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated personally with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab support of the Nazis’ North African campaign. Echoes of the Grand Mufti’s Nazified Islam can be heard among the followers of al-Banna even today.

In a gripping and stylish narrative Berman also shows the legacy of these political traditions, most importantly by focusing on a single philosopher, who happens to be Hassan al-Banna’s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan—a figure widely celebrated in the West as a “moderate” despite his troubling ties to the Islamist movement. Looking closely into what Ramadan has actually written and said, Berman contrasts the reality of Ramadan with his image in the press.

In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds light on a number of modern issues—on the massively reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our own time, on a newly fashionable turn against women’s rights, and on the difficulties we have in discussing terrorism—and presents a stunning commentary about the modern media’s peculiar inability to detect and analyze some of the most dangerous ideas in contemporary society.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Melville House
Publication date

April 27, 2010
Dimensions

4.76 x 1.1 x 7.78 inches
ISBN-10

1933633514
ISBN-13

978-1933633510
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An intellectual thriller in the form of a polemic, with Inspector Berman hunting for clues... Maybe Berman's book will start intellectuals talking, and not just about each other. Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, Slate

"Fascinating... This bracing and volatile book is an important one and devastating in its conclusions."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Paul Berman is, just like me and I think many others, surprised—and that’s an understatement—that some liberals choose to defend ideas that are very illiberal and choose to look away from practices that are even more illiberal. Why are they excusing radical Islam? That fascinates Berman and it also fascinates me, what the presence of Islam does to the liberal psyche in the West."
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maclean's

"It has been quite astonishing to see how far and how fast there has been a capitulation to the believable threat of violence.... I join with Paul Berman in expressing utter astonishment at this phenomenon, or rather at the way that it is not a phenomenon."
—Christopher Hitchens

“Berman… has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them.”
—Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review

“How do you distinguish a jihadist from a ‘moderate’ Muslim? Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals brilliantly dissects the moral confusion and cowardice that contrives to sway some brave men and women. Must reading for our times.”
—Harold Evans, Daily Beast

“Brilliant, uncompromising.”
—Michael Young, Slate

Praise for Paul Berman
“One of our most gifted essayists, a deeply pensive writer with a lyrical talent for imaginative synthesis.”
—The Boston Globe

“One of America’ s best exponents of recent intellectual history.”
—The Economist

About the Author

Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias, The New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism, and Power and the Idealists. He writes for The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Melville House; First Edition (April 27, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1933633514
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1933633510
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.76 x 1.1 x 7.78 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,344,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,908 in Terrorism (Books)
- #3,511 in Journalism Writing Reference (Books)
- #9,203 in Communication & Media Studies

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4.5 out of 5

43 global ratings

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Thomas A. Sobieck

Illuminating Polemic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 15, 2010

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Berman's book is exceptionally well researched and always enlightening. It is a book calling on liberals of all stripes to call a spade a spade. That Islamism is a fascist movement. That Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and others willing to question Islamism are to be celebrated as heroes. While those "liberals" that apologize for fascists are to be ridiculed for their inconsistency and fuzzy sense of morality. The book tends to meander through many discussions that, at first glance, seem cursory to his main thesis. However, in the end he manages to bring all his arguments together into a compelling final chapter. Below is an example of Berman eloquent outrage at the foolishness being peddled by many western intellectuals.

"And so, Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia--its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear--mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology--has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life. And yet, if someone like Pascal Bruckner intones a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin--"Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?"--and onward to the litany about fascism. In The New York Times Magazine Ian Buruma held back from hinting even obliquely at the genuinely fascist influences on Ramadan's grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death--Hassan al-Banna, who spoke highly of Adolf Hitler and helped the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem escape from getting tried at Nuremburg. Yet Pascal Bruckner, the liberal--here is somebody, Buruma would have us think, on the brink of fascism" (Location 3713)!

This book was a joy to read.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Werner Cohn

The Two Faces of Tariq Ramadan

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 24, 2010

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Tariq Ramadan, Arab but Swiss-born, Francophone but professor at Cambridge, has two faces. The first is that of the liberal, thoroughly European and Westernized liberal, charming and a good conversationist at cocktail parties at the Guardian and New York Review of Books. The other face is that of an insistently loyal grandson to Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and exponent of Hitler and the Mufti al-Husseini. It is the first face that has so much impressed the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, but it is with his second face that Ramadan has written an article so anti-Jewish that the leftist press in France could not print it, and it is also with his second face that Ramadan has endorsed suicide attacks against the Israeli public.

Berman, to his great credit, has waded his way through this morass of two faces, and he has his written his report with tremendous intellectual verve. It is a cautionary tale. Berman rightfully points to the deadly danger we face from the terrorist Islamists, but also, and perhaps even more deadly, from their sophisticated, leftist, voguish fellow-travelers. He gives due credit to some European writers who have preceded him in this -- Pascal Bruckner and Caroline Fourest in France and Ulrike Achermann in Germany -- but it is Berman's book that is immediately accessible to the American reader. Berman has been rewarded by an appreciative reception from thoughtful people. And he has also been rewarded, as were the pioneers of anti-Stalinism some sixty years ago, by sneers and hostility from fellow-travelers and their apologists.

13 people found this helpful

Helpful

Editor, SFHR

the best classroom book for disentangling Islam from Islamism-- concise and jargon free

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2014

Verified Purchase

Berman needs no introduction to those who follow current affairs, but I assign selections from this book in an upper division course on world religion. Berman's concise, even-tempered history of the Muslim Brotherhood disentangles Islamism from Islam. Berman, like myself, studied with Edward Said at Columbia (though i do not know Berman) and he grew up understanding Orientalism. The best cure for Islamophobia turns out to be this sober history, which shows how the comparatively small, and recent MB and "Wahabi" strains spun away from a world religion with 1.3 billion followers. No need, therefore, for Berman to hide Islamism's terrorist component. (Quotes from their writings are enough to establish it.) No need to go back to the Middle Ages to find Christian moral equivalents to Iran hanging gay couples from cranes in public squares right now. Berman is a public intellectual, not an academic, so undergraduates can read the prose without having Frank Lentriccia's dictionary of French theory at their sides. The last chapter uses Hirsi Ali's case to explore the strange phenomenon of contemporary progressives flying from Islamic feminism in general. If the book were cheaper I'd assign it, and when more of my class can afford Kindles, I will.

4 people found this helpful

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SDonatelle

Very Well Done

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2010

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Berman does a great job of research and writing in this book. Though he may not have intended to, he confirmed a belief I took on in graduate school-- while researching the Heidegger/Derrida controversy-- that many of the established American and European intellectuals that write reviews these days don't read carefully and throughly. Berman does both and writes about it clearly.

The book is not an easy read, he does go into a fair amount of detail and cover a fair number of writers. But it is well worth the moderate effort required to follow the details.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the state of relations between "Islam and the West" and the state of western intellectuals-- who really have become a pretty spineless bunch.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Andrew Andrew

A Nasty Little Thriller

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2013

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300 pages of Paul Berman wailing about the minutiae of Tariq Ramadan's inconsistencies and offering no world-saving solutions of any depth sounds like a recipe for a yawner, but it's a riveting read and worth the time if for no other reason than rattling some skeleton's in the Brotherhood's closet.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Golfer

The Flight of the Intellectuals

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 12, 2010

Verified Purchase

Content great but a bit tedious at times. A very timely and under discussed and reported commentary on a very important national issue.

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Gareth Jones

Bracing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 22, 2015

Verified Purchase

My first encounter with Berman's writing - belatedly. An excellent summary of the problem at hand. Unlike many, more cartoonist versions on this subject, Berman not only shows an engagement to the first principles of liberalism - plurality, freedom of expression, individual rights - but also a commendable engagement with intellectual currents in the Muslim world, both liberal and Islamist. Recommended.

8 people found this helpful

BLACKPOOL ROCK

Accurate. Academic. Analytical.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 17, 2017

Verified Purchase

Very detailed and well researched. Could not find fault with it. Everything is backed up by first class source material. Thorough. Could not argue with it. What is fact: is fact. What is true: is true.

Amazon Customer

Why does the Left defend Nazi-inspired Islamists?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 3, 2013

Verified Purchase

Why does the Left defend Nazi-inspired Islamists? What are the links between Nazism and Islamism? These questions are answered thoroughly and forensically in this sometimes slow, but important book

11 people found this helpful

Helen

Great book. Far more interesting and informative than I ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great book. Far more interesting and informative than I had realised it would be. Thoroughly recommend for anyone interested in history.

D. D. Paxton

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

Masterful. Dissects all those the deserve it.

6 people found this helpful

See all reviews

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