a bad book on political islam

What ticks of these Muslims? Are they all crazy fundos? Well maybe not all of them, but surely a large number of them are, no? What’s with the head scarves anyhow? Come now, what with all the hullabaloos, these are some of the questions that many in the West, consciously or not, wonder about. And quite rightly I might add, after all, how are we to avoid a clash of civilisation if we don’t know the other, and until now, let’s face it, we didn’t really need to know the Muslims that well.

Muslims and their propensity to fundamentalism, or to use the original French title, Islam and its maladies, are what Abdelwahab Meddeb writes about in Islam and its discontents. What are these maladies? Something about resentiment. No, not resentment – while most of us would use the latter, Meddeb uses the former, so resentiment it is. Where does this resentiment come from? Well, from what I can understand, Meddeb thinks that the resentiment is a product of the Muslim world falling behind Europe half way through the last millennium. And vulgar Americanised pop culture exacerbates this problem.

Well, I think that’s what Meddeb is trying to tell us. I could be wrong. I’m not sure whether it’s a result of poor translation, or it’s Meddeb, this is a rather long winded book. Meddeb I’m sure is a learned person. It’s probably my failure as a reader that I don’t understand him. After all, I too am immersed in vulgar American pop culture that Meddeb bemoans.

There are other Frenchmen writing about political Islam. Gilles Keppel and Olivier Roy come to mind. Try them, and ignore this book.