Books in Brief

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0728
• Pages: 728367350288-731
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Tibi, Bassam. Political Islam, World Politics and Europe.

London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 367 pages. Paperback $52.00

Political Islam, World Politics and Europe by Muslim scholar/philosopher

Bassam Tibi is a timely study about the continuing rise of political Islamism in the

twenty-first century. The book’s exigency is borne out of concern for world peace,

security and democracy. It is in four parts, beginning with the conflict within the

Islamic civilization in both its Sunni and Shi’ite varieties to institutional Islam and

global jihadism to Europe as the battlefield for the competing options.

The Introduction frames the main argument of the book after contextualizing

the impact of the politicization of Islam and its entry into world politics, in the

latter decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first

century. Reading this modern emergence of the Muslim voice as civilizational

rather than religious, Political Islam traces the international political shift to two

major events from the Muslim World: the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the

September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Tibi seeks a corrective to the

misrepresentation of Western sensational media and some Western leaders as to

the Islamic connection of both events. Both the Iranian remaking of their world

order according to Islamic values and the al-Qaeda’s jihadism have been lumped

together as a challenge to Western secular modernity. The massive Muslim migra-

tion to Europe, seeking safety and security from political and economic oppres-

sion, exacerbates the problem. What has emerged on the international world scene,

Tibi suggests, is a new dichotomy of Christian versus Muslim, a “new Cold War.”

He rightly believes that Europe is unprepared for this challenge neither legally nor

civilizationally.

For the sake of security, democracy and political pluralism, both Europeans

and Muslims have a mutual responsibility to negotiate religious absolutism, Tibi

recommends. He contends that violence does not result in peace for all concerned.

Rather, this “politics of civilizations” demands a reconfiguration of world politics

as a cross-cultural bridging of European cultural modernity and reformed Islam.

Since the contest for the future world order is a war of ideas, Tibi adds, education

for democracy is paramount at this historical juncture. Whereas Muslims must

abandon jihadism and revive the medieval tradition of Islamic rationalism that

embraces pluralistic democracy, Europe’s task is to understand that education

about Islam is part and parcel of their cultural modernity. Tibi concludes that