© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Edited by Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells ISBN 0-231-12667-0 Columbia University Press 400 pp. Purchase This Book

Is our entire culture suffering from "Islamophobia"?

In "The New Crusades," editors Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells present a compilation of essays that attempt to both define and deconstruct the term. The book evaluates the Western need identify a coherent enemy in the post-Cold War era. According to several of the authors, including recently deceased Columbia professor Edward Said, this attempt to establish a single adversary has led to an oversimplification of the Arab-Islamic world into the next "evil empire," defined by buzzwords in our media-savvy culture.

Divided into two parts, "The New Crusades" first analyzes how the fear of fundamentalist Islam is playing out in American politics. Initially, the book focuses on political scientist Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory and how that mindset has seeped into domestic U.S. politics. From the perspectives of Qureshi, a scholar and freelance journalist and Sells, a professor of comparative religion at Haverford College, "Those who proclaim such a clash of civilizations, speaking for the West or for Islam, exhibit the characteristics of fundamentalism." Such oversimplification can have dangerous consequences, they warn, regardless of the political message or motivation.

The essays, primarily by prominent scholars in Middle Eastern and religious studies, note the dangers of a generalized definition of Islam that glosses over political realities in various cultures. Much of the first half of the book provides a scholarly analysis accusing the Huntington theory of "cutting through a lot of unnecessary detail, of masses of scholarship and huge amounts of experience, boiling them down to a couple of catchy, easy-to-quote-and-remember ideas, which are then passed off as pragmatic, practical, sensible, and clear."

The authors critique how Huntington's theory of a basic incompatibility between Islam and the West has been taken mainstream by media voices such as Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pipes, and Stephen Emerson. University of East Anglia politics and sociology professor Neil MacMaster begs readers to remember how "cover headings and photographs convey immediate and powerful meanings that may influence the way in which the following 'small print' texts are read." In short, oversimplification is skewing our ability to accurately analyze the facts.

The second half of the book moves beyond pinpointing holes in Huntington's theory and makes an effort to evaluate the origin of Muslim stereotypes. Focusing on non-U.S. cases, such as the rise of Jean Marie Le Pen in France and the conflict in Bosnia, the essays evaluate how an oversimplified fear of Islam can grow within a civilization with potentially devastating consequences. The authors assemble a warning to Americans that it is the very fear of Islam as an "enemy within" as opposed to a hostile outside force that makes domestic reactions so volatile.

"The New Crusades" forces the reader to step back and consider the implications of the media's presentation of Islam. From magazine cover art to newspaper headlines, Islam has been whittled down to a few convenient images and buzzwords, the authors note, even though it is a mainstream religion worldwide and should not be immediately equated with gun-toting terrorists or women in burquas. "The New Crusades" is an important attempt to redefine a dangerously one-sided image. --Julia Bain, NationalJournal.com

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