Suchergebnisse

This is the slyest, and therefore smartest, assessment of Islamic fundamentalism currently
available. The author, a prolific Lebanese political theorist, has offered in this, his fourth
monograph on the subject, a well-argued, highly original thesis. Moussalli asks one basic
question: does Islamic fundamentalism have a philosophical basis? "Yes, it does,"
he replies, "but it is not the same basis for all Islamic fundamentalists." He then
proceeds to demonstrate how particular Islamic fundamentalist theorists have addressed issues
such as ideology and knowledge, society and politics, from their own philosophical perspective.
The argument is markedly tilted toward politics, as each of the six chapters examines either a facet
of political philosophy or the discourse of a particular theorist on the Islamic state. The first three
chapters are framed as general overviews, first of the fundamentalism–modernism dyad,
then of the epistemological divide between divine revelation and human reason, and finally of the
discursive dichotomy between the Islamic state and democratic pluralism. The next three chapters
shift to dominant theorists, the three "heroes" of Islamist ideology. Chapter 4
examines Hasan al-Banna on the Islamic state; Chapter 5, Sayyid Qutb. Chapter 6 takes up the
most prominent current Islamist: Hasan al-Turabi. Not since Hamid Enayat's Modern
Islamic Political Thought (Texas, 1982) has any scholar made such a comprehensive effort
to trace the patterns of similarity—and the evidence of conflict and
disagreement—among the major ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism.

The debate about the Internet revolution has been marked by a double dystopia. One comes
from the Scandinavian cybernauts who are far more extensively wired than their West European,
or even North American, counterparts. In "Digital Arrogance," the Swedish media
scholar Andreas Kitzmann laments that the global expansion of multimedia technology and
cyber-culture "is motivated not by the promise of human emancipation and enlightenment
but by fantasies of power and complete control." The South Asian cultural critic Ziauddin
Sardar is even more harsh. "Cyberspace is social engineering of the worst kind. . . . The
supposed democracy of cyberspace," he writes in Cyberfutures (1996),
"only hands control more effectively back to a centralized elite, the ideology of the free
citizen making everyone oblivious to the more enduring structures of control."