Celebrating centrist Muslims

Raymond Baker offers some good news amid the gloom of global terrorism, opening up the little-known world of wasatiyya—or centrist—Islam. It is the Islam of the “new” intellectuals of the “Islamic Revival,” including legal scholar Mohammed al-Ghazali (d. 1996); journalist Fahmi Huwaidi; Al Jazeera broadcaster Yusuf al-Qaradawi; and politicians Necmettin Erbakan (d. 2011), Alija Izetbegovic (d. 2003), and Rachid Ghannouchi. Baker sees these leaders as “heralds” of an “Islamic renewal” who hold sway over a majority of Muslims around the world through their thinking and writing on globalization, democracy, social justice, and freedom.

Baker, who teaches international politics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and political science at the American University in Cairo, provides a scathing critique of Western—and particularly American—imperialism. Reacting to orientalist attitudes and to the work of his mentor Samuel Hun­tington, he seizes every opportunity to remind the reader that many of the present crises in the Middle East have arisen as a result of the West’s ill-considered interventions, greed, and ineptitude. This criticism is particularly refreshing coming from an American, albeit one who has spent a large part of his adult life living in Cairo and traveling in Islamic lands.

The title suggests that Baker offers a grand tour of the great diversity of expressions of Islam around the world. Instead, the book is a narrowly focused exploration of one particular stream, which the author terms the “River of Life.” Baker is clearly enamored of the Qur’an, which he quotes freely, and he seems to identify with Islam without declaring allegiance to it. He sees the wasatiyya as representing “Islam itself,” as though he has the authority to pronounce it the correct interpretation. On the other streams within Islam he has little to say. In a few sentences he writes off “inherited Islamic institutions like Al-Azhar,” the leading Sunni university in the world, as “docile official Islam.” He labels interpretations of Islam that espouse violence “criminal versions of Islam” and deems them unworthy of further discussion or explanation. He does not discuss progressive Muslims such as Abdullahi an-Na‘im, who advocates a form of secular state, or feminists such as Fatema Mernissi.