<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Book -- Very Nourishing and Readable!
Review: If you want to read just one book to find out why many Westerners feel that their lives are empty and why the Muslim world languishes in backwardness and repression, I recommend that you read this one.As I was reading the book, I remembered two close friends. One is Pakistani elder statesman Mahmud Ali, who laughs when he watches George W. Bush getting excited about the blessings of American "freedom." The other is Ayyub Malik, an architect and writer in London, who would hang every Muslim "fundamentalist" for blocking Islamic reforms. During a phone conversation from Islamabad, Mahmud Ali said the Americans spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars to pick a president and they "ended up with Bush, who needs to be sent back to school to learn English." In the United States, he continued, the family, the church and ethnic and neighborhood communities have unraveled and old folks are "rotting and dying in loneliness at nursing homes." Bush extols freedom in America because he doesn't know the quality of life of a typical "Punjabi farmer" who lives on a modest income surrounded by his children, grandchildren and kin groups and is devoted to the affairs of his mosque and spiritual order (tariqat). The Pakistani statesman was echoing a main theme of Freedom, Modernity and Islam. The Westerner is free to do anything he wants, but there may not be a lot he really wants to do. His freedom doesn't necessarily bring him happiness. Social breakdown, anomie and a lack of appreciation of non-material values have rinsed Western life of much of its meaning. A Wal-Mart cashier may be working two jobs to make ends meet and may not have a family or friends around. What can he do with his "free" time to be truly happy? Author Richard Khuri is a philosopher who grew up in Lebanon and lives in the United States, and he belongs to the rare breed of intellectuals who have intimately known both Islamic and Western civilizations. He's troubled to see freedom "shrink" in the West and is suppressed in the Muslim world. Khuri traces the degeneration of freedom in the West to Enlightenment philosophes, especially Rene Descartes, who argued that in order for man to be happy, he should follow the dictates of reason unencumbered by a priority beliefs, morality, intuition or experience. What these thinkers didn't realize, says Khuri, is that "reason is always guided by something else, be it our moral and social ends or, within science ... aesthetic or metaphysical bases." (p. XXIX) The "sovereign" Cartesian reason was reduced to technology, which spurred industrial capitalism. Industrialism degenerated into exploitative market economy, which has unglued the family and civil society and narrowed the space of freedom available to our Wal-Mart cashier. Khuri calls this "negative freedom," which fails to tap the sources of deeper meaning and happiness. "The negative sense of freedom," he explains, "is that in which we emphasize our freedom to choose, whether among trivial or serious matters, and the opportunity we are given to do so through lack of interference from the authorities. The positive sense of freedom is that in which we emphasize the quality of our choice and what we do with the opportunity we are given, the transcendent root of freedom, and freedom itself as meaningful expansiveness in a boundless world." (p. 81) Freedom can gain that "meaningful expansiveness" only when reason draws on human sensitivity, experience and morality and faith. Muslim societies do provide rich resources for "positive freedom" inherent in Muslims' belief system and ethnic and religious communities (partly because those resources are not eroded by modernity). Man needs, however, "negative freedom" as well to live a meaningful life, which is lacking in most Muslim societies. Mahmud Ali's Punjabi farmer isn't quite free to question the interpretation of Islam by the local Sunni establishment. Punjabi customs would require him to pick a husband for his daughter, who cannot initiate a divorce even if that husband oppresses her. Pakistan is under the rule of an army general, and our farmer has little say over how his country is governed. Partly because of this absence of "negative freedom," the line of visa applicants at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad spans a quarter-mile. Khuri emphasizes, rightly, that Muslim societies need religious, social and political reforms to slacken the barriers that stifle Muslim thinking and creativity. He mentions the failure of epistemological, religious, spiritual and political movements to expand the scope Muslim freedom. The fundamentalists represent the most visible among the contemporary movements for Islamic renewal. He also points out that Islamic fundamentalism is an intolerant, "oversimplified" school of thought, "which is incapable of absorbing the subtleties and pluralism that Islam had long cultivated." (p. 261) And he calls on Muslims to shed their "defensive posture," characteristic of fundamentalism, and tap their "spiritual roots" through "individual choice" to revitalize their faith and civilization. I tend to disagree with him and with my friend Ayyub Malik on this point. For all the virtues of pluralism, I'm not sure that Islam, or any other society or civilization, can be revitalized by pluralist reformers. Historically, social and religious movements have been spearheaded by revolutionaries who show little tolerance for dissent. Pluralism sets in once a society has settled down. In the United States, the Puritans didn't certainly entertain religious pluralism, and Catholics, Jews and African Americans were mistreated and discriminated against for a long time. Having observed Muslim youth activism on three continents, I believe that many Muslim societies are ripe for renewal. And I see Islamic fundamentalists blazing the trail. In any case, Richard Khuri has done a superb job of spotlighting what ails Western and Muslim societies and how they may be reformed. Everyone interested in contemporary human condition in the two civilizations ought to read Freedom, Modernity and Islam. Mustafa Malik
Cheverly, Md.
<< 1 >>
| 
