Richard Brautigan: So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. New York: Delacorte Press, 1983.
Richard Sennett: The Frog Who Dared to Croak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

This review was first published in Chronicles of Culture, Volume 7, Number 10, October 1983. Republished with permission.

In the twentieth century, first-person narrative fiction asserts individualism while undercutting it. Although we quickly learn who this ‘I’ wants us to believe he is, and we rarely fail, in the end, to see who he really is, we do not always clearly see what the author thinks, or believes, about his narrator’s seeming and being. By refusing to judge explicitly, late modern novelists and poets depend on their readers’ ability to find a constellation of meaning beyond the narrative’s landscape—beyond the individual portrayed. Even in an irreligious time we have some idea of Dante’s judgments. But what will readers make of James Joyce six centuries after his death? He himself identified an immediate need for literary archeologists to interpret his books.

This literary problem reflects and reflects upon the familiar political tension between liberty—an assertion of individuality—and authority—the embodiment of meaning. In modern times especially, individuals resent authority but find its destruction a diminishment of themselves. They eventually get the worst of both: individualism for Stalin, tyranny for the Russians; or, alternatively, anarchy for the many and subservience for the few.

The novelist Richard Brautigan, whose earlier book, Trout Fishing in America became an icon of the Sixties ‘counterculture, explores liberty in America. Richard Sennett, a sociologist by day and sometime novelist by night, explores tyranny in Hungary and the Soviet Union. Both use first-person narrators, and both pose the problems individualism causes for ‘we moderns.’

Brautigan’s middle-aged narrator remembers the summer of 1947, when he was twelve years old and “the most interesting thing happening in my life” was watching a husband and wife who fished in a pond while sitting in their living-room furniture, carefully trucked out and unloaded each evening at seven. Imitating their deliberateness, he intersperses his description of one afternoon spent waiting for them to arrive at the pond with memories of other days in his childhood, culminating in the day his “childhood ended” when he accidentally shot and killed a friend.

The reviewer for the New York Times could find no purpose for this procedure, but the narrator explains it simply enough. “I am still searching for some meaning in [the story] and perhaps even a partial answer to my own life, which as I grow closer and closer to death, the answer gets farther and farther away.” Hence the attempt to reverse aging by the means of memory, to recapture childhood, the time when truth seems closer—not only Wordsworth’s famous reason but because an adult can see “unknown vectors” the child did not see.

Brautigan does well. He remembers the boredom of childhood. His cuteness, which has irritated more than one reader of his other novels, here contributes to a story that does not omit childhood’s childishness. Children ponder lying and truth-telling, fantasy and reality, with an intensity most will lose in adulthood; Brautigan knows something of how these intertwine. So, for example, he has his narrator remember the “very ancient and fragile” lock on an old woman’s garage door:
“The lock was only a symbol of privacy and protection, but that meant something in those days. If that lock were around today, a thief would just walk up to it and blow it off with his breath.”
Blowing: the narrator remembers these things “so the wind”—today’s prevailing viciousness, a harsh reality—”won’t blow it all away.” His memories recapture not only childhood but the more humane minds of that time and place—the American Northwest a couple of years after World War II, “before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity.” This isn’t quite as sentimental as it sounds; lonely children who spend their days watching, not participating, often find their way to the eccentric adults (mostly old people, old age itself being a form of eccentricity) who have time for them. The narrator draws these portraits with a bright child’s mixture of sarcasm, curiosity, and fondness.

Brautigan has never offered any but the simplest ideas, and his sentiments—the mixture of satire and sympathy Christianity becomes when secularized—recall Dickens (as do his congruent fascinations with eccentrics and children). He gets his style from Hemingway. But his tone belongs to him, and it is what makes him one of our most elusive writers. His teaching (as it were) is straightforward enough: the narrator remembers his childhood recreation of shooting apples in an abandoned orchard. He bought the bullet that killed his friend because he preferred the “dramatic” sound of “a .22 bullet burning an apple into instant rotten apple sauce” to the satisfaction of eating a hamburger in the restaurant next to the gun shop; he had only enough money for one or the other. He identifies the bullets with “aggressions,” hamburgers with the pleasant eccentricity of the married couple (“Take it nice and easy is my motto,” the husband says while cooking one). Brautigan surely thinks of this homey dichotomy as a choice Americans always have before them, and he leaves no doubt that he now prefers hamburgers.

After the shooting, his narrator developed a sad/comic obsession with hamburgers. (“I was a weird kid,” he concedes; “weird” derives from a word that meant fate, “unknown vectors”).
“Looking back on it now, I guess I used the hamburger as a form of mental therapy to keep from going mad because what happened in that orchard was not the kind of thing that cases a child to have a positive outlook on life. It was the kind of thing that challenged your mettle and I used the hamburger as my first line of defense.”
This satirical counterpointing of guilt with Boy Scoutmaster understatement-by-cliché must leave many readers, including some good ones, strewn like apples shot by a weird kid. The problem of tone reveals the problem of meaning. The whole account sidesteps the fact that the accident could still have been prevented had the boy known not to fire a gun if your friend could be standing in the bullet’s trajectory. The narrator never considers this, his imagination obscuring common sense even after thirty-two years. What of Brautigan?

We can’t know. Whatever Brautigan may think of his narrator, the tone gives us contrary signals, or signals one can interpret variously with equal justification. Like his narrator, Brautigan enjoys individuality, liberty, but not the responsibility they force upon us. That goes for the imagination as well as for action. He detests the mass-imagination of today, preferring the time when “people made their own imagination, like home-cooking.” The result was more palatable, perhaps, because however dotty or injurious it was still on a human scale. But to what extent can an individual really make his own imagination? Brautigan will not or cannot delineate the limits, or the complementary extent to which one must take his bearings from things beyond himself. Responsibility, which must be to something or someone, arises there; Brautigan eludes it. He knows and mocks the old fatherly bromides but his narrator has no father to tell him how to shoot a gun.

Brautigan presents the world of pre-adolescence, omitting sexuality, that complication of love and friendship. In his imaginary memoir of a Hungarian philosophy teacher named Tibor Grau, Richard Sennett devotes only a few pages to childhood, many more to youth and adulthood. Sexuality and politics matter here. But they do so in a way that equally evokes the atmosphere of ‘counterculture’ sentiment.

The notion that sexual liberation really is liberating was the ‘counterculture’s’ central illusion. Despite numberless illustrated instruction manuals and copious experiences, many of us still contrive to overlook the fact that sexual activity involves linking bodies—however variously—and not unrestricted movement. Presented as an act of liberation, ‘sex’ must disappoint. Reportedly, it often does.

Tibor Grau does not share this illusion. Resented by his public school classmates for his superior wealth and intelligence, he wanted “to have them, to conquer them”; his homosexual passion based itself not on the illusion of sexual liberation but on the illusion that one’s enemies are worth “having,” an egalitarian presumption that lies beneath much of what passes for power-hungry elitism. After moving from teenaged schoolboys to young, displaced peasants who frequented Budapest’s Municipal Park, Grau’s “first steps” toward Marxism came “when I began to feel such love for some of the older boys that I wanted to stop paying them, imagining that they would freely return my feelings” if suitably impressed by his mastery of dialectics. They didn’t, of course, and Grau learned early “how sordid life is,” and “how sad and impossible it is to live.”

Evidently, life’s sordidness, sadness, and impossibility result from the rarity of making love, liberty, and sexuality coincide. Liberty in particular causes the young to be “confused and afraid, as they should be.” Personal liberty means you’re on your own. “To avoid the terrifying solitude of liberty,” the young “search to find a realm of life in which they can immediately belong.” Giving up on the male prostitutes in the park, Grau sought love and friendship among the poor, sharing their “anger and hatred against the world.” Even in old age, he imagines “hatred of the world as it is” to be “the noblest emotion an adolescent can feel.”

Resentment and love of love mix easily; they make a poison. We see this when Grau remembers a Deputy Director of “Cultural Propaganda” in Hungary’s short-lived socialist regime of 1919. With the rather heavy irony that tyranny provokes, Sennett shows how this poison caused suspicion, betrayal, and lying, not fraternal struggle for truth against shared enemies. Most insightfully, he has Grau write that he foolishly resisted what turned out to be at routine inquiry not only because he suspected a conspiracy but because he wanted to assert his liberty; he did not want to be forced into writing an apologia. Sennett knows that the problem of liberty would remain even if socialism solved the ‘problem of scarcity,’ economic and emotional, that socialists believe they can solve.

Elsewhere, Grau reflects that socialism asks and promises too much because “no one can give another more than permission to exist, and that permission entails all manner of mistakes, stupidities, and waywardness.” Evil is the denial of this permission, a denial made by too many frustrated socialists, and fraudulent ones. The existence Grau praisses, moderately, is not mere life; “to live is to love something concrete for itself”—a formula that mixes Marxist materialism with Kant’s categorical imperative, in the hope of avoiding the worst aspects of both.

Sennett has Grau survive some fifteen years in Stalinist Russia, including the Second World War. He gives him an elderly, male lover with whom to spend his last years in Hungary; justifiably embarrassed by this bluebird finale, he has Grau write, defensively:

“I know what you will say: Grau, such a self-absorbed, unpleasant man before, now redeemed. You really understand nothing. I simply have something to do. This life formed for me these habit of small pleasures each day which the young would call the prison of old age.”

We are meant to “understand” that the love of something—here someone—specific, for itself, is true liberty. It is surely closer to true liberty than either utopian socialism or Marxist ‘realism.’ But Grau overlooks something. Throughout, he describes himself as a philosopher. The prototypical philosopher, Socrates, insisted that philosophia or love of wisdom differs from loving men—or, for that matter, women. As long as he retains his wits, a philosopher always has “something to do.” Grau doesn’t know this, remaining an intellectual, not a philosopher at all.

Does Sennett know this? He is less elusive than Brautigan; I suspect that he does not.

The modern individualist recognizes no present authority; at most, he might recognize the authority of some imagined future condition of the human race. Yet he often finds the quest to satisfy mere appetites unsatisfying—as indeed he must, with advancing age and infirmity. With no faith in reason or revelation, he can only turn to memory or imagination. Not themselves authoritative, memory and imagination can conjure a dim authority. Remembered authority stands against the rapid changes of democracy or the equally rapid but more brutal changes of ‘totalitarianism’ or modern tyranny. Imagined authority wants to accelerate those changes, to move onward to a future that seems to resolve the unresolvable tensions of the human condition.

Brautigan’s narrator attempts to find authority in childhood, rather like an American Rousseau. Sennett’s narrator “weed[s] his memories… to clarify and refine his understanding,” yielding a materialist Kantianism. The procedures differ, but both men look to the modern substitute for reason and revelation: sentiment. Unfortunately, sentiment’s multifariousness equals or exceeds that of reason, or perhaps even that of revelation. As a substitute for other forms of authority, it is insufficiently authoritative. Modern individualism undercuts itself in its very self-assertion

 

New York Times, December 1980

It was a peculiar incident because young people aren’t supposed to be shy anymore. The meeting , which concerned politics, had resolved into small groups of lingering talkers. A young man stood by himself, apparently waiting for the woman he’d arrived with. Another woman wanted to kiss him goodnight. He submitted, rather stiffly, and recoiled slightly after the taxing kiss. She laughed, of course, and kissed him again; he looked quite miserable.

He was right, even if over-serious. Much of the talk had centered on inflation (they were conservatives), and the usual things were said. But not the important thing: Inflation isn’t only an economic problem; it symbolizes o our time.

The spirit of our time consists of hot air, and it inflates all our means of communicating.

We know, too well, that money inflation occurs when dollars multiply faster than what economists are pleased to call goods and services. This makes each dollar mean only a fraction of what previous ones did, although each says the same thing: ONE DOLLAR.

Words, too, have inflated, and in the same way. I’m not thinking of propaganda, political or commercial (lying does not inflate; lying counterfeits and counterfeiters depend on the worth of the currency they imitate). I’m thinking of the proliferation of words, of our suspicion that we are told more but hear less that’s worth listening to. Magazines and books clog the supermarket, radios chatter, and television sets flicker in the night. They tell us of the world, which does and thinks more or less what it has always done and thought, but now with more accompanying verbiage. The changed ratio between what expresses meaning (which grows) and what’s meant (which stays the same, even as it changes) makes each meaning-unit–each word–worth less, mean less.

The young man who endured those perfunctory kisses may have sensed that inflation afflicts our gestures as well. Some 40 years ago, Americans could still believe the credo of sentimentalism: that a kiss is still a kiss, a smile is still a smile, and fundamental things don’t change, as time goes by. Like those who imagined that dollars had intrinsic worth, that words had inherent meaning, they mistook a medium of exchange, of communication , for value itself. They were innocent of TV `personalities’ and their relentless grins, of Hugh Hefner’s glossy mass-produced porn. Embraces and kisses, smiles and caresses–they’ve multiplied exponentially since Casablanca. But the sum of human affection that makes such gestures meaningful surely has not.

Some economists say that inflation results from fulfilled demands for higher pay, without increased production, which force the government to print more money. Others say government needs no forcing, that it prints extra, devalued money, to pays its debts. No serious quarrel here. While some explain that we would get more for less, the others explain that we would pay less for more.

Word inflation also has greed behind it. Prolixity pays, as a thousand hacks can testify. And just as otherwise moderate worker feel compelled to act greedily once inflation begins, word-makers hold forth ever more loudly and longer. As the babbling intensifies, the religious part of humanity long for the Word that will stop the words, rather as this-worldly monetary economists yearn for a President who will stop the money-pressure.

The inflation of gesture partly depends on the liberation of another greed, the greed for sex. This generates those laughable worshippers of their own afflatus, whose ancestor, Orgoglio, Edmund Spenser described in his poem The Faerie Queene. Appetite replaces affection, debauching our gestures as surely as it does our other currencies.

Yet not all affection dies from affection’s crowding, and not all gestures communicate appetite. Affection survives, forlornly, in a world that fails to hold much of a place for it. Does affection’s forlornness account for the proliferation of unfeeling, unfelt gestures. For the discomfiting kisses suffered by that young man had no appetite behind them. Perhaps we imagine that if we increase our use of the forms of affection, we can somehow conjure it.

What pumps air into this balloonage of dubious money, glib talk, and spurious intimacy?

Distraction I think: the separation of our minds from the feelings and thoughts that make them distinctively human. Distraction lets us try to appear as more than we are while making u less than we were. We have inflation because we want its precondition, having almost forgotten anything else to want. The young man’s sadness and the woman’s unintended comicality mark the limits of a world that tries to expel reason, tragedy, and love, without quite succeeding.

Ali A. Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

 

Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people” (or any army, the general added)? What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux replied, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle said, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by Mao–some combination of communism and nationalism–and “to some degree by Nasser”–that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism. De Gaulle offered a correction: “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, would not shift the current or guide it. But Islam–dismissed, disparaged religiosity–might do so. As an army officer de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “haven’t made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the bedrock beneath the course of events even then?

Ali A. Allawi also finds that bedrock, albeit much eroded. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed one of the Middle East’s last remaining Nasserites, Saddam Hussein, he found there not liberation but sectarian murder and corruption. After servicing as Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance in the new government, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself to time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, Allawi wants to understand how and why the current passes–specifically with respect to the decline of “the spirit of Islam”–and how that decline might be reversed. He attends not simply to Islam as a set of religious beliefs but as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility. Fundamentally and more generally, “can a modern society, with all it complexities, institutions, and tensions, be built on the vision of the divine?”

In the forty years since de Gaulle and Malraux conversed, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called political Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abdl A’ala Mawdudi into practice with real regimes. But Islamic civilization has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.” By “political” Allawi means what Machiavelli means: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity in commanding. By “civilization” he means a sense of balance, of proportion, between “the individual and the collective” and “between worldliness and otherworldliness.” He means something like what Aristotle means by political rule: not command but reciprocity in rule, ruling and being ruled–the way of a husband and wife, not of parent and child, much less of master and slave.

The modern West lacks genuine civilization, he argues, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success, effective acquisition; much of the modern East (Japan and China leading the way) now pursues such success as well, albeit corporately not individualistically. In this pursuit, West and East conjure such impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces as markets and technologies. West and East succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?)

In response, Muslims pay but also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states… claim, in one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists nonetheless that only Islam, among the religions, might go beyond a mere critique of modernity and reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing the intellectual advances of modernity, most notably the discoveries of modern science. He does not go so far to deem this likely. Considering the Muslims of the 18th and 19th centuries, the first to collide with the modern West, he writes, “No wonder many thought they had been abandoned by God.”

“Nearly always coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”–and, it might be added, rule of Muslims over non-Muslims–Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad’s founding. It did so, Muslims believed, by divine right and divine aid, morally and politically. “The bedrock of any Islamic sensibility must be the textual certainty of the Quran as the unaltered and unalterable word of God.” With respect to morality, the Quran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts endowed to individual souls, who should cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, the Sharia. The Sharia finds support in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consists of several elements. First of these has been empire, but empire of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort–“a relatively loose, non-institutional affair, mainly connected with generating revenue for the needs of the ruler and the functioning of the government” by means of tribute. Governmental functions include the administration of Sharia law (“the Islamic political world is infused by the sacred”) and of military defense as well as military “expansion and conquest.” The characteristic Muslim regime has been kingship, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

Muslims underestimated the modern West, assuming they had little or nothing to learn from proponents of imperfect religions. As for Western adherents to the new irreligion, Machiavellianism, Muslims correctly judged the modern state to be un-Islamic, against the Ummah, the body of believers. Surely God would favor Islam against such institutionalized atheism.

Nor did all Muslims recline in complacency. Allawi recounts the recommendation of the Algerian Emir Abd el-Qadir, a contemporary of Tocquevile, who proposed to filter Western technology through the existing network of Sufi civic associations and guilds–all governed under Sharia law. For awhile, Abd-el-Qadir remained confident, invoking “the power of Islam” derived from “the grace of the One and Only God.” But with Islamic strength pitted against Machiavellian strength, and with the strength of Islam unaccountably faltering, Abd-el-Qadir surrendered; “when it was impossible for me any longer to doubt that God for inscrutable reasons had withdrawn from me, I decided to withdraw from the world.”

This reclusion opened Sufism to the riposte Machiavelli aims against Christians, an argument Allawi calls “astonishing”: “that it was the spiritual dimension of Islam, distorted by the Sufi orders, that led to the decay and decrepitude of Muslim countries and opened them to foreign exploitation and conquest.” For their part, Western imperialists encouraged such quietism wherever they found it; the original moderns and the modernist critics of Islam within Muslim countries concurred in identifying the source of Muslim weakness as Muslim spirituality.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, a project seen most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. ‘Political’ Islam stood up even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Ad-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of these two forces, modernism and Islamism–to which Allawi adds a third, Western imperialism–“by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural, and psychological unit of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam–both severed from Islam’s spiritual roots–guaranteed Muslims’ political imbecility from then more or less until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed boith secularism and the non-spiritual, merely legalistic and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam,” a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”: Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld Abd-el-Qadir’s civil-associational strategy against satism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabik who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms (minus the atheism) as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stupefying victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes that directed those armies. The enrichment of the oil-rich Saudis {and thereby the Wahhabis) in the 1970s, along with the Iranian revolution of 1979 brought ‘political’ Islam to power in core Muslim states. Too little, too late, Allawi argues. Any scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Quran, has lost much of its original meaning, as many words have taken on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. For example, in modern Arab deen means religion; in Quranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life–the regime–of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity. The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions–secularism, historicism–far removed from Islamic learning.

As for the madrassas, the schools controlled by clerics, insofar as they teach `political’ Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined” legalist-literalist Islam, the Islam of the Wahhabits and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connections with the classical schools of law.” The classical schools of law had been moderate, restrained, and subtle in their decisions, and allowed for considerable leeway in their implantation,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. The rigidity of contemporary Islamic legalism yields a rigidity and at times outright fanaticism of practice, a Muslim procrusteanism that amputates all too many arms and legs. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding. All its vitality, originality and appositeness fade away, which turns it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

Allawi defends an Islamic politics that accommodates the variety of sects within Islam as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the eleventh-century theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad ib Muhammad al Ghazali, who argued along lines familiar to readers of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the religio-political question requires no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully but rather an acknowledgment of a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike: within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shi’a Muslims to hold high offices under the Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabis and Salafists Allawi adapts a phrase coined by a none-too-pious political thinker to make this point: “The closing of the Islamic mind, at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

Had Muslims glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance they might have conducted themselves along a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the nurturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islamic civilization by European powers.” Had this not happened, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” its own “version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” This legacy stems from “a short but decisive Quranic verse (Quran 42: 38), demanding that consultation should be the basis of any system of authority”: The Muslims’ “communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to “the entire community”–“in effect” “the entire population,” and not merely tribal elders or even adult males. So interpreted, this verse would form the foundation of a genuinely political life in Muslim communities, a foundation upon which a republican regime might have been constructed in a measured way, over time, perhaps along the lines enfranchisement widened under the British constitution in the 19th century.

Would such a politics, a “civilized” politics, include non-Muslims in the ruling body of the regime? Allawi does not explicitly say if “accommodation” entails shared rule. He inclines to wave away non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of Westerners.” But, he asserts, in places like Southeast Asia Muslim conquests were not really conquests at all, for the most part, but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” Dhimmitude–the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes–was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

Protect them from whom? This description of peaceable and accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring, were it quite believable. From its beginning, Islam comes to sight as a fighting faith. It combines the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always had imperial ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible, but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it even less.

Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so: but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve strategically and for now, would he deem `live and let live’ a Godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern natural rights derive from western convention, “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”–a violation of Islamic law, which allows conversion to Islam but never from Islam. Impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, this means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is–negotiable.

Allawi further assures his readers that Islam, alone among the major religions, rules no major state–no “core state,” in Samuel Huntington’s terminology–and therefore portends no new empire. Perhaps so, but has that not made terrorism–a technique intended to cause the centralized modern state to ‘de-center’ and collapse–all the more attractive to some self-described Muslims? The destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, the intended attack on the White House: none of these could make America collapse, but were they not rather costly in blood and treasure? No matter: “Islamist groups, when they succeed in achieving power, are soon bogged down in the minutiae of governing and remaining in power.” Well, yes–decisions, decisions. Shall it be ten stripes or fifteen for this heretic? A mullah’s work is never done. Although Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, these categories do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts.

And so we learn, “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself, reinforcing its `outsider’ status in the constellation of states and civilizations.” If so, then why has the West refrained from assaulting Muslim-ruled countries that have not (a) launched attacks against the West; (b) sheltered their co-religionists who launched such attacks; or (c) invaded neighboring countries?

Such criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well, and that’s a lot. He strikes me as a successor to the sober and moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to `privatize’ religion, to reduce religion’s authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively `privatized’ himself? Can his form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home–except in exile? Despite his longings, is he finally most nearly at home only in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jew, and Quaker so long as they “demeaned themselves as good citizens”?