Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith

Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith. By Vartan Gregorian, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. xi + 164 pp. $19.95 (cloth).

This is a little book with a big mission. Its goal is to build bridges between the Islamic and Western worlds by raising the standards of understanding of Islam and Muslims. Its author, Vartan Gregorian, born in Iran, is a scholar-administrator who has had a stellar career as the president of Brown University and the New York Public Library. Gregorian is currently the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

According to the author, the book was originally written as a brief report to the trustees of Carnegie Corporation in 2001. It was then turned into its present form with the idea of "promoting American understanding of Islam as a religion, the characteristics of Muslim societies, in general, and those of American Muslim communities, in particular" and to "promote intergroup and interfaith understanding within our pluralistic democracy-and especially among the three Abrahamic faiths." In spite of its small size and inevitable generalizations, the book achieves this goal to a large extent. The authors knowledge of Islamic culture and history is reflective of his own personal journey from Iran to the United States.

The analysis and presentation of Islam as a mosaic rather than a monolith is emphasized throughout the book. The first chapter provides a brief survey of Islamic religion and culture. Among the issues discussed are the historical rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, the five pillars, the Shari'ah, the Sunni-Shiite division, and the later history of Islam until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The author does not seem to follow a standard system of transliterating Arabic words in English, and this has led to several transliteration mistakes. These include nowbowat instead of nubuwwah, towhid instead of tawhid, and Mevlavi instead of Mawlawi in Arabic and Mevlevi in Turkish.

The second chapter lays out the main theoretical framework of the book: the author makes a distinction between "modernists" and "traditionalists." Even though Gregorian does not define these two groups clearly, he considers the tension between the two as emblematic of modern Islam. He sees both groups and their successors in the twentieth century as closely related to nineteenth-century colonialism and its impact on the Islamic world. The third chapter continues this theme and introduces further distinctions. According to the author, two major phenomena define Islamic religious movements in the modern period. While "Islamic revivalism" considers "religious reform as an end in itself," "Islamism" regards "Islamic revival as a means to a political goal, namely, the reorganization of the state." At this point, Gregorian divides the Islamists into moderates and militants.

Chapter 4 discusses Islamism as a politics of liberation. Gregorian explains Islam's widespread appeal as a functioning ideology in terms of the continuity of traditional Islamic values on the one hand, and the effects and failures of modernization in Muslim countries, on the other. With this distinction, he avoids falling into the trap of an internalist scheme where everything good is attributed by Muslims to an idealized view of Islam and everything bad is attributed by non-Muslims to the allegedly intolerant, dogmatic, and militant culture of Islam. The author is also careful in not pushing an externalist scheme to its limits where everything bad that happens in the Islamic world is attributed to colonialism and everything good is attributed to the forces of modernization and the pressure of powerful Western states (as many now believe in the aftermath of 9/11).

The last two chapters of the book are not so much scholarly ruminations and strategic analyses as the sincere call of a concerned citizen to go beyond the received categories of Islam versus the West. Gregorian points to extremisms bred by the Islamophobes in the United States as well as others in the Islamic world, and warns against the dangers of creating a market for a clash of civili7.ations. In the torrent of books that have come out since September 11 and which define Islam as the new "other" of the West, this little book is a conscientious call of reason and understanding.

IBRAHIM KALIN

College of the Holy Cross

Worcester, Massachusetts

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Summer 2004
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