By Paul Berman
Two decades in the past, Ayatollah Khomeini referred to as for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers all over the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s protection. at the present time, in accordance with author Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into a whole social class”—an ever-growing staff of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, specially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who continue to exist in basic terms as a result of pseudonyms and police safety. And but, rather than being applauded, the Rushdies of this day (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) usually locate themselves brushed off as “strident” or as no larger than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist circulation who falsely declare to be “moderates.” How did this ensue? within the FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman—“one of America’s major public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)—conducts a searing exam into the highbrow surroundings of the instant and exhibits how a few of the West’s top thinkers and newshounds have fumbled badly of their efforts to grapple with Islamist rules and violence. Berman’s research of the heritage and nature of the Islamist stream comprises a few remarkable revelations. In interpreting Hassan al-Banna, the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood, he exhibits the increase of a big and sometimes violent worldview, parts of which survives this day within the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman additionally finds the stunning tale of al-Banna’s affiliate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated in my view with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab aid of the Nazis’ North African crusade. Echoes of the Grand Mufti’s Nazified Islam might be heard one of the fans of al-Banna even at the present time. In a gripping and fashionable narrative Berman additionally indicates the legacy of those political traditions, most significantly by way of targeting a unmarried thinker, who occurs to be Hassan al-Banna’s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan—a determine greatly celebrated within the West as a “moderate” regardless of his troubling ties to the Islamist stream. taking a look heavily into what Ramadan has really written and stated, Berman contrasts the truth of Ramadan along with his photo within the press. In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds gentle on a few glossy issues—on the vastly reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our personal time, on a newly trendy flip opposed to women’s rights, and at the problems we've got in discussing terrorism—and offers a beautiful observation in regards to the sleek media’s strange lack of ability to discover and research the most harmful principles in modern society.
Read Online or Download The Flight of the Intellectuals PDF
Similar political freedom books
China’s emergence as a very good energy is an international obstacle that may very likely modify the constitution of global politics. Its upward push is multidimensional, affecting the political, safety, and monetary affairs of all states that include the world’s quickest constructing sector of the Asia-Pacific. lots of the lately released reports on China’s upward push have enthusiastic about its kin with its rapid neighbours in Northeast Asia: Japan, the Koreas, Taiwan, and Russia.
The alliance among Syria and Iran has proved to be an everlasting characteristic at the political panorama of the center East. This e-book lines the serious phases within the evolution and consolidation of the alliance within the Nineteen Eighties, and provides causes for its durability into the twenty first century.
Securitizing Immigration offers with the starting to be hindrance for immigration as an issue of defense on the european point. It combines an research of ways bureaucratic and political approaches have interacted within the integration approach with an research of ways those practices can be found in a context formed by way of the preoccupation with danger.
- Counterterrorism: Democracy's Challenge
- Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays
- Values and Perceptions of the Islamic and Middle Eastern Publics
- Zimbabwe: Picking Up the Pieces
Extra info for The Flight of the Intellectuals
Example text
A helpful creationist proposal. But the Darwinians, unlike the Voltaireans, were in no rush to yield. That was in 1995, and by then Ramadan had already established himself in Lyon, at the Union of Young Muslims and the Tawhid bookstore and publishing house. These were slightly raffish immigrant endeavors, somewhat outside the old and official mainline Muslim organizations in France. Even so, the mainline organizations welcomed the arrival of a brilliant young philosopher. He built alliances. He attended conferences.
Meddeb winced. The Bush administration spoke about “Islamic fascism” with Al Qaeda in mind, though also with an implied reference to some of the other currents on the radical side of the Islamist movement—the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iranian theocrats, and so forth. The administration’s habit of rhetorically lumping those several groups together struck Meddeb as still another mistake, tactically speaking—a formula for committing the crudest of foreign-policy blunders. One of Bush’s keenest supporters among the American intellectuals was Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neo-conservative movement.
The book recounts the intellectual history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, of the philosophical current within modern Islam that Ramadan regards as his own. And, at the heart of the book, stretched across some two hundred pages, is a portrait of the single most influential figure within that history, who is, of course, Hassan al-Banna—the man whose ideas Ramadan has adopted for himself and has set out to preserve, which also means: to adapt. Ramadan’s two hundred pages on al-Banna are a gusher of adulation.