Tuesday's Read: Islam Against the West

William L. Cleveland. Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985)

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A rather inconsequential element of Shakib Arslan's character struck me as I read Cleveland's biography: his egocentric monomania. This was a man not particularly invested in his family. Not a philanderer, true - he had a long and stable marriage - yet, despite being known as a great thinker of his time, he did not devote himself to making provisions for his children's educations. His own son never learned to read Arabic, an irony that Arslan, a champion of Arab culture, spoke of with consternation and a certain flailing disapproval. When, late in his life, his wife conceived and bore two daughters within a couple of years of each other, Arslan seemed flummoxed. Throughout his life he struggled to support his family, often bemoaning his lack of funds. Easier for him to retreat to his inner world, and to traverse the world of political ideas and Islamic ideals, broadly writ.

Cleveland makes repeated mention of Arslan's sizable ego, and his devotion to what Foucault might call the late Ottoman episteme: a cultural and political milieu defined by Islamic superiority and, in Arslan's view, a milieu quite correctly politically and socially divided according to religious confession. Arslan was not a devotee of the new polities emerging from Europe. Nation-states and expansive imperialism had little cachet. Rather, the Ottoman order, with a millet system dominated by Sunni leadership, was his political ideal.

Yet, Cleveland explains, despite his devotion to elements of the Ottoman political order and his unwavering belief in the superiority of Islam, he was not a religious scholar. He was not trained in classical jurisprudence, nor did he turn to it to make his political and religious arguments.  Like many of his generation, he was deeply compelled by the scientific discoveries and technological advancements emerging from Europe. These were neutral, if not beneficial, ideologically speaking, unlike contemporaneous philosophical, political, and social exports from Europe.

Arslan's dabbling in fascism in the 1930s, and his support of the Axis Powers and their opposition to Zionism, was something that he later omitted (or downplayed in the extreme) in his autobiographical writings.  This seems entirely understandable; it would be difficult for a man of ideas, and a man who pushed himself into public view with such consistency and tenacity, to acknowledge that he had come down so far on the wrong side of history, particularly given the monstrous fallout that came from 1930s ideologies. Yet fascism was viewed as a compelling and possibly viable ideological alternative to some (though not many) intellectuals in the early twentieth century, a fact that Gershoni and Jankowski have thoroughly canvassed elsewhere. It is worthwhile, with the benefit of years of distance, to consider exactly why it was viewed by some with such favor. Cleveland makes the case that Arslan's interest in the Axis Powers was largely rooted in the desire to form political alliances, rather than a strong ideological affinity with fascism per se.