Book Review of Alastair Crooke, Resistance. The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, Pluto Press, London 2009
Alastair Crooke, director and founder of “Conflicts Forum”, traces the essence und spirit of the Islamist revolution from its origins in Egypt, via the Iranian Revolution to Hamas and Hezbollah. Having talked to many Islamists, he states “that the conflict between Islam and the West is at core a religious one”, even if the policies pursued by the West are secular. The ideas which underlie Western policies can be traced as a linear continuum from the Protestant and puritan struggle with Roman Catholicism. The same processes and the same discourse used against Catholics were later applied to Islam. Crooke cites an Iranian cleric who explains the nature of the conflict between Islamism and the West, according to whom the core of the conflict is about the “essence of Man”. The West, says the cleric, has not thought about the consequences that have flowed from its ideas and how they have affected others. The core of the problem lay in the Western process of thinking, i.e. how it “thinks about thinking”. This mode of thinking distorted the West’s view of the human being. Thus, the West had lost the centrality of the human person as a guide to how we should live in the future. “Only from such introspection”, says the Iranian cleric, quoted by Crooke, “can we begin to address what went wrong”.
“Resistance” tells the story of how the Muslim world embarked upon a journey to discover new confidence and self-esteem; to find a solution to Muslims’ feelings of victimhood and to end the humiliation brought upon by continuous contempt and demonisation. Islam has nothing to do with terror or suicide bombings, says Crooke, but with the daily fight for justice, for human respect and compassion. Islamists dispute the essential claim that Western modernity offers real human welfare. They reject the process of instrumental Western thinking and the abuses of power to which it has given rise, says Crooke.
The author states further that armed Islamist resistance is not, as misconstrued by Western media, reactionary violence directed against modernity against which Islamists resist or which they are unable to assimilate. The purpose of Islamist resistance is not to kill Westerners, as the crusaders did to Muslims, but “to force the West to change its behaviour”. One main object of the book is to try to explain the essence of the Islamist revolution and the quest for the essence of Islamism and its message. It is not a book about Israel and Islam, because Israel is viewed by Muslims as a sub-set of Western Weltanschaung, but about the Islamist resistance and the West. In this narrative Israel plays only an incidental role.
Crooke mentions numerous parallels between Islamist political and philosophical thinking on one side and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School on the other. It is no surprise, therefore, that second generation Juergen Habermas is widely read in Teheran. The exponents of the Frankfurt School were the first to approach questions of morality, religion, science, reason and rationality from a variety of perspectives. Like the Islamists, they argued that by the eighteenth century, Western instrumental rationality had tipped the balance of Western thinking, allowing knowledge derived in this manner to claim a false unassailability. Like the Shiite clerics, adepts of the Critical Theory claimed that the reification of scientific (or rational) thought had become so radical that it had become a means of dominance and control of the environment, nature and of Man himself. In the end, this development would lead to a de-politicisation of politics. Although culture survived, it became a privatised modus, a lifestyle, and not a public network of norms and rules.
The book asks what went wrong in the West after the Enlightenment. Crooke sees one major flaw in the functional instrumentality of Reason. This canon pervades Western politics, economics and science, and it antagonizes Islamic thinking. The westernisation and secularisation of Turkey, and the brutality pursued during the building of its nation-state, have become symbols of the worst aspects of secular modernism. The myth of a free market operating through an invisible hand, leading to optimal human welfare, is incompatible with the tenets of Islam and poses an existential threat to it. Another cause of conflict lays in differing religious insights: The foundations of the Christian world-view are said to underlie Western economic doctrine, the concept of the nation-state and the principles around which society is organised, writes the author. He distinguishes also between the “emancipatory resistance of movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah and the ´burn-t he-system-to-build-anew` philosophy of al-Qaeda and the eschatological leanings of some Salafi groups”. The failure of the West to make this distinction empowers the more extreme movements at the expense of the mainstream, so Crooke. The demonisation of Islamism is not the result of poor understanding by the West, but rather a “deliberate ideological operation” in order to weaken liberalism and to strengthen America’s scope to take “decisive action” like the interventions in the Middle East in pursuit of the neo-liberal agenda, so the author.
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