General characteristics
The faith-sensitive scholar will try to maintain a balance between respect for Muslim belief in Islamic unity, and the mistakes of a Muir or of a Gibb who depicted Islam as an immutable, monolithic abstraction. Presenting a detailed and carefully nuanced description of diversity past and present, Esposito represents this as unity in diversity, “The unity of Islam, from its early formulation to contemporary developments, has encompassed a diversity of interpretations and expressions of the faith” (252). In his chapter on “The Muslim community in history,” he wrote:
Within the diversity of states and cultures, Islamic faith and civilization provided an underlying unity, epitomized by a common profession of faith and acceptance of
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the Sharia, Islamic Law. Islam provided the basic ideological framework for political and social life, a source of identity, legitimacy, and guidance. (66)
Again referring to “the unity of Islam, rooted in belief in one God,” he remarks that “from the early centuries of Islam, devout Muslims produced a diversity of interpretations” (113). A tension within Islam between “reason and revela-tion, legalism and spirituality, unity and diversity” has been “played out down to the present day” (114).
Esposito’s treatment of the Shi’a–Sunni schism describes the origin of the split and delineates the main differences. He does not mention the depth of resentment that Shi’a felt toward the Umayyads for the murder of Muhammad’s grandson, or give much detail on the treatment of Shi’a in some parts of the Sunni-majority Muslim world. He describes how the “passion” of Huseyn symbolizes for Shia the “historic struggle between the forces of good and evil, God and Satan” but he does not allude to the view of some Shia that it is Sunnis who represent “evil” here, and Shi’a “the good.” (111). He refers to Shi’a in Lebanon experiencing deterioration in their situation, and to “sectar-ian strife between Sunni and Shia” in Pakistan (202). Presumably, he chose not to overstress intra-Muslim conflict, sensitive that this would conform for some the image of Islam as a violent faith, the stereotype to which he refers in his Introduction:
Events in the Muslim world have captured the headlines . . . However, too often it has simply been knowledge of stereotypes and distortions, the picture of a mono-lithic reality dubbed fundamentalism, a term often signifying militant radicalism and violence. Thus Islam, a rich and dynamic religious tradition of almost one billion people, the second largest world religion, has been buried by menacing headlines and slogans, images of hostage takers and gun-toting mullahs. (xiii)
On the last page of the book, he says that “differing interpretations of Islam have resulted not only in an enriching diversity . . . but also in divisive conflicts within the community of believers” (252). In describing diversity, Esposito constantly stresses Islam’s dynamism, in contrast to the old notion of a static, immutable Islam. “Understanding the background and context of revival and reform, its leadership, and their interpretations of Islam is essential for an appreciation of Islam’s dynamism and diversity,” he writes (115) and, “one-fifth of the world’s population testifies to the dynamism of Islam and the continued commitment of Muslims to follow the straight path, the way of God, to whom belongs all that is in the heavens and all that is on the earth” (Q42: 52–3; 252).
On the one hand, his Islam is neither monolithic nor static. On the other, he does not want to deny Muslim belief in Islam as a total scheme of life.
Describing the classical formulation, he writes, “maintaining that Islam offered a self-sufficient, comprehensive way of life based on the Quran and sunna, custom” the Muslim scholars “argued that Islam must permeate every area of life” (49). Even after the single united caliphate has disintegrated into sepa-rate sultanates, the “traveler across” the Muslim world “could experience an international Islamic order that transcended state boundaries . . . all were bound by the Sharia, Islamic Law, and obligated to observe the Five Pillars of Islam” (65).8
On Sufi Islam, Esposito refers to Wahhabi hostility (119) and to opposition from some Orthodox religious scholars, or ulama.9 He then politicizes this, thus avoiding extensive discussion of Sufism as an authentic expression of Islam. Sufi saints, he says, claimed their own “authority” which challenged that of the ulama whom many Sufis saw as “co-opted by power” and as “tolerating and supporting the sociopolitical abuses and excesses of the government”
(103). Many Sufis were “critics and opponents of the Umayyads” (101). Thus,
“while some members of the ulama were Sufis, the majority dismissed Sufi doctrine and practice as heretical” and this “deep-seated suspicion and hostil-ity led to persecution” (102–3). Esposito implies that the charge of heresy was politically rather than religiously motivated. This is a careful balance between his awareness that Sufi Islam is “a major popular religious movement within Sunni and Shia Islam” (100) and what almost amount to prudence—awareness that significant actors in contemporary Islam dislike Sufism, so some refer-ence to its marginality from Orthodoxy is required. Being faith-sensitive sometimes involves expressing sensitivity to more than one interpretation of Islam, as Esposito comments, “the inherent unity of faith, implicit in state-ments like ‘one God, one Book, one [final] prophet’ should not deter one from appreciating the rich diversity that has characterized the religious (legal, theo-logical, and devotional) life of the Islamic community” (114). When he refers to Sufism’s “eclectic, syncretistic tendencies” he does so in the context of sug-gesting that this “enabled Islam to adapt to new environments and absorb local religious beliefs and customs” (66).
Surveying the contemporary Muslim world, Esposito covers Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon in some detail, Turkey in less detail and offers not only useful factual data on governance but also nuanced and skillful analysis. He points out that more and more Muslims are now
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able to take part in what is effectively an “international discussion of Islamic theological and religio-political issues and are no longer dependent on ‘their local imams and ulama of the state-run media’ for their understanding of Islam.” “A variety of voices,” he says, are “available through official and unofficial channels, above and below ground” (226).10 Many of the issues facing Muslim countries, too, are not of their own making. In the West, the process of modernization, the “establishment of modern states, the creation of a sense of national identity and political legitimacy” “all took time and experimentation”. In contrast, many Muslim countries were until quite recently under imperial domination. Some were even artificially created by the colo-nial powers.
Esposito does refer to internal conflict in Muslim states, and to acts of vio-lence, such as the assassination of Anwar Sadat by members of Tanzim al-Jihad (173). Yet he does not give the impression that violence defines life for the vast majority of Muslims. Rather, while there is “an Islamic revolution going on in many parts of the Muslim world,” this:
Is not that of bombs and hostages, but of clinics and schools. It is dominated by social activists (teachers, doctors, lawyers, dentists) and preachers rather than warriors. The battle is often one of the pen, tongue, and heart rather than the sword. Radicalism and terrorism, though capturing the headlines, are a very small though at time deadly part of a phenomenon characterized more by a broad-based religiosocial revolution which has affected most Muslim societies (251).
What many Muslims want is a secure and safe environment free from danger or pollution, access to schools whose curricular honor the divine, adequate health care and secure jobs whether or not the political system which delivers this is “Islamic” or secular. Those who “assassinate, kidnap and bomb” are a
“radical minority” (222).
The threat thesis
Esposito’s The Islamic Threat: Myth of Reality, first published in 1992 is a more detailed treatment of the thesis that Islam and the West are “on an inevi-table collision course” (3). Huntington had not yet written his 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” article, nor had the first act of terror by a Muslim on US soil—
the 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in New York—taken place.
However, Lewis’ Atlantic Monthly article, “The Root of Muslim Rage” (1990) which uses term “clash of civilizations”—possibly for the first time—had
appeared and Esposito cites from this article.11 Asking whether some sort of global conflict between Islam and the West is “inevitable” (3), Esposito sug-gests that, to some degree, the idea that Islam threatens the West stems from the need, following the demise of communism, to identify a “new enemy.”
“Fear of the Green Menace . . . may well replace that of the Red Menace,” he says (5). The substance of his argument throughout the book is that Islamic movements represent not so much a threat as a challenge. Searching for Islamic solutions to the problems they face, Muslims are often convinced that neither Western nor (while the Soviet system lasted), communist solutions could meet or satisfy their needs. The very insistence that alternatives to Western models have any validity challenges Western “complacency—spiritually, socially and ultimately politically” because it represents a “questioning of both the tradi-tions that we seem to embrace—materialism, libertinism and individualism, though these may only be a caricature of us—and also of our commitment to the rules that we say we espouse: tolerance, freedom of expression” (205).
Esposito rejects the notion that “Islam” represents a “monolithic threat” (208) because of the real difference between what he calls the myth of “the unity of Islam” and the “diversity of its multiple and complex manifestations in the world today,” as well as between the “violent actions of the few, and the legiti-mate aspirations and policies of the many” (5).12 There is no “monolithic Islam out there somewhere, believing, thinking, feeling, thinking and acting as one”
(180). Emphasizing what he refers to as “the diversity behind the seeming unity of Islam” (204) he argues that “for many Muslims, Islamic revivalism is a social rather than a political movement.” Some want to set up “Islamic states”
but what others want is a “more Islamically minded and oriented society”
(212). Although some Muslim organizations and individuals try to achieve their goals by extra-constitutional means, “the vast majority are moderate and operate within the system” through the electoral process (207). Some Muslim revivalists dismiss “democracy” as “Westernizing and un-Islamic” but others
“have ‘Islamized’ parliamentary democracy, re-asserting an Islamic rationale for it . . . in their opposition to incumbent regimes,” many of which are dicta-torial or absolutist (186). This does not represent, though, uncritical accep-tance of Western style democracy, since many Muslims believe that Islam
“can generate its own distinctive forms of democracy in which popular sover-eignty is restricted or directed by God’s law” (187). Esposito is fully aware of the charge that some Muslims espouse democracy as a strategy; “a pragmatic, tactical accommodation” rather than as a “principled position” (167).13
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