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L'Islam
de Marché: L'Autre Révolution Conservatrice
Haenni, Patrick.
L'Islam de Marché: L'Autre Révolution Conservatrice.
Reviewed
by Issandr El Amrani, TBS book reviews editor
In this short volume,
Swiss researcher Patrick Haenni has written an introduction
to the new forms of religiosity and religious expression that
have taken much of the Islamic world by storm. Several of the
book's chapters are of particular interest to TBS readers as
they outline the central role of television in spreading these
new phenomena and engendering a new form of religious outreach
that invites its followers to reconsider Islam's role in their
personal lives rather than in their political demands.
In this sense, Haenni's
work builds on and expands on the conclusion that French students
of political Islam such as Olivier Roy had reached in the 1990s,
when they heralded "the failure of political Islam."
If that diagnosis has been partly contested by the rise of Al
Qaeda and numerous Islamist electoral successes across the Arab
world, it also has been partly confirmed in the failure of Islamist
groups to wholly convert their societies to the idea of a Salafist
return to an early Islamic period. Indeed, as Haenni points
out, there has been rising dissent among these groups against
the authoritarianism and dogmatism of their leadership. These
dissidents, Haenni argues, "without necessarily leaving
these organizations, prefer to focus on personal salvation,
self-improvement and the quest for economic success." This
disenchantment with traditional Islamism coincides with the
rise of new, more pious, bourgeoisie that seeks to reconcile
its mercantile interests with Islam – hence the book's
title, "Market Islam."
Two of the most famous
practioners of this trend are the Egyptian television preacher
Amr Khaled, whose TV shows draw a huge following among Arab
youth, and his Indonesian counterpart Abdullah Gymnastiar, better
known as Aa Gym. Haenni argues that these preachers drew directly
on the model of American televangelists, not only in that they
invented a new type of religious broadcasting that resembles
afternoon talk shows more than the didactic one-way conservations,
but also because they constructed publishing empires (books,
computer programs, cds, dvds, live events, etc.) around their
personality. There is a direct relationship with the American
Christian model in Aa Gym's case at least since one of his closest
advisors actually is a former Houston-based Presbyterian tele-preacher
who converted to Islam.
The American evangelical
"revolution" that began in the 1980s is not the only
source of inspiration for these preachers. A contemporary revolution,
that of self-improvement publishing, is part and parcel of the
entrepreneurial message behind "market Islam." Preachers
such as Khaled urge their followers to renounce the ambient
fatalism that plagues many Arab youths and engage in a more
positive, can-do view of life whose central model is the successful
businessman. In the 1980s, prominent Muslim thinkers introduced
concepts of what it meant to be a good Muslim that included
ideas borrowed from Western self-improvement hits such as Dale
Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
By the 1990s, the Arabic translation of Stephen Covey's The
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People engendered a wave
of Islamic adaptations, which focus on the idea that Islam is
the best path to both spiritual self-improvement and material
success.
When Haenni writes
of "the other conservative revolution" (the book's
subtitle) he is not referring to the rise of Islamist political
groups, from which many of the current leaders of "market
Islam" left disenchanted. He is drawing a comparison to
the rise of the religious conservative movement in the United
States, which has provided a model for combining populist religiosity
and America's celebration of the successful entrepreneur. "Having
been converted to the virtues of the private sector and the
market as well as the cause of the 'minimum state,' market Islam
already appears as the ideal partner of the Americans not only
in their Middle East policy, but also in the conflict of modernity
that opposes it to the Europe of the Enlightenment, of secularist
and statist rationalism," concludes Haenni.
L'Islam de Marché
is, because of its size, a necessarily synthetic book. Its fascinating
thesis deserves to be expanded into a longer work, if only because
there is still too little study of the new expressions of religiosity
that have appeared in the Muslim world in the past two decades.
In the meantime, it should at least be translated into English
to reach a wider audience.
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