NYT gives favorable review to Juan Cole's new book, with one "but"
... [George W.] Bush’s effort to equate America’s amalgam of new enemies to the Axis powers of World War II quickly fizzled. Even some in the White House admitted privately to embarrassment, and the word “Islamofascism” was stricken from presidential speeches. Evil? Yes. But not an organized force — and Bush’s speeches quickly came to be regarded as a huge mistake because they inflated the power of America’s enemies rather than dividing them by playing off their longstanding rivalries. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Iraqis and the Iranians were fighting a bitter war. And Bush was lumping Osama bin Laden’s Sunni extremists with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of a nuclear-capable Persia.
Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World” maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began. Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world.
Readers of Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, will find many of the arguments familiar, though they are well assembled here, with essays on the myths surrounding Saudi Wahhabism, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the unintended side effects of American meddling in Iran. Cole starts his book in the right place: America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, which has skewed policy and often led us to support dictators we would ordinarily put on the list of human-rights violators. (The Saudis would probably qualify.) And he declares a truth that should be sobering to President Obama: “The fact is that we are likely to become more dependent on Islamic oil in the coming decades, not less,” he writes, noting that 11 of the top 15 exporters of oil are countries with Muslim majorities....
But in seeking to explain [radical Islam] to Americans, Cole sometimes reaches for the wrong analogy. He compares the 9/11 hijackers to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who read white supremacist works before bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To Cole, the two men “bear a number of striking similarities to members of such radical Egyptian groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping of the Blind Sheikh.” They all railed against “Jewish control of the U.S. government” and attacked tall buildings that were symbols of power. They all belonged to “fringe, if significant, movements.”
Did they? George W. Bush may have overinflated the power of Islamofascism, but certainly the radical Muslim movement, in all its incarnations, has a membership that is bigger and better financed than the American fringe groups, and with a presence in more countries than those home-grown extremists who threaten domestic terrorism.
Read entire article at David Sanger in the NYT Book Review
Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World” maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began. Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world.
Readers of Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, will find many of the arguments familiar, though they are well assembled here, with essays on the myths surrounding Saudi Wahhabism, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the unintended side effects of American meddling in Iran. Cole starts his book in the right place: America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, which has skewed policy and often led us to support dictators we would ordinarily put on the list of human-rights violators. (The Saudis would probably qualify.) And he declares a truth that should be sobering to President Obama: “The fact is that we are likely to become more dependent on Islamic oil in the coming decades, not less,” he writes, noting that 11 of the top 15 exporters of oil are countries with Muslim majorities....
But in seeking to explain [radical Islam] to Americans, Cole sometimes reaches for the wrong analogy. He compares the 9/11 hijackers to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who read white supremacist works before bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To Cole, the two men “bear a number of striking similarities to members of such radical Egyptian groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping of the Blind Sheikh.” They all railed against “Jewish control of the U.S. government” and attacked tall buildings that were symbols of power. They all belonged to “fringe, if significant, movements.”
Did they? George W. Bush may have overinflated the power of Islamofascism, but certainly the radical Muslim movement, in all its incarnations, has a membership that is bigger and better financed than the American fringe groups, and with a presence in more countries than those home-grown extremists who threaten domestic terrorism.