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What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East,
by Bernard Lewis,
Perennial, 186 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror,
by Bernard Lewis,
Modern Library, 184 pp., $19.95
Islam in a Globalizing World,
by Thomas W. Simons Jr.,
Stanford Law and Politics, 111 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity,
by M.J. Akbar,
Routledge, 272 pp., $25.00
Islam: A Short History,
by Karen Armstrong,
Modern Library, 222 pp., $10.95 (paper)
We are, in this country right now, engaged in the process of constructing, rather hurriedly, as though we had better quickly get on with it after years of neglect, a standard, public-square image of "Islam." Until very recently, we had hardly more than the suggestions of such an image—vagrant notions of stallions, harems, deserts, palaces, and chants. A Peter Arno drawing in The New Yorker sixty-five years ago more or less summed the matter up. A stetson-hatted tourist leans out of his roadster to ask a turbaned man prostrate in prayer by the side of the road: "Hey, Jack, which way to Mecca?"
The reason for the rush to change this casual mixture of ignorance and indifference is clear enough: September 11, suicide bombers, Kuta Beach, Osama, Nairobi, the Cole—and now the Iraq war. What isn't clear, and will not become so for quite some time, is where it all is taking us, what our sense of this obscure and threatening Other that has appeared suddenly—and literally—on our domestic horizon is going ultimately to be. The familiar, almost intimate enemy we precipitously lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union is being replaced in our minds by something far less well defined, much further removed from the political history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. Communism, with its roots in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, at least had a Western pedigree. Marx and Lenin emerged from historical backgrounds all too recognizable, with ideological intentions derived, on the face of them, from some of our dearest social hopes. But "Islam," a creed of Arabs, Turks, Africans, Persians, Central Asians, Indians, Mongols, and Malays, has been rather off our cultural map. What are we Americans to think about an inflamed competitor of which most of us know hardly more than the name?
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