Abstract
HIS ANIMUS toward Israel leads him to a number of what one can only hope are errors of haste: By way of explaining Osama bin Laden's appeal, he writes that "the Palestinians ... have been living under Israeli military occupation in violation of UN Security Council resolutions for over 40 years," effectively conveying that pre-1967 Israel's existence is itself a violation; he discusses Israel's "crushing victory" and "seiz(ing)" of land in 1967 without mentioning that it was fighting a war of self-defense; astoundingly, he writes that "[t]he increased use of force under the Ariel Sharon government sparked the second intifada, which began in September 2000"--choosing not to remember that the then-prime minister was Ehud Barak, who was offering unprecedented diplomatic concessions at Camp David; he says that Hezbollah fought only until Israel's departure from Southern Lebanon, and is now a mainstream organization devoted to education and social services, an assertion belied by a scan of any morning's newspaper; and he refers to Shaykh Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, as a "pragmatist" for his willingness to participate in the Palestinian Authority, notwithstanding his forthrightly consistent refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist. Only "[a] small minority," Esposito writes, "continues to espouse violence and terrorism to liberate the whole of Palestine." And on and on. (And how much of this got past the editors at Oxford is its own kind of mystery.) Although animus toward Israel drives much of Esposito's analysis, he also discusses another pervasively cited issue: "the dangers of Western economic hegemony and its side effects." And, he says, "[t]he Muslim world's dominance by the West and marginalization as a world power, which has challenged Islam's relevance to modern life, and its lack of control over the forces of development, have been daunting barriers to progress." Here, too, yes, the emerging global culture of our time and its driving individualism, not only in economics, but also in politics, culture, and religion is deeply unsettling. It is also very attractive, which is why people in Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union struggle not only to find a place for themselves in this new global milieu but to work through its emerging networks and institutions toward a more supple shape of globalization. Again, why the Muslim and Arab worlds should be uniquely, and violently, resistant to globalization, if indeed they are, is left unexplained by Esposito. Esposito calls for greater cross-cultural dialogue and encouragement of genuinely creative and thoughtful Muslim reformers of today, and who can argue with that? But in the end, his insistence that Muslims are endlessly put upon victims who must endlessly be understood by Western elites, and his unwillingness forthrightly to acknowledge the ills besetting Muslim societies are deeply patronizing. "Democracy," he writes, "is an integral part of modern Islamic political thought and practice, accepted in many Muslim countries as a litmus test by which the openness of government and the relevance of Islamic groups or other political parties are certified." What, in the light of all we have seen in the past years, can this possibly mean, especially when nearly all of today's most creative Muslim thinkers find that they can thrive only in non-Arab states? (Indeed the Muslim reformers he himself discusses--Anwar Ibrahim, Mohammad Khatami and Abdurrahman Wahid--are respectively Malaysian, Iranian, and Indonesian.) The only concrete policy prescription to emerge from Esposito's analysis is, of course, for the United States to distance itself from Israel.