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Enemy in the Mirror
A firm grasp of Islamic fundamentalism has often eluded Western political observers, many of whom view it in relation to social and economic upheaval or explain it away as an irrational reaction to modernity. Here Roxanne Euben makes new sense of this belief system by revealing it as a critique of and rebuttal to rationalist discourse and post-Enlightenment political theories. Euben draws on political, postmodernist, and critical theory, as well as Middle Eastern studies, Islamic thought, comparative politics, and anthropology, to situate Islamic fundamentalist thought within a transcultural theoretical context. In so doing, she illuminates an unexplored dimension of the Islamist movement and holds a mirror up to anxieties within contemporary Western political thought about the nature and limits of modern rationalism--anxieties common to Christian fundamentalists, postmodernists, conservatives, and communitarians.
A comparison between Islamic fundamentalism and various Western critiques of rationalism yields formerly uncharted connections between Western and Islamic political thought, allowing the author to reclaim an understanding of political theory as inherently comparative. Her arguments bear on broad questions about the methods Westerners employ to understand movements and ideas that presuppose nonrational, transcendent truths. Euben finds that first, political theory can play a crucial role in understanding concrete political phenomena often considered beyond its jurisdiction; second, the study of such phenomena tests the scope of Western rationalist categories; and finally, that Western political theory can be enriched by exploring non-Western perspectives on fundamental debates about coexistence.
A comparison between Islamic fundamentalism and various Western critiques of rationalism yields formerly uncharted connections between Western and Islamic political thought, allowing the author to reclaim an understanding of political theory as inherently comparative. Her arguments bear on broad questions about the methods Westerners employ to understand movements and ideas that presuppose nonrational, transcendent truths. Euben finds that first, political theory can play a crucial role in understanding concrete political phenomena often considered beyond its jurisdiction; second, the study of such phenomena tests the scope of Western rationalist categories; and finally, that Western political theory can be enriched by exploring non-Western perspectives on fundamental debates about coexistence.
197 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 7, 2019
This book was written two decades ago though its very important message - that Muslim fundamentalists are a product of the same tradition as Western modernity - still has not sunk in to the public. It would’ve been great if people had internalized this lesson at the time, as we wouldn’t have had to deal with years of ongoing orientalist writing across media. Nonetheless for me in particular, I didn’t need to hear this again, especially in heavily academic form. There are limits to human knowledge, especially when the only knowledge considered “real” is that which can be obtained by instrumental rationality. Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and thoughtful atheists have all grasped this basic fact. I feel that this is basically a truism at this point. For those less familiar with these arguments and willing to deal with academic writing, this book has some useful points to make. It is very short and makes up for its lack of concise writing with a great deal of thoroughness.
February 25, 2022
Roxanne Euben’s The Enemy in the Mirror is less a book about Sayyid Qutb but how to read Qutb. Advocating a dialogic model of interpretation that ‘attend to actors’ self-understandings without requiring that the interpreter abandon a perspective that makes both evaluation and critique possible’ (p. 38), the book reads Qutb through a genealogy that covers Islamist thinkers like Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and a conversation that covers Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Alisdair Maclntyre, Robert Bellah, Daniel Bell, and Richard John Neuhaus as Western respondents to the many common concerns Qutb mulled over. Arguing that ‘fundamentalism has in many ways become a negative mirror reflecting back on Western life that which it would leave behind’ (p. 44), Euben insists on the comparability of Qutb’s thoughts, excavating it (rather presciently, as the book was published in 1999) from being relegated to the narrow confines of terrorism studies.
By situating Qutb within a hall of ideological contemporaries and forebears, Euben enriches (and maybe challenges) the idea that Qutb is really the ‘godfather’ of modern jihadism, given that a return to (religious) foundationalism amidst Enlightened rationalist domination isn’t a call he made alone, and the conditions that gave rise to these intellectual interventions weren’t that of Qutb’s making either. Thankfully, Euben does so without diminishing the intellectual agency on the part of Qutb. This is a work of political thought, after all, which means the ‘inherent power’ of ideas and ideology as ‘moral ideals’ to animate politics is duely acknowledged (p. 24). Going against the area specialists’ call to read Islamist militancy as local conflicts adopting a global rhetoric, Euben’s invitation, as I see it, is to assert that local fundamentalist agitations cannot be understood without interrogating the appeal of the universalist claims behind it.
Reading the book two decades on from its publication, one can’t help but note the underlying factors that shape Qutb’s worldview–the decline of community, moral decay, the ethical vacancy of instrumentalist rationalism–that Euben expounded has more or less become common knowledge now after the explosion of writings about Islamism post-September 11. In other words, it is almost a trite point, at least in academia, to say that radical Islamism is irrational or antirational, although Euben’s challenge to use the ‘enemy’ as our own mirror seems to have very litte takers, even now. Nonetheless, the book’s aim of seeking to understand Islamic fundamentalism in its own ‘self-understandings’ is often weakened by the dialogic model proposed by Euben as it reveals two tensions.
First, the tension between making Qutb legible and exceptional. The book makes a noble attempt to
counter renditions of Qutb’s thinking as an isolated, alien ideology that is monstrously incomprehensible by situating his thoughts within a corpus of writing both Western and non-Western. But in so doing, it also over-moderates the saliency of Qutbism in its appeal, longevity, and spin-offs. No doubt, getting to those questions may require different research trajectories and methodology, but if Qutb is the protagonist of this story, then one has to ask, what makes his intervention outstanding?
Commendably, the writer does not take an apologist stance to the many troublesome aspects of Qutb’s theses, such as his thinking concerning gender rights, religious freedom, pluralism and justice. Nor that of the contradictions inherent in his thinking about how the sovereign (godly) individual can be actualised best within the (self-evident) one-ness of God’s sovereign over Earth when the individual is also to act as the vehicle for realising such one-ness in a society of individuals. But in pointing out these flaws and authoritarian undertones, it begets the question of what explains Qutb’s appeal? Is it simply a question of moral certainty? Or that of power, seeing that his ideas were pandered towards an exclusive audience (that of Sunni Muslims)? In other words, in labouring too much over why is he comprehensible (to a Western audience), the book misses the opportunity to show why Qutb is convincing for many.
Secondly, if one should not shy away from Qutb’s call to emancipation, namely his jihad to restore God’s sovereignty in examining his activist ideology, it begs the question of why juxtapose Qutb to theorists like Arendt and Taylor, who generally reasons from the stance of non-violent liberalism. With Arendt, Euben uses her theorisations of the human condition and not her work on totalitarianism, which may or may not be what Qutb intended, but is surely an overtone of the political projects taken up by his ideological heirs. Unpacking that, for me, would have been a more productive venture. I am not trying to romanticise non-violent ideologies or activism here, but rather am questioning why not put Qutb side-by-side with Marx, Fanon, and Malcolm X? Why moderate Qutb’s radical activism in the comparative parts of the book? After all, laments about alienation, hedonism, and civil decline does not automatically lead to calls for the total and violent overturning of the political and social order (such is the case for most of the Western thinkers Euben cited). I say so not to fetishise Qutb’s ideology by dipping it into violence, nor do I agree with such simplistic acrobatics of denouncement. But if Qutb’s ideology is explicitly activist, those are the terms we must grapple with instead of looking away sheepishly from its violent implications.
My critique does not take away from the book’s unique contribution that I pointed out from the outset: this is a book on how to read Sayyid Qutb. Living in a world of keyboard warring, googling, and free PDFs as we do, it is no longer enough to claim that many, including Islamophobes and Islamists, have read Qutb out of context. The more pertinent question to ask, who is Qutb in the larger context of things? This book is a great place to start with a story that does not begin with Qutb (unlike what writers of the War on Terror like to claim), nor will it end with him, despite the desperate efforts of many fundamentalists to do so.
By situating Qutb within a hall of ideological contemporaries and forebears, Euben enriches (and maybe challenges) the idea that Qutb is really the ‘godfather’ of modern jihadism, given that a return to (religious) foundationalism amidst Enlightened rationalist domination isn’t a call he made alone, and the conditions that gave rise to these intellectual interventions weren’t that of Qutb’s making either. Thankfully, Euben does so without diminishing the intellectual agency on the part of Qutb. This is a work of political thought, after all, which means the ‘inherent power’ of ideas and ideology as ‘moral ideals’ to animate politics is duely acknowledged (p. 24). Going against the area specialists’ call to read Islamist militancy as local conflicts adopting a global rhetoric, Euben’s invitation, as I see it, is to assert that local fundamentalist agitations cannot be understood without interrogating the appeal of the universalist claims behind it.
Reading the book two decades on from its publication, one can’t help but note the underlying factors that shape Qutb’s worldview–the decline of community, moral decay, the ethical vacancy of instrumentalist rationalism–that Euben expounded has more or less become common knowledge now after the explosion of writings about Islamism post-September 11. In other words, it is almost a trite point, at least in academia, to say that radical Islamism is irrational or antirational, although Euben’s challenge to use the ‘enemy’ as our own mirror seems to have very litte takers, even now. Nonetheless, the book’s aim of seeking to understand Islamic fundamentalism in its own ‘self-understandings’ is often weakened by the dialogic model proposed by Euben as it reveals two tensions.
First, the tension between making Qutb legible and exceptional. The book makes a noble attempt to
counter renditions of Qutb’s thinking as an isolated, alien ideology that is monstrously incomprehensible by situating his thoughts within a corpus of writing both Western and non-Western. But in so doing, it also over-moderates the saliency of Qutbism in its appeal, longevity, and spin-offs. No doubt, getting to those questions may require different research trajectories and methodology, but if Qutb is the protagonist of this story, then one has to ask, what makes his intervention outstanding?
Commendably, the writer does not take an apologist stance to the many troublesome aspects of Qutb’s theses, such as his thinking concerning gender rights, religious freedom, pluralism and justice. Nor that of the contradictions inherent in his thinking about how the sovereign (godly) individual can be actualised best within the (self-evident) one-ness of God’s sovereign over Earth when the individual is also to act as the vehicle for realising such one-ness in a society of individuals. But in pointing out these flaws and authoritarian undertones, it begets the question of what explains Qutb’s appeal? Is it simply a question of moral certainty? Or that of power, seeing that his ideas were pandered towards an exclusive audience (that of Sunni Muslims)? In other words, in labouring too much over why is he comprehensible (to a Western audience), the book misses the opportunity to show why Qutb is convincing for many.
Secondly, if one should not shy away from Qutb’s call to emancipation, namely his jihad to restore God’s sovereignty in examining his activist ideology, it begs the question of why juxtapose Qutb to theorists like Arendt and Taylor, who generally reasons from the stance of non-violent liberalism. With Arendt, Euben uses her theorisations of the human condition and not her work on totalitarianism, which may or may not be what Qutb intended, but is surely an overtone of the political projects taken up by his ideological heirs. Unpacking that, for me, would have been a more productive venture. I am not trying to romanticise non-violent ideologies or activism here, but rather am questioning why not put Qutb side-by-side with Marx, Fanon, and Malcolm X? Why moderate Qutb’s radical activism in the comparative parts of the book? After all, laments about alienation, hedonism, and civil decline does not automatically lead to calls for the total and violent overturning of the political and social order (such is the case for most of the Western thinkers Euben cited). I say so not to fetishise Qutb’s ideology by dipping it into violence, nor do I agree with such simplistic acrobatics of denouncement. But if Qutb’s ideology is explicitly activist, those are the terms we must grapple with instead of looking away sheepishly from its violent implications.
My critique does not take away from the book’s unique contribution that I pointed out from the outset: this is a book on how to read Sayyid Qutb. Living in a world of keyboard warring, googling, and free PDFs as we do, it is no longer enough to claim that many, including Islamophobes and Islamists, have read Qutb out of context. The more pertinent question to ask, who is Qutb in the larger context of things? This book is a great place to start with a story that does not begin with Qutb (unlike what writers of the War on Terror like to claim), nor will it end with him, despite the desperate efforts of many fundamentalists to do so.
July 20, 2015
Good read, 3.8 stars. Great synthesis of modern western and Islamic critiques/understandings of modernity, rationalism, secular humanism. Some salient points made about comparative political theory, complicating notions of incommensurability, and the danger of purely epiphenomenal interpretations of fundamentalism. However I did feel that there was a lot of talking about talking...that was kind of the point and it was valuable- but, still. Also I was slightly underwhelmed by this in part because I just took a class on this material and it didn't seem to contribute something very interesting and new to the discourse. I did like the characterization of modern critiques of modernity as akin to the snake eating its own tail (Euben didn't use that analogy but that's the feeling I got from it).
November 21, 2007
satu lagi buku barat yang bicara tentang islam. dalam bukunya, euben secara khusus "mengoprek" kiprah sayyid quthb untuk kemudian mengajak pembaca ikut masuk menelaah fundamentalisme.
sebagai referensi yang mengacu dari kacamata barat dan orientalis, buku ini saya anggap cukup kritis. namun, keberimbangan masih menjadi persoalan di dalamnya.
sebagai referensi yang mengacu dari kacamata barat dan orientalis, buku ini saya anggap cukup kritis. namun, keberimbangan masih menjadi persoalan di dalamnya.
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July 2, 2015Overall her thesis is interesting and quite sensible. A large portion of the text is used to argue with potential critics.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews