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Radical Islam in the Western Academy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2021
Abstract
Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as ‘radical’ is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.
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93 Arnakim argues the ummah underwrites a just and peaceful world order but is ignored by Western IR theorists. Lili Yulyadi Arnakim, ‘Islamic norms and values in International Relations and their reinterpretation in AKP-governed Turkey’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello (eds), Islam and International Relations (ebook edn).
94 Sheikh, Islam and International Relations, p. 109. For Sunni legal orthodoxy as representing an Islam compatible with Rawlsian liberalism, see March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship.
95 Amr Sabet, Islam and the Political: Theory, Governance and International Relations (London, UK: Pluto Press 2008); Raffaele Mauriello and Seyed Mohammad Marandi, ‘Oppressors and oppressed reconsidered’, in Abelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello (eds), Islam and International Relations, (ebook edn).
96 The concept of strategic essentialism as a means of mobilising minority identities has its origins in the work of Gayatri Spivak.
97 Pasha, Islam and International Relations, pp. 22, 26.
98 Ibid., pp. 26–7.
99 Ibid., p. 63.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid., p. 47.
102 Ibid., pp. 47–8.
103 Ibid., pp. 69, 72.
104 Ibid., p. xvii.
105 Ibid., p. xx.
106 Ibid., p. 36.
107 Ibid., p. 97.
108 Ibid.
109 See: {http://fiqhcouncil.org/about-fcna/}.
110 Deina Andelkader, ‘Democracy and secularism: The binary divide between faith and reason’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello, Islam and International Relations (ebook edn).
111 Ahmed Al-Dawoody, ‘From tripartite division to universal humanism: Alternative Islamic global International Relations’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello, Islam and International Relations (ebook edn).
112 Al-Dawoody, ‘From tripartite division to universal humanism’ (ebook edn).
113 Mauriello and Marandi argue Iran's revolutionary ideology did not simply adopt Marxist principles; Shi'i Islam's scriptures resonate with Marxism. Either way, Islam is held up as a mirror to Marxism. Mauriello and Marandi, ‘Oppressors and oppressed reconsidered’.
114 Carimo Mohomed, ‘The parting of the ways’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Maurielo (eds), Islam and International Relations (ebook edn).
115 Deina Abdelkader, ‘Part II: Diplomacy, justice and negotiation in Islamic thought’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello (eds), Islam and International Relations (ebook edn). Citing Mendelsohn's use of the term, Sheikh states, ‘That is not to say that one cannot or should not criticise radical Islam. Rather criticising radical Islam on the grounds of exclusivity is somewhat akin to holding double standards…’. Sheikh, Islam and International Relations, p. 185. Mendelsohn, Barak, ‘God vs. Westphalia: Radical Islamist movements and the battle for organising the world’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), p. 596CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
116 Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship; Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (eds), Islam After Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).
117 For a former Hizb ut Tahrir member turned ‘radical’ democrat, see Maajid Nawaz, Radical (London, UK: Random House, 2012). See also the UK government supported CVE programme, ‘Radical Middle Way’, which deploys the Islamic concept of al wasatiyya I discuss below: {http://impacteurope.eu/partners/radical-middle-way/}. Rhetorical redescription is associated with Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
118 For the secular activism of radical Muslim actors, see Nikki Keddie, ‘The origins of the religious-radical alliance in Iran’, Past & Present, 34:July (1966), pp. 70–80. For ‘radical Islam’ as secular democracy in Turkey, see Saab, Hassan, ‘The spirit of reform in Islam’, Islamic Studies, 2:1 (1963), p. 33Google Scholar.
119 Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928).
120 Owen cites the ‘irreducible difference between liberalism and radical Islam’ and, calling ‘radical Islam’ a ‘movement’, names Qutb one of its ‘intellectual leaders’. Owen, Judd, ‘The task of liberal theory after September 11’, Perspectives on Politics, 2:2 (2004), p. 325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
121 Jenco, Leigh, ‘“What does heaven ever say?”: A methods-centred approach to cross-cultural engagement’, American Political Science Review, 101:4 (2007), pp. 741–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
122 For al wasatiyya as a liberal counter to radical Islam, see Zaheer Kazmi, ‘Islamic democracy by numbers’, in Devji and Kazmi (eds), Islam After Liberalism, pp. 149–67. For a sympathetic account of al wasatiyya in the Co-IRIS literature, see Rodolfo Ragioneri, ‘Constructing an Islamic theory of IR: The case of Yusuf Al Qaradawi, Umma, jihad and the world’, in Abdelkader, Adiong, and Mauriello (eds), Islam and International Relations (ebook edn).
123 For example, March states, ‘It is unmistakeable that Qutb is part of a modern genealogy of radical Islamic thought …’. March, Andrew, ‘Taking people as they are: Islam as a “realistic Utopia” in the political theory of Sayyid Qutb’, American Political Science Review, 104:1 (2010), p. 205CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London, UK: I. B. Tauris. 2009); Choueiri, Youssef M., ‘Theological paradigms of Islamic movements’, Political Studies, 41:1 (1993), pp. 108–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
124 Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad (London, UK: Hurst 2005). For post-Islamism, see Bayat, Asef, ‘The coming of a post-Islamist society’, Critique, 5:9 (1996), pp. 43–52Google Scholar; Roy, Globalised Islam.
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