Politics
M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabizing Logic of Zionism
(Palgrave, 2010).
century, determined to create a Jewish state in Palestine. This is their solution
to the ‘abnormal’ condition of European Jews, who are without a land and are
not a nation. To achieve this, they must seize Palestine; induce Western Jews
to become colonists; and, above all, recruit Western powers to adopt their
colonial project.
Zionists can only succeed by creating Islamicate enemies; they need
resurgent anti-Semitism to send Jewish colons to Palestine; and they must
persuade/coerce the West to stand behind their colonial project. In succeeding,
the Zionists merely transplant Jewish abnormality from Europe to the
Middle East – and make it worse. In Europe, Jewish-Gentile frictions were
local problems; in Israel, ominously, they have come to form the pivot of a
global conflict that pits the West against the Islamicate.
Read reviews of this book by Christison, Yassin-Kassab, Ahmad and Salaita.
M. Shahid Alam
Scholarship or Sophistry? A Review of Bernard Lewis'
"What Went Wrong?"
This paper reviews Bernard Lewis' book, What Went Wrong? It critiques
his essentialist thesis about the backwardness of the Islamic world, viz.,
that the Islamic world fell behind the West because Islam is incompatible
with democracy, denies rights to religious minorities and limits the rights
of women; that Muslims lacked curiosity and made no attempts to catch-up
with the West. Instead, this paper seeks to place the phenomenon of
Islamic decline in the context of world history and world economy.
Starting in the early nineteenth century, Western Europe used its growing
military and economic power, both derived from the Industrial Revolution,
to control and penetrate the economies of the rest of the world. Consequently,
over the period 1800-1950, China, India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe,
Latin America, and the Islamic world went into relative or absolute decline.
Contrary to Lewis's position, this decline was a general phenomenon; it was
not specific to the Islamic world.
Click here to read the rest of this essay: go to page 57.
M. Shahid Alam
Is There An Islamic Problem?
It has become fashionable in some circles after September 11 to
excoriate Islam as the source of the problems facing the Islamic world.
The air is thick with theories which claim that Islam has been paralyzed
by a deadening obscurantism since the twelfth century, and this paralysis
will only end when Muslims decide to replace Islam with secular
humanism. It is time these theories were deconstructed.
Click here to read this essay.
M. Shahid Alam
How Eurocentric Is Your Day?
At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias
in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global
economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in
several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
Click here to read this essay.
M. Shahid Alam
An Abnormal Nationalism
This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between
Israel - leading an alliance of Western states - and the Islamicate more
generally. Jewish ‘nationalism’ was abnormal for two reasons. It was
homeless: it did not possess a homeland. The Jews of Europe were
not a majority in, or even exercised control over, any territory that could
become the basis of a Jewish state. We do not know of another nationalist
movement in recent memory that started with such a land deficit - that is,
without a homeland. Arguably, Jewish nationalism was without a nation too.
The Jews were a religious aggregate, consisting of communities, scattered across
many regions and countries, some only tenuously connected to others, but
who shared the religious traditions derived from, or an identity connected to,
Judaism.
Click here to read this essay.
