At first this book looks like another eye-catching, fear-mongering title aboutIslam. Are these books promoted by profit-hungry publishers or by underpaidfretful academics? Or has Islam become fair game for a wider unrestrainedacademia replacing the Orientalist school with newer analytical tools? Somepreliminary remarks, or a contextualization, might be useful here.Whatever its “resurgent” form, Islam is presenting something of an enigmaticchallenge for all. From the bazaars of the East to the sidewalks of the West,it refuses to lie down or go away. Attempts to discount it, ignore it or even suppressit have not succeeded. This hauntingly recurring phenomenon (p. 1) needsto be relabeled and reassessed. But the doubt lingers that representing it as “terrorism,”“theocracy,” “obscurantism,” “fundamentalism,” or “religious extremism”has muddied waters even more. Feeding popular fears with such preconfiguredterminology has neither satiated curiosity, quelled fears, nor broughtanyone closer to the truth.Compounding the picture is the “location” of the writers of such works: theworld-view, epistemology, discourse theory, or narrative framework fromwhich they approach Islam. The much-heralded objectivity of academia issacrosanct no more. Relativity, subjectivity, and the actor’s point of view are invogue. Old Orientalist views and definitions of the non-Occidental world arebeing overwhelmed by an array of (neo-Orientalist) analyses from a variety ofdiscourse perspectives.These analytical tools, even if applied with some success to their own societiesand disciplines this past century, don’t seem to have much of a shelf lifewhile some are less effective than others: positivist assertions fast give way torealist or inteqretivist ones; modernist perspectives to postmodemist ones; andstructuralist interpretations to poststructuralist ones. And when applied to Islamand Muslim societies, the results of these approaches can be bewildering (asshown by Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), and so can their effects (as shown byHuntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations prognostication).From its side, the Muslim world is all the more perplexed at the persistenceof such stereotypical labeling and analyses. Generally unfamiliar with these“new” tools, their reaction is either to ignore this “demonology of fundamentalism”(p. 16) or to interpret it as another of the West’s conspiracies against Islam.Sometimes it results in outright hostility (as shown by Khomeini’s fatwa andBradford’s book burning) or crude attempts at redress in reciprocal terms (as inAkbar Ahmed‘s Postmodernity and Islam). To western experts, such reactionscan only seem woefully inadequate.Furthermore, the apparently monolithic scenario of western experts with theirwestern critiques of the non-West is complicated by the emerging presence ofnonwestern migrants and their offspring on the westem academic scene. Taken ...
Aerodynamic analysis of multirotor vehicles using a higher-order potential flow method
