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Middle East: Fundamentally Speaking
| Article
# : |
10683 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
2,739 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Molnar
Thomas Molnar is professor of religion at Yale. He is the
author of The Pagan Temptation; The Decline of the
Intellectual; Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time; and God and
Knowledge of Reality. |
RADICAL ISLAM, MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY AND MODERN POLITICS
Emmanuel Sivan
Yale University Press, 1985
218 pages
IN THE PATH OF GOD, ISLAM AND POLITICAL POWER
Daniel Pipes
Basic Books, 1983
373 pages
Which one, the military nation-state, or a return to Islamic values, will help the Arab world turn to new glory, and incidentally to modernize its structure and economy? This is the basic question-complex asked by Professor Emmanuel Sivan, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Professor Daniel Pipes from the United States Naval War College. To be sure, their topics do not quite overlap. Sivan is mostly interested in the unity of Islamic thought on political matters, from the writing of medieval scholars to the present time. Pipes focuses on the present, especially the last few decades, during which the Arab state (including Iran, which is Moslem but not Arabic) emerged from historical passivity to an almost decisive role, thanks to their geopolitical situation and to the Western industrial need of their black gold, oil.
In these two volumes, interested mainly in political developments, religion plays a prominent function. Islam is the least secularized of the three major monotheistic religions, and the authors stand before this phenomenon with a certain incomprehension, although they study it and describe it with scholarly thoroughness. One of their
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