| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Faisal Devji. Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. (Crises in World Politics.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 184. $25.00. Adnan A. Musallam. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2005. Pp. xiii, 261. $44.95.
For those seeking to navigate the turbulent waters of global Islam, these two monographs will appear less as new compass readings and more as familiar signs of the murky depths that mark not just Islam but also the scholarly study of Islam. Faisal Devji's book is clever and facile. It is neither an analytical essay nor a historical review of Islamicly justified violence. Instead, it offers a manifesto against liberalism in all its forms. Devji rejects any attempts to construct a new paradigm of Islamic legitimacy, favoring instead fragmentation of authority at every level; the only mantra that matters is globalization. Drawing on continental theorists to support his contrapuntal reading of Islamist rhetoric, Devji favors Olivier Roy in concluding that "the kinds of individuals, practices and religiosity common to Al-Qaeda [read: terrorism] do not differ significantly from quietest forms of Islam [read: Sufism] or indeed from globalized religions more generally [read: contemporary Islam, Judaism and Christianity]" (p. 161).	1
Such a sprawling, uncritical conclusion is the hallmark of this quirky, often obtuse foray into contemporary Muslim thought. Jihad becomes objectified as the jihad, and what is then put on display are myriad landscapes or portraits of the jihad as a new trope. Since political Islam never existed for Devji, except as a spurious genealogy of influences, the jihad becomes redefined "in accidental terms as a series of global effects" (p. 26). Landscapes function as horizons of global Islam that encode the jihad as logo or brand name. One landscape projects militancy, or confrontation between the West as pseudo-democracy and Islam as the true democracy of monotheism. Another landscape projects martyrdom as a media spectacle, albeit one "that has as much to do with the nature of media as it does with anything Islamic" (p. 103). A final landscape is modernity. The jihad embraces, even as it effaces, modernity: instead of signaling an apocalyptic end to humankind, in the manner of earlier Islamists or Zionist Christian fundamentalists, it opts for the normality of pursuing reciprocal interests, with mutual benefits, as the next stage of Muslim-Western relationships.	2
Inscribed in all these rhetorical somersaults is the elusive shadow of Osama bin Laden. He is not a terrorist but a protagonist, not a misguided warrior but a mystical guide or Sufi master. He is the hero of monotheist geographies at the same time that he is the harbinger of a new world order. More significant than his instrumental use of violence is the family resemblance of al-Qaeda to environmentalism and to antiglobal protests but not to prior moments of Islamic radicalism (p. 160).	3
Devji's study resembles nothing so much as a maze. It requires the reader to navigate constantly between common-sense perceptions of militancy and violence, democracy and world order, and those marked not as jihad but as the jihad in new landscapes chartered only in Devji's often inchoate imagination. By contrast, Adnan A. Musallam's study is more like molasses. It is palpable and sticky, at once thick and sweet, and best digested in small portions. What Musallam provides are not postmodern ramblings but old-fashioned soundings. His book is nothing less than the full biographical recapitulation of Sayyid Qutb, arguably the most influential Islamist thinker and, apart from Osama bin Laden, the most famous Islamic radical of the late twentieth-early twenty-first century.	. . .

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