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Summary
Summary
An up-close portrait of the ongoing internal struggle by secular and religious moderates to rescue Islam from the small, violent, and virulent minority that threatens it.
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, this groundbreaking book by a preeminent reporter takes readers deep into the struggle within the Muslim world where a growing movement defies and challenges extremism and repudiates Osama bin Laden, his deviant doctrine, and his violent disciples.
Robin Wright, an acclaimed foreign correspondent and television commentator, has witnessed the angry birth, violent rise, and globalization of Islamic militancy for almost four decades. In her recent reporting, she discovers a stunning new trend spreading within the Muslim world--the rejection of Islamic extremists. This is a historic evolution, slow to take off but now reaching critical mass. This trend is increasingly visible as clerics publicly repudiate Osama bin Laden, Muslim comedians ridicule militancy altogether, young Muslims rap against guns and bombs, women scholars launch liberation movements using the Koran, Pakistani villagers resist Taliban intrusions, and former Egyptian jihadis debate and then denounce violence.
This new jihad, which Wright describes in its many manifestations, has various goals. For some Muslims, it's about reforming the faith. For others, it's about reforming political systems. For all, it is about achieving basic rights--on their own terms, not Western ones. What is at its heart is the rejection of venomous ideologies, suicide bombs, plane hijackings, hostage-takings, and mass violence.
Muslims, Wright demonstrates, are doing what the West cannot--confronting extremism on its own terms and rescuing the faith from a virulent minority and changing history.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
To tell the story of the new world order forming in many Islamic nations, Wright begins in Tunisia, where the self-immolation of fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi inspired his angry fellow citizens to oust President Ben Ali in what is now referred to as "The Jasmine Revolution." Just a few weeks later, bloggers and activists in Egypt used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak. Similar protests broke out in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and other countries. Wright posits that the Muslim world is currently experiencing a sentiment of counter-jihad, "a struggle within the faith itself to rescue Islam's central values from a small but virulent minority." In Part Two of the book, Wright examines the cultural significance of anti-extremism, from the lyrics of the Tunisian hip-hop artist El General, to the feminist interpretations of the Koran by Amina Wadud. Maz Jabroni and other comedians on the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour are "waging their own often quirky campaigns against extremism," and creating alliances across cultural and religious lines. Part Three sums up what is at stake for these nations in turmoil and questions the Obama administration's wavering policies in addressing these international uprisings. Wright is an expert on the subject and this book is an accessible and riveting account for readers looking to learn more about the post-9/11 Islamic world. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In one of the first of a flood of books that will inevitably follow Osama bin Laden's death and the Middle East uprisings, Wright (Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, 2008, etc.) delivers the stirring news that jihadism is fading, and Arab nations are finally entering the modern world.Touring the region, reporter and scholar the author interviewed participants and recounts these changes, often through their eyes. Early chapters recap recent, familiar eventsrevolutions in Arab states, unrest in Iran, defections from al-Qaeda and increasing efforts within the Islamic world to discourage violence. Half of the narrative consists of magazine-like essays on Islamic culture, ranging from the predictable (the struggle for women's right, Islamic television) to the exotic (Islamic rap music, Islamic comedians, Islamic satirical theater, popular TV preachers). An astute observer and no Pollyanna, Wright delivers a jolt in her conclusioneven the successful revolutions have made matters worse by destroying the only thriving industry, tourism. Too many Middle East nations, oil rich or not, are economic basket cases on the level of sub-Saharan Africa with massive unemployment, widespread poverty, dreadful infrastructure and no tradition of democracy or even honest leadership. More than $1 trillion from the United States has produced unimpressive results in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is no chance these nations will receive a fraction of that. Achieving freedom solves their easiest problem.More journalism than deep analysis, the book paints a vivid portrait of dramatic changes in the Islamic world that may or may not end well.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE Arab world is poised for an era of political and cultural renewal. In dramatic succession, popular uprisings have toppled long-reigning dictators even as others cling to power. Amid these momentous events, scholars, journalists and politicians are scrambling to explain how these revolutions came about after years of political stagnation and dashed attempts at reform. Robin Wright's "Rock the Casbah," though it was mainly reported before this year's convulsions, tackles these questions directly. Wright, a veteran foreign correspondent, argues that the Arab world's younger generation is at the vanguard of a sweeping and seductive cultural revolution. Setting out to challenge the lazy trope that Islam is incompatible with modernity and democracy, she traveled across the Middle East - with forays into the wider Muslim world - to profile hip-hop artists, poets, playwrights, feminists, human rights activists, TV imams, comic book creators and comedians. Wright contends that these reformers are working toward a "counter-jihad" to reclaim Islam from militants who crave perpetual holy war. "For the majority of Muslims today, the central issue is not a clash with other civilizations. It is instead a struggle within the faith itself to rescue Islam's central values from a small but virulent minority," she writes. "The new confrontation is effectively a jihad against the Jihad." Wright's protagonists include relatively well-known activists like the American Muslim comedians who formed the "Axis of Evil" comedy tour, the Islamic scholar and feminist Amina Wadud (who led Friday prayers at mosques in South Africa and New York) and Saudi clerics who developed a government-backed program to de-radicalize Islamic militants. But her best subjects are those who have not been profiled before, like Dalia Ziada, a 29-year-old Egyptian blogger and human rights activist who at the age of 8 underwent female genital mutilation (a practice that, as Wright points out, dates back to the age of the pharaohs in Egypt, long before Islam). Ziada, who is devout and wears the Islamic head scarf, started a blog in 2006 and joined a burgeoning movement nicknamed the "pink hijabis" - observant Muslim women campaigning against domestic violence, female genital mutilation and other social problems rooted in misogynistic interpretations of Islam. Inspired by a comic book called "The Montgomery Story," about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Walk to Freedom, Ziada translated it into Arabic. "When I read this story, I learned that someone must take the risk for others to follow," she told Wright. "I wanted to be the Martin Luther King of Egypt!" In 2008, she helped organize a film festival devoted to human rights - and eluded government censors by screening the films on a riverboat that cruised the waters of the Nile. In early 2011, Ziada joined the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians protesting in Tahrir Square, who toppled the regime of President. Hosni Mubarak after its 30 years in power. Wright also recounts the tale of Hissa Hilal, an amateur Saudi poet and mother of four who appeared on a reality TV show in Abu Dhabi called "Poet of Millions" (imagine "American Idol," but in verse, with the winner collecting a prize of over $1 million). Normally, contestants on these shows pad their poems with grandiose invocations of a proud Bedouin past and the romance of the desert. But Hilal, wearing the enveloping black niqab, with only two slits for her eyes, read a poem titled "The Chaos of Fatwas" - an attack on Islamic militants and established clerics for their many religious rulings that incite violence. "Extremist fatwas represent subversive thinking, terrifying thinking," she told Wright, "and everyone should stand against them." By doing so, Hilal became the first woman to reach the show's final round; she also received multiple death threats. While her portraits are often inspiring, Wright ultimately skirts the question of whether these few brave individuals represent a significant political and social force within Islam. The reader walks away thinking that since the Sept. 11 attacks, a battle has been waged between a minority of Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda and the majority of Muslims, who are now "fighting back" - in cool, creative cultural ways - to reclaim Islam. Wright rests much of her argument on sweeping assertions culled from the characters she profiles and supplemented by public opinion polls. "A growing number of Muslims now want to use their faith as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself - or as a way to find answers rather than being the answer itself," she writes. "For them, Islam is often more about identity than piety, about Muslim values rather than Islamic ideology. Islam is a comfortable space and a legitimate vehicle to search for solutions compatible with global trends; it is no longer about creating an ideal Islamic State or even voting for Islamic parties." This is a radical claim, but it's largely unsubstantiated. In the past, when given free electoral choices, Arabs have voted in large numbers - and they have voted for Islamist parties, as they did in Iraq in 2005 (and again in 2010) and for Hamas during the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. By concentrating so closely on cultural reformers, Wright fails to address the place of Islamist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of the Iraqi Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. There's hardly any mention of these quite popular groups, let alone how they relate to her notion of the "counter-jihad" and where they might fit into the post-revolutionary order in the region. Hezbollah and Hamas, in particular, offer a mixture of Islamist ideology and 20th-century national liberation rhetoric. These movements could be strengthened by the regional upheavals, precisely because they combine Islamic and nationalist narratives. Right now, they are in a bind because of their reliance on (and, in Hezbollah's case, support for) repressive regimes in Syria and Iran. But unlike Al Qaeda, which has no realistic political platform and whose main objective is to kill civilians, these groups have carefully defined goals underpinned by the notion of "national resistance" against Israel. They also have an important social base, provide social services to their constituents and participate in electoral politics. Wright, it seems, has taken promising developments on the ground - developments that appeal to the American romance with youth, technology and agency - and read too much into them, perhaps in a wishful projection of American ideals. This comes from good intentions: she wants American readers to relate to Muslims, to think "they're just like us." But a less encouraging reading is that the Muslims who are "just like us" - the most Westernized - tend to be the least representative and least effective in bringing about deep cultural shifts. In the end, her inspirational portraits do not support her claim that "the counter-jihad is the most pivotal trend in the Islamic world." Part of the problem is that Wright presents these debates in an ahistorical void, as if they had only just now begun. She portrays those working to revolutionize Islam as reformers driven by their response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and subsequent American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. But while recent events clearly galvanized some of the characters she profiles, the effort to reform Islam stretches back for centuries - and it has been influenced by secular ideals. Wright's characters, while they are pious, are also the modern inheritors of an Arab secular and nationalist awakening that first stirred in the 19th century. The outcome of today's revolts will depend as much on how the Arab world revises its secular traditions as on debates within Islam. The contemporary debates on Islam, modernity and nationalism began with two 19th-century scholars, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, who taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni learning. Afghani argued that Muslims needed a new interpretation of the Koran suited to modern times, and he sought to impose limits on the powers of Muslim rulers with constitutions based on updated Islamic principles. Other reformers debated the merits of constitutional government and tried to establish elected assemblies. The subsequent Arab nahda, or renaissance, was a period of literary and intellectual innovation when Arabs living under the rule of the Ottoman Empire rediscovered their storied past. Beirut and Cairo emerged as centers of publishing and journalism, as intellectuals produced new works and republished classics of Arab literature and political thought. This renaissance laid the groundwork for the Arab nationalism that would dominate the 20th century; it sowed the idea that Arabs are bound by a common language, culture and history. Eventually, of course, Arab nationalism led to dictatorship and disillusionment - and its appeal waned after the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. By the 1980s, Islamist movements were growing and autocratic rulers were building elaborate security apparatuses to keep the Islamists and secular opponents from gaining any political power. Even if they don't know it, Wright's characters owe a great deal to the secular thinkers who challenged religious orthodoxy and secular strongmen alike in the years that followed the 1967 war. Among these is the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm, whose "Self-Criticism After the Defeat" was published in 1968: it disputed the dominant Arab narrative that the defeat was due only to outside forces of imperialism and colonialism. He argued that Arab societies needed to modernize by embracing democracy, scientific innovation and gender equality - all themes echoed by Wright's modern-day activists. A YEAR before his assassination in June 2005, the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir published a powerful short book in French (later issued in English as "Being Arab") exploring the roots of what he called the "Arab malaise" of the early 21st century. Kassir contrasted this malaise with two historic periods of Arab cultural and political ascendancy: the nahda and the age of early Islamic empires in the seventh to 12th centuries, when Arabs were the dominant power in the world. That era is particularly significant for Islamists, who pine for the early days of Islam when its imperial ambitions were at their height. But Kassir argued that the Arab world must move beyond this nostalgia to see the 19th-century renaissance as a more realistic model for ending Arab frustration. He described the nahda as an era "when Arabs could look to the future with optimism." For a long time, that sense of possibility seemed out of reach. But the Arab revolts of 2011 are the start of a new journey of reform and renewal. The secular and nationalist visions articulated by Azm, Kassir and others are still alive; but so are the Islamist agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas. Indeed, the current Arab revolts are partly driven by Islamist aspirations, bet also by a renewed notion of Pan-Arab identity. Arabs are inspired by one another's methods and ambitions, as the protests that began in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Of course, today's revolutionaries are trying to dislodge the rulers who came to power during the last wave of Arab nationalist fervor. Through her profiles, Wright chronicles a sliver of this longstanding battle between reform and orthodoxy. The larger struggle is still playing out on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Damascus and elsewhere. Like the history itself, that narrative has yet to be written. A comic book about Martin Luther King Jr. inspired an Egyptian blogger. Hissa Hilal was the first woman in the final round of the TV show "Poet of Millions." According to Robin Wright, the reformers are working toward a 'counter-jihad' to reclaim Islam from militants. Writers on the Square Negar Azimi's "Letter From Cairo" explores the post-Tahrir literary scene. See Page 35. Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: The Sandstorm | p. 1 |
| Part 1 Extreme Makeover | p. 13 |
| 1 The Scent of Jasmine | p. 15 |
| 2 The Counter-jihad | p. 41 |
| 3 The Big Chill | p. 65 |
| 4 A Midsummer's Eve | p. 90 |
| Part 2 A Different Tune | p. 113 |
| 5 Hip-Hop Islam | p. 115 |
| 6 The New Chic | p. 138 |
| 7 The Living Poets Society | p. 160 |
| 8 Satellite Sheikhs and you tube Imams | p. 176 |
| 9 The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour | p. 189 |
| 10 Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes | p. 214 |
| Part 3 A Wild Ride | p. 227 |
| 11 The Beginning of the Beginning | p. 229 |
| 12 The Diplomatic Pas de Deux | p. 244 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 257 |
| Notes | p. 261 |
| Bibliography | p. 285 |
| Index | p. 293 |