Islam after Liberalism Paperback – Illustrated, December 1, 2017

Islamic apologia and post modernism make bizarre bedfellows, as demonstrated by this collection of essays published by diasporic authors trained in Western Academia. This unholy alliance, otherwise a branch of post colonial theory, which is deeply suspicious of Western liberalism as well as established scholarship, aims at amplifying the past accomplishments of the Islamic world and undermining the triumphalist European narrative of progress and growth. At least we all agree that Liberal Islam is a mirage, an unachievable template of Western liberalism, and its premises are irrelevant for such societies.What is the alternative? Political Islam?Political Islam, in its present state forms as in Iran or Saudi Arabia, remains deeply flawed, as it spawns authoritarian repressive governments, unaccountable politicians hiding behind the fig leaf of the Sharia and hangers on who profit from their links with this “ hierocracy”/ rule by clerics (as opposed to theocracy). The other pole of political Islam are the militant terrorist Islamist groups who oppose all governments, they preach the virtues of a utopia forged by a harsh regime of brutal punishments, denigration of secular learning and the reimposition of slavery, polygamy, seclusion of women and humiliation of minorities. Both support the police state approach for the “moral” regeneration/ regimentation of society. Both compete for the correct interpretation and application of the “Sharia” ; an archaic fixed legal system that seems to supersede the Koranic text.The straight jacket of the Sharia is one of the main obstacles for the transformation of Muslim societies. Massive reform is long overdue, witness the current pathetic state of the Muslim world swept by internecine bloody conflicts that afflict millions in Syria, the Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya etc., and the desperate empoverishment of millions who are voting with their feet to face the dangerous sea crossings for the alternative Utopia. Surely there is plenty there to spur the Muslim intellectuals to come down from their ivory towers and examine objectively the reasons for this woeful state. Instead they prefer to indulge in the constant denigration of Western Liberalism and exchange pedantic arguments about the latest critical sociological or cultural theory. I wish they would follow the original example of the great Syrian intellectual Aziz Al-Azmeh, who has retained his critical acumen by condemning “ culturalism “ both in its Western romantic garb and its Islamist revivalist mirror image.