Review of The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
I have just posted on SSRN my most recent work, which is a review of Noah Feldman's latest book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. The review will be posted in Middle East Law and Governance: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which is a peer reviewed journal co-sponsored by Yale Law School and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
Though it was clearly written in a sympathetic spirit, I found the book to be deeply dissatisfying, in that it was distorting as to Muslim politics, law and governance and mistaken as to the wellspring from which Islamism drew inspiration, which is certainly not desire for the rule of law. I also think he got Iraq, and the relationship of jurist to state in that Shi'a dominated country, completely wrong. But you may judge for yourselves. The abstract is below, the hyperlink to the entire (draft) article is on the first line of this post. To download it, just click on "select download location" and then hit SSRN and it will pop up. Make sure you sign on to do that, or I won't get credit for the download (takes 3 seconds to register if you don't have an account.) Happy reading.
Professor Feldman has provided in his latest book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, a superficially positive account of Islamic history. He argues that the shari'a, the vast body of rules and norms developed by jurists on the basis of Muslim foundational text, operated in a manner in the medieval world that both legitimized and constrained the political authority, the Caliphate. He further maintains that the Islamist call for shari'a is to restore balance among competing institutions within the state and reinstitute the medieval rule of law in a modern context.
Despite the apparent sympathy, the work is reminiscent of the type of material that Edward Said so devastatingly critiqued in his seminal study, Orientalism, in which Said argued that in studying the East, the West could do little more than project its own reductive, exoticizing vision of an inferior East. Three Orientalist themes can readily be gleaned from Professor Feldman's book. First, the Muslim East is a monolith, and a single narrative can accurately encapsulate it relatively well. Second, the Muslim East is exotic, incapable of rule of law on more secular terms, necessarily turning to a world of caliphs and medieval jurists to develop a template on which to build rule of law themes. Finally, the Muslim East is obsessed with and nostalgic for its past. Islamists seek nothing more than the resurrection of classical glories in a modern context, the balance of modernity seems to have little affected their vision.
This review will reveal the manner in which these three Orientalist thematic constructions of the Muslim East are distorting in a manner that makes the Muslim polities unrecognizable to the Muslims who actually inhabit them.
Though it was clearly written in a sympathetic spirit, I found the book to be deeply dissatisfying, in that it was distorting as to Muslim politics, law and governance and mistaken as to the wellspring from which Islamism drew inspiration, which is certainly not desire for the rule of law. I also think he got Iraq, and the relationship of jurist to state in that Shi'a dominated country, completely wrong. But you may judge for yourselves. The abstract is below, the hyperlink to the entire (draft) article is on the first line of this post. To download it, just click on "select download location" and then hit SSRN and it will pop up. Make sure you sign on to do that, or I won't get credit for the download (takes 3 seconds to register if you don't have an account.) Happy reading.
Professor Feldman has provided in his latest book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, a superficially positive account of Islamic history. He argues that the shari'a, the vast body of rules and norms developed by jurists on the basis of Muslim foundational text, operated in a manner in the medieval world that both legitimized and constrained the political authority, the Caliphate. He further maintains that the Islamist call for shari'a is to restore balance among competing institutions within the state and reinstitute the medieval rule of law in a modern context.
Despite the apparent sympathy, the work is reminiscent of the type of material that Edward Said so devastatingly critiqued in his seminal study, Orientalism, in which Said argued that in studying the East, the West could do little more than project its own reductive, exoticizing vision of an inferior East. Three Orientalist themes can readily be gleaned from Professor Feldman's book. First, the Muslim East is a monolith, and a single narrative can accurately encapsulate it relatively well. Second, the Muslim East is exotic, incapable of rule of law on more secular terms, necessarily turning to a world of caliphs and medieval jurists to develop a template on which to build rule of law themes. Finally, the Muslim East is obsessed with and nostalgic for its past. Islamists seek nothing more than the resurrection of classical glories in a modern context, the balance of modernity seems to have little affected their vision.
This review will reveal the manner in which these three Orientalist thematic constructions of the Muslim East are distorting in a manner that makes the Muslim polities unrecognizable to the Muslims who actually inhabit them.
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