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Paul Berman’s Archaeology
of Islamic Fundamentalism
Reviewed
By Paul Devlin
Terror and Liberalism
by
Paul Berman
Hardcover:
$21.00
I cannot imagine a more important,
engaging, or lucid book for understanding the current world situation. But this
is not a book about current events. It is almost like a previously unseen
history of the twentieth century. Berman is a liberal journalist with
outstanding credentials. He often writes for major newspapers and magazines
such as The New York Times and The Nation. Here he has presented an
analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and earlier fascist movements which may
substantially adjust points of view towards both.
Berman
names totalitarian ideologies of both right and left which emerged after World
War I “pathological
mass movements”. What is significant about this book is that Berman carefully
demonstrates that both major Islamic movements of the right (fundamentalism)
and left (Baathi socialism) are also “pathological
mass movements” whose foundations are directly traceable to the first World War
(and not because of Western colonialism, but because of the idea of the
separation of church and state, which took hold in Turkey after the war). All
pathological mass movements, Berman tells us, smile upon and encourage suicide
and murder. And their roots are the 19th century European thought
–Muslim fundamentalism is as well. To label pathological Islamic movements as
“fascist” is not just to make a parallel, Berman shows, but to describe their traceable
theoretical roots. Islamic fundamentalism and Baathi
socialism are firmly in this tradition and their early theoreticians were
deeply read in German Romantic anti-Semites, like Fitche
for instance. Berman describes several concrete links from the reading lists of
the Western-educated theoreticians of Islamism and Baathi
socialism. (Interestingly, this stream also worked in reverse, with Berman
noting the case of Johann von Leers, Goebbels’s
right-hand man, who converted to Islam and worked for
Algerian
leader Ali Benhadj,
‘If faith, a belief, is not watered and irrigated by
blood, it does not grow. ...Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide
operations and martyrdom for Allah. Faith is propagated by counting up deaths
every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses. ’ . . . . Surely this,
you will say, cannot be Western – surely this kind of talk, at last, is exotic!
But this is how the leaders of
Islamic
Fundamentalists and Baathists, Berman teaches us,
want to re-create an imagined “golden age” (a completely Romantic project).
They were each aiming for utopia. (Berman is also the author
of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968.) But utopia, of course, is not
what it seems. Murderous rage often lurks behind dreamings
of utopias. He tells us how twentieth century pathological mass movements
reject all the positive aspects of the enlightenment – reason, the idea
universal rights, and so on. But Berman, who has an astute literary mind, could
have made this point that I kept thinking of: two famous literary utopias,
Voltaire’s
Berman
emphasizes the deep irrationality of pathological mass movements, and presents
us, late in the book, with a devastating critique of Noam
Chomsky, who, according to Berman, never stops trying to explain irrational
people rationally. “Last of the 19th century rationalists” is the
moniker Berman applies to him. Pathological mass movements all wanted to turn
back the French Revolution (and the American one too, by extension, which was,
in a way, another step in the English revolution against monarchy, which really
means: they wanted to destroy Anglo-American liberalism). Islamism did most
especially, because it is absolutely incompatible with the separation of church
and state. (Of course, disturbingly, the current President of the
This book
has (as Wallace Stevens said somewhere about something else) “an understanding
beyond journalism”. But it does not incorporate any current fetishes of the
academy; there is no jargon and it is highly readable. The argument is clear
and the writing is pristine. I was also pleased to find that Berman is
remarkably tuned to a literary frequency without getting too dreamy about the
influence of literature or its analysis on world events. First he gives us a
careful and absorbing reading of Camus’ The Rebel. There’s a brief discussion
of, of all things, Victor Hugo’s prosody (in relation to “rebellion”). He
criticizes Salman Rushdie and Jose Saramajo. And so on.
The villain
of Terror and Liberalism, Berman’s
man who is the metaphor for and prime mover of pathological mass movements, is
Charles Baudelaire. The book’s hero is Walt Whitman, whom Berman calls “the
anti-Baudelaire”. For Berman, Baudelaire = death, tyranny. Whitman = life,
democracy. Maybe Berman could have put a note here referring the reader to the
first chapter of Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes
Toward History, which describes the frames of
acceptance and rejection. (Whitman, who Burke discusses
would be “acceptance”; Baudelaire, “rejection” – and thus totalitarianism.)
The 19th century literary roots of
20th century political catastrophe are much more thoroughly and
interestingly treated in George Steiner’s In
Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition
of Culture (Yale UP, 1971), but Berman does a great job for his purposes.
His purpose is not to update In
Bluebeard’s Castle, but to riff on it (although this is my own comparison,
Berman does not mention Steiner).
But now
for how all this happened. Once upon a time, according to Islamism’s major
theoretician, Sayyid Qutb,
everything in the world was just great. People were not alienated and life was
perfect. When was this? During the first Caliphate of the 7th
century. Why were things so great? There was no separation of church and
state. The will of Allah was supreme upon the earth. The Islamic world was a
Garden of Eden which had not tasted the fruit of secularism.
The
centerpiece of this book is Berman’s discussion of Sayyid
Qutb’s thirty-volume (yes, three-zero) “exegetical
extravaganza”, In The
Shade of the Koran, which appeared in the 1960s. Qutb
is the intellectual father of Al-Qaeda. Berman draws
all the connecting lines. Surprisingly, and Berman shows this, In the Shade of the Koran is not simply
a thirty-volume pamphlet for hatred but at times a very sophisticated work.
Berman calls In the Shade of the Koran:
a vast and elegantly constructed
architecture of thought and imagination, a work of true profundity, vividly
written, wise, broad, indignant, sometimes demented, bristly with hatred,
medieval, modern, tolerant, intolerant, cruel, urgent, cranky, tranquil, grave,
poetic, learned, analytic, moving in some passages, a work large enough to
create its own shade
(Berman
notes that he has only been able to locate volumes 1, 4, and 30 of this
massively influential work in English translation.) Qutb’s
major theory, according to Berman, is “Islam as totality”. (Incidentally, his emphasis on truth and
totality, Berman notes, Qutb is not so very different
from two of his Western contemporaries, Sidney Hook and Georg
Lukacs.)
As for Terror and Liberalism’s drawbacks, which
do not abound but are still there, Berman’s somewhat blind support of
Berman
does not note the following, but to close, I would like to point it out. In his
journal of his travels through India, private diaries kept while doing research
in India during the 1950s (published as Baksheesh and Brahman by HarperCollins
in 1995), Joseph Campbell makes the suggestion that the West’s “dialogue with
Islam” was, eventually, and through twists and turns, responsible for democracy
– due to Islam’s radical egalitarianism (one of traditional Islam’s best
features, in my opinion). Ironically, after the West developed democracy
through its ancient “dialogue”, the politically immature “critique” of democracy which
followed likewise polluted Islamic thought. Careful demonstration of this
development this is Berman’s great achievement.