CRISIS OF ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

Raised in Iraq in the 1950s, serving as a minister in the post-Saddam government and now a visiting fellow at Princeton, Allawi is supremely well-placed to comment on the rise of the Islamic world in global politics. The gap between the sacred and secular is as much of a key to the crisis in Islam as it has been for Western societies. In the 1950s Allawi grew up in a community where the ruling cultural and political class had moved away from overt identification with Islam. Women rarely wore the hijab, and the pilgrimage to Mecca was mainly for older people. Then the 1960s were dominated by populist and nationalist ideologies, and by the end of the 1970s militant Islam seemed unstoppable, with a radical jihad-inspired culture initially focused on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There followed the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the rise of the Taliban, civil wars in Sudan and Algeria, the eruption of global terror and the invasion of Iraq. The author found that only a few of the Muslims he encountered in the political arena could resonate with the spiritual or ethical aspects of Islam, and he traces the origins of change right back to rulers such as Tippu Sultan in Mysore at the end of the 18th century. The divisions within and between Muslims led to extreme violence, particularly the Wahhabi-inspired Islamists. In this wide-ranging book the author argues first that Islam is different from other civilisations, particularly the globalising world order, because it has to recognise the role of the transcendent. Secondly, he tracks the changes that have occurred in Islam's self-understanding in the past two centuries, for instance the science of tafsir, modernising the understanding of the Quran, of which Sayyid Qutb was a leading exponent, seeking Quranic sanction for fighting tyranny. Qutb was key in giving radical Islam legitimacy in the eyes of the public. He then deals with the outer effects of the erosion of Islamic civilisation in terms of institutions and economic life, raising the question of whether a uniquely Islamic order can ever be recreated. 304pp.