Malise Ruthven, in a review of recent books by Paul Berman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, questions some of the governing assumptions about the nature of Islam that both authors replicate in their work: equating Islamist movements with fascism (Berman) and seeing Islam as inherently patriarchal (Hirsi Ali).
“Obsessed as they are with their model of a ‘totalitarian threat’ to Enlightenment liberalism, both Berman and Hirsi Ali fail to take account of well-documented facts that would challenge their presuppositions. Berman muddles kin-patronage politics, a constant in Arab societies, with fascism. Hirsi Ali—oblivious of changes in gender roles that are occurring within more developed Muslim polities, and ignoring the way that traditional systems of authority tend to oppress women in cultures as different as China, Japan, and India—confuses Islam (a malleable religious tradition) with patriarchy (a specific set of social relationships built around masculine power). As Julien Benda himself might acknowledge, a failure to look at all the facts, however complex they may be, is a kind of intellectual betrayal, a trahison des clercs.” [trahison des clercs = to score political points at the expense of intellectual integrity]
Ruthven offers some compelling reasons why the “Islamist = fascism” equation is inadequate:
“Herein, I would suggest, lies the fallacy of treating the Islamist movements with all their complicated ramifications as a ‘totalitarian’ ideology in the same category as Nazism and communism, with dissenters such as Hirsi Ali viewed as ‘persecuted intellectuals’ comparable to the heroic refuseniks of the cold war era. Granted that Islamism contains fascistic elements (to which I myself have drawn attention), it is dangerously simplistic to assimilate the complexities of family power rooted in clan politics and kin patronage networks of a traditionally based society to a system comparable to that which operated in Russia from 1917 to 1991 or Germany during Hitler’s Third Reich.
The inadequacy of the ideological model of ‘Islamic fascism’ that Berman adopts in both Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals was revealed by Paul Bremer, George W. Bush’s viceroy in Iraq, when he made the disastrous decision to abolish the Baath Party in 2003, precipitating a sectarian war that wreaked an appalling human cost. Bremer was explicit in making a Berman-like comparison between Baathism and Nazism. ‘Just as in our occupation of Germany we had passed what were called ‘de-Nazification decrees,’ he told PBS’s Frontline, ‘the model for the de-Baathification was to look back at that de-Nazification.’”
Berman is Bremer’s intellectual companion, his ideological fellow traveler. Despite a smooth delivery that gives an appearance of sophistication, he suffers from the same anthropological illiteracy that has proved catastrophic in Iraq and now—increasingly—in Afghanistan, where US and NATO policymakers seem to have difficulty in grasping the complex, clan-based nature of the insurgencies they face. “
Malise Ruthven, “Righteous and Wrong,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 19, 2010, p. 88
