Comrade Joseph Massad on "Islam in Liberalism" in Jadaliyya

"JM: The book tackles such a wide-ranging and varied body of literature that each chapter could also have become a book unto itself. The first chapter discusses the emergence of the European liberal discourse on democracy, citizenship, and political freedom and how Islam was integral to these categories from their inception, so much so that one could argue that these categories themselves are Orientalist categories which oppose themselves to the Orientalist categories of Oriental despotism, subjection, and political repression. The chapter addresses both liberalism as ideology and as a ruling political regime(s) in Europe/the US and how both aspects of liberalism invented themselves in relation to something they christened (and I use the term deliberately) “Islam.” The literature varies from Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Samuel P. Huntington, and from British government reports and late-nineteenth-century special French journals that discussed the question of “Islam” to late-twentieth-century Rand Foundation reports on how to use Muslims to overthrow the Soviet regime. In terms of diplomatic history, it emphasizes the Russian-Ottoman wars of the 1770s to the 1870s and addresses the fear of colonial officials in Algeria, India, and Indonesia of what European colonialism would christen “pan-Islamism,” to World War I, World War II, and post-War American deployment of Islam as central to its anti-Soviet Crusade. Protestant Christianity as a category has an important role to play in these debates, and I bring it in in various parts of the chapter. The chapter also analyzes how the deployment of Islam served and continues to serve western liberal subjugation of Muslims, and it relates the Islam claimed by ruling regimes in Muslim-majority countries to the Islam fostered by liberal Western regimes."