Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of AJISS we present a diverse number of articles that deal with a wide range of issues. The thorny and continuously debated relation between Islam and the West is the subject of four contributions: Ralph Coury’s “A Neoimperial Discourse on the Middle East,” Charles Butterworth’s “On Others as Evil: Toward a Truly Comparative Politics,” Ali A. Mazrui’s “Islam in a More Conservative Western World,” and M. Hazim Shah ibn Abdul Murad’s review essay on “Islam and Contemporary Western Thought.” Commonly, it is the reports of missionaries, travel literature, colonialist memoirs, or orientalist texts that have been the main field of research for studying western attitudes toward Islam. In contrast, Ralph Coury’s contribution takes an uncommon approach to exploring these attitudes by using the works of Paul Bowles, the American expatriate novelist, as a principle research tool. Bowles has spent most of his productive life in Morocco, where the Arab and Islamic constitutional elements of the people and their life make up the fabric and background of his novels and his other writings. In this penetrating analysis of Bowles’s views of Islam and of Arabs, Coury links the inner psychodramatic self of the novelist to his political and cultural unconscious in order to provide an alternative insight to his works. Looking at the issue from a different perspective, Charles E. Butterworth brings to the fore a variant reading of the western cultural heritage. Butterworth begins his study by emphasizing that, as far as the relation between Islam and the West is concerned, “for exchange to be fruitful, each party needs to look at the best in his or her own tradition, rather than at the worst, or even the ordinary, and ask that the interlocutor do the same for his or her tradition.” By this, Butterworth endeavors to recover the other, the lost and forgotten dimension of the westem mind: the mind of Homer, of Socrates, and of Albert Camus. It is the tentative mind that is seen as relevant to Islamic-western dialogue, the self-doubtful mind, where the human traits of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice lend themselves very prominently to a particular part of the western discursive tradition. Instilled with the wisdom and insight of a keen observer of the human condition, Ali A. Mazrui treats the subtle ideo-political transformation of the West as well as that of the Muslims living in the West, not as students or travelers, but as members of this society. His findings rest on three main ...