A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism
by S Sayid
(Zed Books, £12.99)

THE RISE of Islamism as a major political force in the Middle East and to some extent elsewhere has been one of the most important political developments of the last 40 years.

It is also one that has rendered much of the secular left bewildered and incoherent.

The most important recent manifestation of the confusion was the spectacle of much of Egyptian secular democracy cheering on the brutal overthrow of the country’s first elected government by means of a military coup because that government had emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, the principal Islamist political organisation in the Arab world.

Or take Samir Amin, hitherto one of the world’s foremost anti-imperialist scholars, cheering on the French neocolonial intervention in Mali because it was, at least ostensibly, directed against African Islamists.

For too much of the left a rigid secularism maintained by the crudest state violence — or even by imperialist intervention — is held to be preferable to even democratically-sanctioned rule by elected Islamists.

This logic, of course, led to the prolonged and horrifying civil war in Algeria in the 1990s.

This book is a mainly academic treatise which explores aspects of the Western approach to Islamism. Mostly written in the ’90s, it is inevitably dated.

It is also very much aimed at specialists in cultural studies — there is quite a lot of Foucault chasing Derrida through its pages and the invocation of “sedimented, ‘naturalised’ subjectivities.”

Nevertheless, if one can get past all that, there is useful material to be gleaned from Sayid which is applicable to present-day problems.

Take the whole idea of the caliphate as the ideal political form for Muslim society here on Earth — “the nodal point around which a global Muslim identity was structured,” as Sayid points out — prior to its abolition by Turkish leader

Kemal after the final break-up of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of WWI.

The concept of the caliphate is clearly central to the grip Islamic State (Isis) has established on the imagination of some Muslims — particularly among the young — since its emergence across the territory of Iraq and Syria in the last two years. It is a direct consequence of the partial destruction of the state in those two countries by Western intervention.

It is one thing to argue that Isis represents at best a ludicrous, and often savage, caricature of the caliphate.

But to present it, as elements of the left do, as either a sinister creation of imperialism for its own nefarious ends or as a distorted expression of anti-imperialist struggle is to project our political categories onto a movement that has little interest in them.

The idea of the caliphate as an appropriate objective of political struggle builds on the perceived and actual failure of secular nationalist forces to achieve worthwhile social or national objectives.

But it seeks to supplant those objectives rather than secure them.

The tearing down of the Sykes-Picot mandated border posts and the creation of Anglo-French colonialism was once the demand of Arab nationalism.

Today, Islamism carries forward the work for its own religious-inspired reasons.

Needless to say, the Isis variant of Islamism  — entirely undemocratic and considerably violent — feeds off events like Sisi’s coup in Egypt and  appears to make it plain that the elected Islamists will never be tolerated and that the only road is therefore the Isis/terrorist one.

Sayid also draws attention to the intertwining of Islamism with ethnic identity — a powerful connection often overlooked by secularist zealots in the West —  and also the idea, which clearly has much to commend it, that it “in the final analysis is a reflection of socioeconomic processes and struggles.”

These are issues which have been propelled to the forefront of world politics at least since the advent of the Islamic revolution in Iran in ’79.

The neocolonial interventions in the Arab world this century from Iraq to Libya and the aborted “Arab spring” have only added to their salience.

They have even washed up much closer to home, with the successful campaign to get the judiciary to remove the elected mayor of the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.

These questions urgently need a much more serious consideration by socialists than they have received hitherto, free from the blinkers of the aggressive and insensitive — to put it charitably — secularism of the likes of the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Sayid’s book is a contribution to that debate, although very far from the last word on it.