Michael Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics. The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, Princeton University Press, Princeton-Oxford, 2014
Last update: 2025-01-21 16:06:21
During a phase in which hyper-specialization seems to be playing the lord and master in academia, Michael Cook, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, has not given up aspiring to great panoramas. After exploring (inter alia) the pivotal principle of ‘commanding good and forbidding wrong’ down through the whole of Islamic history (Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought) and measuring himself against nothing less than the history of mankind (A Brief History of the Human Race), Cook in his latest book analyses the relationship between religion and politics in Islam, comparing the latter with Hinduism and Latin American Catholicism.
The aim of the book is to investigate the way in which the three great religions’ classical repertoires are mobilised in the context of modern politics and the great principles that inspire such politics (nation, democracy, freedom and equality). In particular, Cook considers their relationship with six elements: identity, society, war, ‘divine jealousy’ (i.e. the degree of all-inclusiveness that the divine precepts enjoy), the polity and fundamentalism. The result of the interaction between each of the three religious traditions and politics is certainly conditioned by their respective bodies of doctrine but it is also anything but a foregone conclusion; so much so that ‘no tradition is a reliable predictor of the behaviour of those who inherit it, but just as surely heritages are not interchangeable’ (p. 248). Ancient Religions, Modern Politics thus simultaneously avoids two distortions found fairly commonly in religious and Islamic studies, in particular. On the one hand, the idea that the social and political behaviour of believers is integrally determined by their religious faith and, on the other, the conviction that religion is no more than the epiphenomenon of more profound social, economic and political factors and processes. But if there is no direct and (above all) stable causal link between religious faith and type of political action, it is nevertheless possible to outline some tendencies. The Islamic tradition contains principles that are very much in harmony with some of modernity’s political imperatives and, at the same time, others (such as the exclusivism of its religious law) that prevent its definitive reconciliation with modern political systems. Whether certain principles or others are activated thus depends on the convictions and strategies of the various actors. The way Hinduism relates to modernity is, in certain respects, more conflictual but, precisely for this reason, Hindu ideologues and militants use their tradition very selectively, renouncing the more problematic aspects (the caste system, for example) and emphasising those that are electorally more advantageous (consider the insistence on identity). The Catholic tradition is less politically conditioning, on the other hand. Catholics risk, rather, assuming the characteristics and values of the movements and ideologies with which they ally themselves each time, in a spectrum that can range from reactionary conservatism to the revolutionary Marxism embraced by liberation theology. The soundness of Cook’s approach and his conclusions is guaranteed both by the accuracy of his reasoning and by the cross-referencing between an impressive number of texts, documents, statistics and opinion polls, in which it is the facts that give form to the theory and not vice versa. At the end of the book, Cook condenses the results of his long exploration in order to have his say on the religious reawakening that, for some years now, seems to be characterising societies at every latitude. The author wonders, in particular, whether this reawakening is actually a global fact and is, for this reason, affecting all faiths, or whether it is not just an optical illusion produced by the Islamic revival, whilst the other religions would be continuing to fall behind. The answer is that the reawakening is actually a verifiable fact but the case of Islam, in its Islamist version, presents two elements that the other religions lack: the desire to found a State wholly governed by religious criteria and the recourse to armed struggle (jihad) as the fulfilment of a duty inscribed in the religious tradition. Some might disagree. But whoever might wish to contest Cook’s position would have to be prepared to attempt an intellectual and documentary tour de force equal to the one this book constitutes.