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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Veiled Meaning

A veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether. ~Paul Berman One might say much the same about Berman’s essay on Ramadan, which seems to timidly and euphemistically dance around the edge of saying something bold about Ramadan.  I understand that writing […]

A veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether. ~Paul Berman

One might say much the same about Berman’s essay on Ramadan, which seems to timidly and euphemistically dance around the edge of saying something bold about Ramadan.  I understand that writing about certain things, especially intellectual movements to which you feel no particular attachment, can be difficult and a writer can sometimes feel as if his own argument is eluding him in the mesh of all the detail (this has to be even more true when the detail runs to 28,000 words), but after slogging through all of it I would have liked to have found out something more interesting than “who is afraid of Tariq Ramadan.”  I now understand who is afraid of him, but I just have no idea why I should really care what Tariq Ramadan thinks (or at least no more of an idea than I had going in).  Update: I also have no idea why I am supposed to be deeply engaged by tactical alliances between Trotskyists and Islamists or the journalistic assault on Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  I suppose these things are “new,” as Berman keeps calling them, but why are they interesting?  After finishing the piece, I can’t really say. 

Also, despite his utmost striving, Berman fails to convince that the influences of fascist or other modern European thought were as formative for Qutb and al-Banna as he and others routinely claim.  To take just one example from the Berman piece:

This was Islamism itself, in its Mussolinian, Third Reichstyle yearning for the final showdown.

But “the final showdown” is either implicit or very explicit in every monotheistic religion that concludes with an apocalypse, an end of days or a Day of Judgement.  I doubt very much that Qutb received this idea from fascist thought.  If anything, any familiarity he had with fascist thought would have been added to the Islamic background.  In any case, modern gnostics, such as fascists and the like, derive their political apocalypticism from the religious apocalypticism of which their ideology is a pale secular shadow. 

To bring in a phrase that many conservatives will cite but relatively few conservatives probably understand, the gnostic drive to “immanentise the eschaton” is precisely the attempt to realise an apocalyptic religious goal here below through the creation–often forcible and violent–of a secular equivalent of heaven or Firdaus.  A crucial difference between chiliastic religious movements and modern gnostics on the one hand and Islamists on the other is that it seems that the latter do not believe that they can accelerate or usher in the Day of Judgement.  On the contrary, it seems to me that a salafi has to be almost the opposite of a chiliast or modern gnostic in that he believes the “final showdown,” to use Berman’s phrase, is not in any way under his control.  The salafi may be a religious zealot with a political agenda (though he would not necessarily define the two spheres as being all that separate), but he does not think that he will bring Firdaus to earth.

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