Bruce B. Lawrence

On violence : a reader

This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it. On Violence is divided into five sections. Underscoring the connection between violence and economic world orders, the first section explores the dialectical relationship between domination and subordination. The second section brings together pieces by political actors who spoke about the tension between violence and nonviolence—Gandhi, Hitler, and Malcolm X—and by critics who have commented on that tension. The third grouping examines institutional faces of violence—familial, legal, and religious—while the fourth reflects on state violence. With a focus on issues of representation, the final section includes pieces on the relationship between violence and art, stories, and the media. The editors’ introduction to each section highlights the significant theoretical points raised and the interconnections between the essays. Brief introductions to individual selections provide information about the authors and their particular contributions to theories of violence. With selections by : Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Osama bin Laden, Pierre Bourdieu, Andre Breton, James Cone, Robert M. Cover, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Engels, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Mohandas Gandhi, Rene Girard, Linda Gordon, Antonio Gramsci, Felix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel, Adolf Hitler, Thomas Hobbes, Bruce B. Lawrence, Elliott Leyton, Catharine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Dorothy Martin, Karl Marx, Chandra Muzaffar, James C. Scott, Kristine Stiles, Michael Taussig, Leon Trotsky, Simone Weil, Sharon Welch, Raymond Williams

Introduction: Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology

TO SPEAK OF IBN KHALDUN and Islamic ideology is to voice the imperative task of situating ourselves in several temporal and disciplinary modes. It is to acknowledge the profile of our world, the circumstance of Orientalism in that world, the emergence of Ibn Khaldun within Orientalism, and, finally, the significance of the papers included in this volume as a means of understanding Ibn Khaldun and Orientalism as well as our contemporary world.

Osama Bin Laden: The Man and the Myth

It was Fall 2006, less than five years ago. George Bush was President of the USA. The war on terror was full throttle forward. The October issue of US News & World Report had the following insert box in its “Washington Whispers” Section:

“ALL DISTINCTIONS ARE Political, Artificial”The Fuzzy Logic of M. F. Husain

Few modern artists so consistently embodied a fuzzy logic of their own as did the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011). His critics tried to define him as a reckless defamer of Hindu values, but another way to define him is as a dutiful devotee of a vision that was inclusive, rather than exclusive, and that understood all boundaries and identities as fluid or blurry, rather than as fixed and immutable. Or one might say that Husain strove to project what Ashis Nandy has called “Indian-style secularism,” celebrating creation, humanity, and beauty in the multiple religious forms of the subcontinent. Having lived and painted in India all his life, he was forced into exile in his nineties by right-wing Hindu politicians. In London, he continued to work on a new interpretation of Indian civilization as universally relevant, in a sequence of paintings with themes from the Mahabharata , while, in Doha, a royal patron commissioned him to paint a series relating Islamic and Christian civilization. The two series are shown, in this essay, to best exhibit Husain’s view of “all distinctions” as “political, artificial.”

A HMAD S. M OUSSALLI , Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). Pp. 249.

This is the slyest, and therefore smartest, assessment of Islamic fundamentalism currently available. The author, a prolific Lebanese political theorist, has offered in this, his fourth monograph on the subject, a well-argued, highly original thesis. Moussalli asks one basic question: does Islamic fundamentalism have a philosophical basis? “Yes, it does,” he replies, “but it is not the same basis for all Islamic fundamentalists.” He then proceeds to demonstrate how particular Islamic fundamentalist theorists have addressed issues such as ideology and knowledge, society and politics, from their own philosophical perspective. The argument is markedly tilted toward politics, as each of the six chapters examines either a facet of political philosophy or the discourse of a particular theorist on the Islamic state. The first three chapters are framed as general overviews, first of the fundamentalism–modernism dyad, then of the epistemological divide between divine revelation and human reason, and finally of the discursive dichotomy between the Islamic state and democratic pluralism. The next three chapters shift to dominant theorists, the three “heroes” of Islamist ideology. Chapter 4 examines Hasan al-Banna on the Islamic state; Chapter 5, Sayyid Qutb. Chapter 6 takes up the most prominent current Islamist: Hasan al-Turabi. Not since Hamid Enayats Modern Islamic Political Thought (Texas, 1982) has any scholar made such a comprehensive effort to trace the patterns of similarity—and the evidence of conflict and disagreement—among the major ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism.

49.95/cloth.

‘Holy War’ does not exhaust, and often fails to explain, the semantic range of jihād in Arabic/Islamic contexts. A more fruitful approach to the culturally encoded nuances of jihād requires the prior delineation of ideology from religion. Only a few scholars, e.g., Michael Gilsenan, Hamid Enayat, Pierre Bourdieu and Bassam Tibi, have considered the value‐neutral use of ideology in the analysis of Islamic evidence. None has addressed jihād, none has reverted, or tried to revert, contemporary stereotypes derived from an essentialist notion of Islam and Muslims, power and piety clustered around the univocal reading of jihād as ‘holy war’. This essay suggests other interpretive options that merit consideration by all serious students of religion in the modern world.