Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left.(Book Review)

Thinking Past Terror:

Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left

By Susan Buck-Morss

W.W. Norton & Company, 160 pages

Susan Buck-Morss reminds us that an engaged public must take on Islamism as a discourse, or a way of understanding and giving meaning to the world. Buck-Morss, as a scholar of the Frankfurt School, or dissident Marxists who pose a critical theory of society and politics, offers a thought experiment in response to the racialization of Islam and Arabs: what if there were a counter-hegemonic global solidarity movement? She asserts that Islamism is not a pathological worldview used by evil fanatics to destroy other ways of life but rather a political discourse. Islamism is not monolithic but a diverse and fragmented politicization of religion and culture in which people explore and figure out power relationships, postcolonialism, capitalism, modernity and Western hegemony. Thus, Islamism is a way of viewing the world that, if taken seriously rather than as an alien, dangerous ideology, can help us completely rethink leftist politics. In particular, political Islam is struggling with the same contradictions of the current political, economic and social global hierarchies as "we" are. If both Western progressive and political Islamic thinkers/activists could recognize a shared commitment to understanding power, then that very communication would pull together a leftist movement dedicated to radically democratizing the world.

Buck-Morss proceeds to dismantle assumptions about Islamism, such as misogyny and repression, in a fascinating narrative that deftly moves from the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy to a critique of global capital to the depoliticization of art to an open-ended question about the possibility of a global left She argues that if we want to fiercely critique how power works, we must explore these seemingly ...