About twenty years ago, as an undergraduate auditing a class on Arab Political Thought with the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al Azm, I got it into my head to interview Edward Said in one of the campus's political magazines. The idea, as I remember it, was to query Said on same aspects of Al Azm's famous critique of Orientalism, among other things.

I wrote to Said and got a disappointingly tepid response back, but no outright rejection. A few months later, Said came to campus to give a lecture, and I approached him after the lecture to inquire about his interest in doing the interview."I don't want to do it!" he muttered, waving me away with exasperation. And that was that.

To the best of my knowledge, Said published no response to Al Azm's critique of Orientalism anytime in the twenty-some odd years between the publication of Al Azm's piece and Said's death. One wonders about the conception of intellectual exchange behind that decades-long silence. One wonders, also, about the sort of profession that looks on such silence with equanimity. If there is a principle at work here, it is this: a Big Name can evade major criticisms of his career-making book with impunity so long as his critics are, by"accepted" criteria, a bunch of"nobodies."

Those thoughts came to mind while reading this interview with Al Azm in the Dartmouth Free Press, an undergraduate magazine at Dartmouth College. (The interview was conducted in February on the occasion of a conference given at Dartmouth in Al Azm's honor.) The difference between Said and Azm—blustering arrogance versus confident receptivity—is telling. The interview turns out to be an interesting one, well worth reading all the way through, but a few passages are especially worth highlighting.

This first passage tells us something interesting about the relation between Islam as such and Islamism, or political Islam. Al Azm is making specific reference to Iranian Revolution, but he clearly intends his comments to apply more generally:

There is nothing in Islam to justify a republic. They call it an Islamic Republic, and in many ways it functions like a republic. They have introduced the standard Western form, like a council of ministers, the elected assemblies, elections, the president, and they are just a continuation of the Iranian state apparatuses under the cloak of Islam. [W]hen they get to power, they find it literally impossible to go back to any institution that is recognizably part of the history of Islam...They have found hardly any place where they can apply or direct genuinely any of the institutions of Islamic history...Besides the appeal to sharī‘a even by the Islamists for purely repressive purposes, when the repression is over, then everything becomes lax again…everything happens, sharī‘a or no sharī‘a.

This insightful passage explains why contemporary Islamism is a strange amalgam of Islamic theology and Western totalitarianism. In fact, nothing in Islam justifies any workable polity. To the extent that a political ideal emerges from the Qur'an, the ideal is tyranny—the relation of rulership that obtains between God and his subjects. To the extent that a conception of law emerges, it is authoritarian, repressive, and paternalistic. To the extent that a specifically Islamic political ideal emerges from Islamic history, the ideal in question is jihad: a specifically religious expression (occasionally sublimated in non-belligerent pursuits) of the ideal of the Homeric hero.

No wonder that such a religious conception leads in practice to a politics of tyranny, warfare, sexual repression and death-worship. The specifically Islamic elements lead in no very specific political direction on their own, but each is perfectly compatible with totalitarianism. Hence the appeal of totalitarianism to Islamic political thinkers who take Islamic norms sufficiently seriously to want to translate them into political practice. In this (complex) respect, the Islamic religion is at the heart of the troubles of the Islamic world. That, of course, was the very thesis of Al Azm's 1968 book, Self-Criticism After the Disaster. It is interesting but unsurprising that no English translation of the book currently exists. (There is a short description of Al Azm's book in Fouad Ajami's The Arab Predicament. Those with J-STOR access can check out his extensive 1998 interview in The Journal of Palestine Studies.)

Notable exceptions aside, such views as Al Azm's are rarely expressed in the academy--and especially rarely expressed in the field of Near East Studies. From his unique vantage as emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Damascus, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Near East Studies at Princeton, Al Azm explains why:

DFP: Do you believe the open debate on Islam, the open intellectualism, has died out?
SaA: I’ve seen in, for a while now, scholars, colleagues, especially in Europe and in America, a kind of feeling of intimidation. They were holding themselves back from making a serious critical judgment of Islam. You stopped being able to criticize Islam. I do not think that is a good or salutary result. The debate created this atmosphere of intimidation where you can say only good things about [Islam], and when you say only good things about it you are really idealizing it. Whenever you want to say something critical or point out a flaw, you tiptoe around it and use euphemisms. I was not feeling happy at all with that…I’ve also felt that some scholars have become apologists for Islam. I don’t think you are helping the Muslims or helping our society by becoming an apologist.

Such claims are, I suppose,"merely" anecdotal. But since anecdotes are the epistemic foundation for all further evidence of this sort, I don't see why that should be an obstacle to taking it seriously. The question is whether they will.