The American Left and Islam: the case of Paul Berman

"Berman is no Benda, standing up to over weening power and establishment bias. Rather, Berman embraces them on the way to trying to denigrate an embattled European intellectual who, in a sure sign of his moderation, has made enemies in both the Western and the Muslim worlds. Berman has been stalking Ramadan for some time now in a spirit of fury and resentment, as anyone reading his unbalanced “profile” of Ramadan for The New Republic will remember. Nor is there anything liberal about Berman’s attack on Islam through his misappropriation of Hannah Arendt in his “Terror and Liberalism.” There, after referring to Saddam Hussein as a “totalitarian menace” and to the “entire situation” in the Middle East as having “the look of Europe in 1939,” Berman calls for an “anti-totalitarian war.” He concludes the virulently ideological book by asserting that “right now we are beset with terrorists from the Muslim totalitarian movements.”  Such anti-Muslim screeds, posturing as liberal anti-Islamist critiques, tell us little about the radical Salafist threat (“totalitarianism” has nothing to do with it) and nothing about the crucial difference between Islam and the perversions of a few of its radical zealots. In the tradition of Samuel P. Huntington’s polarizing “Clash of Civilizations,” Berman’s work is all bias and invective encased in pseudo- social-science jargon. It is liberal-universalist only because he says it is."

BENJAMIN R. BARBER
New York
The writer is a distinguished senior fellow at Demos and the Walt Whitman professor emeritus at Rutgers University.