Muslims, Islamists and “The West”

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Notes

1. Muslims will refer to all people born in, or converted to, Islam. Islamists has a more restrictive meaning, referring to those Muslims who endorse any version of Islamism, i.e. political Islam.

2. I will continue using “The West” as a totalising, somewhat caricatural, negative model of “The Other” because this is the way the various Muslims, Islamists, and even our three writers choose to characterise that/those whom Muslims and Islamists oppose.

3. They would thus display symptoms not dissimilar to converts who are reputed for their zealousness. And they would be similarly attracted to the most “unWestern” forms which would appear to them “more authentic”.

4. You can explore the views of these writers’ online at http://www.islamonline.net/english/index.shtml

5. The “sole Qur'anic generation” refers to the Muslim leaders of the Prophet's generation: Muhammad himself of course, and the four rightly guided caliphs, former companions who succeeded him.

6. Jihad can be understood in a number of ways from the search for spiritual enlightenment to “a battle in the fullest sense to establish the reign of God on earth” (55).

7. Moderate is a relative term. Here it means the following program: (1) call for Islam, (2) proclaim the Qur'an and (3) demand the application of the Sharia.

8. There are a few clear pages on how Arab anti-Semitism took on the worst of Western anti-Semitism: from the Protocols’ conspiracy theory, physical caricatures (which could be applied to Arab themselves) and eventually racial/ethnic criteria as well as religious one.

9. It was outlawed in 1981.

10. Ibn Taimiyya has since become very popular with radical Islamists.

11. A point that may strike the reader is that their mufti (religious leader) is none other than Umar Abd al Rahman, the blind sheikh imprisoned in the USA following the 1993 bomb attacks.

12. Though he admits Islamism could possibly lead to religious revival as a cultural defense mechanism among Muslim populations in the North.

13. Burgat does not add that Christian arrogance in Muslim eyes is reached as soon as Christians are seen to overcome the traditional limitations of the millet system which tolerate Christian and Jewish minorities as long as they remain subservient.

14. Burgat is an expert of North African Islamist movements. The much more solid Algerian chapter shows his greater familiarity with the Algerian case.

15. Burgat unlike Cesari does not seem to have confronted its informants with the special limitations imposed on dhimmis.

16. I could not help wondering how Burgat would deal with Islamism in a Muslim, non-Arab context.

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Rachel A. D. Bloul

Rachel Bloul is a lecturer in social sciences at The Australian National University. She lectures on race relations, genocide studies, gender and utopias. Her research interests includes Islam and Muslims in the West, globalization and communitarism, transnational Islam, global utopianisms