Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism

Academe, Jul/Aug 2002 by Tompkins, Daniel P

Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic

Fundamentalism and the

Limits of Modern Rationalism

Roxanne L. Euben. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1999

DANIEL P. TOMPKINS

Reading in the summer, we can move outside our fields and study topics of general importance. I've chosen to emphasize Islam in my reading this summer. We teach increasing numbers of Muslim students, increasingly see Islam in the news, and repeatedly encounter instant experts on television, so there is every reason to educate ourselves in this area.

Of recent books on Islam, Euben's has the most appeal. The fundamentalism she describes is a hot topic right now, but the book has deeper utility, too. It presents the Egyptian thinker Sayed Qutb in a way that makes us want to read more. Qutb reacted to modernism in much the same way that the European conservatives described by Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim did in the nineteenth century. Euben shows how and why Qutb moved from accommodation to antagonism and from belief in earthly sovereignty to insistence on divine sovereignty, rejecting all speculative philosophy-- even Islamic philosophy-as an arrogant encroachment on divine authority along the way and insisting on the importance of community and unity.

Qutb's surprising similarity to Western thinkers makes Euben's book doubly worthwhile, and doubly appealing to the general reader. Tactfully but firmly, Euben shows how his critique of alienation, of "the impoverishment of meaning, and the demise of civic virtue" recalls the work of Western sociologists and philosophers Daniel Bell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, and Charles Taylor. These shared commitments make Qutb seem less "alien" and more like a participant in an international response to the Enlightenment. Focusing on this response, Euben tries to build a dialogue "engaging fundamentalist ideas on their own terms" rather than a "mechanical response to structural pressures." This approach, she insists, makes Qutb's beliefs believable, accounts for changes within Islamic practice, and justifies the case for "comparative political theory."

Daniel Tompkins is professor in the department of Greek, Hebrew, and Roman classics and director of the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University.