Review of
Daniel Pipes, In The Path of God: Islam and Political Power.
Basic Books, 373 pp. $22.50.
AS THE Iranian revolution approached its climax five years ago, many Western journalists in Tehran, including myself, wasted hours interviewing the wrong people.
Everyone drove down to Qom to see the mullahs, of course, but we didn't really understand what kind of people they were or what they were talking about. We were more comfortable up in the hills of north Tehran, talking to the prosperous, European-educated, liberal-minded lawyers and professors and bankers who lived in spacious villas near the Shah's palace. We, and they, assumed that their families would control the future of post-monarchical Iran. We hardly dreamed that within a year they would be as irrelevant to Iranian politics as Andaman Islanders, swept aside by a reactionary religious force that left even the United States, a superpower, bewildered and humiliated.
This force, the absolutist Shi'ite authority of the Ayatollah Khomeini, seemed as anachronistic as a dinosaur—but just as powerful. Perhaps we would have better understood what was happening if we had access to Daniel Pipes' remarkable book, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power.
Pipes has taken on, and very nearly accomplished, a daunting task: to explain the political and social development of the Muslim peoples from their origins to the present, to show how contemporary political events in the Muslim world are the inevitable consequence of that history, and to demonstrate why the "Islamic revival" of the 1970s—a phenomenon of which the events in Iran were the most extreme manifestation—is ephemeral and transitory.
Pipes, a lecturer in history at Harvard, has produced a brilliant, authoritative, but occasionally infuriating and inconsistent work which demonstrates encyclopedic knowledge of Muslim intellectual history and a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims. He has described himself as an agnostic Jew who supports Israeli policy. Here he professes respect for Muslims but is frequently contemptuous of them. He sometimes misstates conditions in Muslim countries, and is swayed by the writings of anti-Muslim commentators less judicious than himself. But on balance these unfortunate lapses do not diminish the perceptiveness of his analysis.
The religious fervor and seething anti-Americanism that boiled over out of the slums of south Tehran and overwhelmed the Westernized elite who lived up the hill are much less difficult to comprehend when one has followed Pipes through the decline of medieval Muslim culture, the bitter experience of colonialism, and the psychic shocks administered to the Muslim body politic by the 1967 war and the 1973 oil embargo.
Few other writers have explained so lucidly such complex developments in Muslim history as the codification of the legal system known as Shari'a, the historic failure to implement it, the ossification of intellectual life in the post-medieval era, the principle of jihad (which has never meant ‘holy war,'), the rise and decline of the modernizers and "reformists" such as Muhammad Abduh, and the struggle to cope with the discovery that "barbarian" Europe had outstripped the Muslim lands in every material and intellectual sense.
"Were the Eskimos suddenly to emerge as the world's leading artists and scholars, were factories in Greenland to outproduce those of Japan, and were invaders from the far north to conquer the United States and the Soviet Union, we would hardly be more astonished than were the Muslims two hundred years ago when they suddenly fell under West European control," Pipes writes.
This development has been explored in richer detail in Bernard Lewis' wonderful The Muslim Discovery of Europe, but Pipes' brief account is certainly useful to the nonspecialist trying to understand what seems to be the inherent political instability of the Muslim world.
Pipes understands that this instability is not inherent in the Muslim creed but arises from historical circumstance. He explains, for example, the historic lack of identification between Muslim peoples and their rulers: their larger allegiance was to the Umma, or community of Muslims, while rulers were merely conquerors or usurpers who came and went. Muslims would rally to the cause against non-Muslims—crusaders, Israelis, Hindus—but "wars between Muslim ruling elites looked like pointless jousts to the masses . . . for a believer, the king in Cairo at war with the king in Damascus was like the governor of Illinois at war with the governor of Indiana." The loyalty of the people was "directed to a nation that had no structure. The umma, unlike the U. S. government or the French republic, was not a political reality. Muslims gave their support to an abstraction as though Americans saved their warmest feelings not for the nation but for North America or the Occident."
Pipes' thesis is that the Islamic revival was the almost inevitable response of people who entered the postcolonial era politically crippled by their own history and by their own centuries of failure to implement the rule of Muslim law. He argues that the rise of the petro-power states, and the social disruption caused by sudden wealth, stimulated the revival, and that it will fade away as the oil boom dwindles. "The power of Saudi Arabia and Libya," he says, "will fade as their disposable funds diminish, and the two countries will return to their former inconsequential isolation. Iran's moral influence is fated to end as surely as (its) financial power . . . the effort to wrench Iran back to a standard that no one has ever been able to live by is doomed; as the Khomeinist regime falls, non-or anti- Islamic forces seem likely to take its place."
These points are forcefully presented and cogently argued. The book is a valuable contribution to our understanding. This makes it all the more unfortunate that it is marred by exaggerations, inconsistencies, and evidence of hostility to the subject.
He writes, for example, that daily life in Islam is characterized by "a physical separation of the sexes . . . any man and woman considered potentially attractive to each other sexually are kept apart." This greatly overstates the case, and is simply not true of Egypt, Tunisia or Somalia.
He asserts that the tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe manifests itself today in "obsessive hostility toward the state of Israel." He fails to say who, exactly, in Europe or America, exhibits this "obsessive hostility," or in what form.
Pipes ridicules the Saudis and Kuwaitis as "rentiers," living off oil wealth and producing nothing of value of their own. But he ignores the considerable evidence that the great oil-price increases of the early 1970s were encouraged by the United States.
And he cites too often the views on Islam of V.S. Naipaul, whose nasty put-down of Asian Muslims, Among the Believers, Pipes calls "masterly," and of J.P. Kelly, an unreconstructed colonialist whose views on the geopolitics of the Middle East and Asia went out with the British raj.
A more perceptive editor might have counseled Pipes to purge these and similar passages. Without them, the book would be the definitive work of its kind.
THOMAS W. LIPPMAN, deputy editor of the National Weekly edition of The Washington Post, is the author of Understanding Islam.
