[In the following review, Cooke evaluates the strengths of Islam and Democracy, but finds minor shortcomings in Mernissi's assertions about Western time and her rhetorical point of view.]

This reinterpretation and re-presentation of Islam [in Islam and Democracy] by the controversial Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi is at once affectionate and angry. She presents a picture of a beautiful, flexible, self-renewing religion in conflict with its despotic and corrupt political superstructure from the perspective of an insider who as a girl attended Qur'anic school.

Like several recent studies, this one uses the Gulf War as context. Mernissi regards this confrontation between East and West as a turning point because it emphasized the debilitating division that has characterized Islamic history: “an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force” (p. 21). This division appeared in an Islam that was already polarized between communal practices—religion, belief and obedience—and individual behavior—personal opinion, innovation, and creation. She asserts that if Islam is to survive as a viable system. Muslim scholars like her must tap the individualist tradition of rationalism represented by such groups as the Mu'tazila. If not, the vicious cycle of intellectual opposition, repression, and violent rebellion (e.g., the Kharijites) that began under the Abbasids and is now fed by weapons from the West will persist. The Gulf War also revealed political divisions in the Arab world between countries, between classes, and between regimes and their subdued masses. It showed how unhealthy it is for Muslims to be dependent on the West.

Quoting vivid passages from Islamic historiographers, Mernissi admonishes Muslims to find a balance between Islam as a ruling system and modern political philosophy, between blind obedience to a misinterpreted scripture and freedom of thought within a secular democracy. She asserts that what prevents Muslims from enjoying the benefits of modernity, particularly democracy, which she insists is not a Western, but a universal “insistence on the sovereignty of the individual rather than of an arbitrary leader” (p. 16), is incapacitating fear.

Chapter by chapter, Islam and Democracy catalogues the fears that prevent Muslims from fulfilling themselves: the West, the imam, democracy, freedom of thought, individualism, the past, and the present. Mernissi insists on the importance of understanding the West, especially in this postcolonial era when opposition to its values is no longer a nationalist mandate. The West is both bugaboo and model: colonizing enemy, it yet demonstrated the effectiveness of rationalism: creator of a global arms market that has destroyed the infrastructure of the Islamic world, it yet fostered tolerance within a secular humanism.

Mernissi points to the connection between modernism and fundamentalism. In a world of opportunity for others, the “mixture of frustration and religion is explosive” (p. 55); it even produced a fatwa against a writer of fiction. Islam alone seems to offer a “sense of identity and the power to struggle” (p. 59); it is a “force for the destabilization of privilege” (p. 113). She insists on the importance of contextualizing Islamicism within the “new world order” that is dependent on plentiful supplies of oil so that it is recognized for what it is: “tele-petro-Islam.”

There is a fascinating discussion of technical terms such as hija, hudūd, 'aql and ra'y. An interesting aspect of this semantic analysis is the connection that Mernissi forges between women and power and violence: “In the new post—Gulf War city, which will be anything but the madinat al-salām, what will happen to the women who cause fear because they have already gone beyond the boundaries and refused to accept them?” (p. 10), a somber warning to feminists who would defy their system while remaining in it. Yet she does offer another option that she herself follows: study the feared jāhiliyya and understand that it is in that violent era that today's ignorance finds its roots. Time has exacerbated this pre-Islamic evil and has allowed for the appearance of American women combatants in what had once been the land of the terrifying “goddesses of death, pregnant with fifteen centuries of oblivion” (p. 115). She advocates a renewal in the current jāhiliyya—a term she uses much as Islamicists are now using it—that sounds almost like da'wa. Just as in the 7th century of the common era, Muhammad and his followers came to liberate Arabian society from its misogyny, so enlightened Muslims may today become beacons in the feminist revolution.

Mernissi argues logically and cogently for the interdependence of the social and the feminist revolutions. Her thesis is reminiscent of the calls of other Muslim feminist activists who have insisted that the nationalist revolution cannot succeed without the success of the feminist revolution. Without equality throughout society, liberation movements will remain stymied. The future is in the hands of women who have recognized the essential good in the bad of historical Islam. It is up to them, grounded in a well-understood Islam, to challenge the authority of the despots, whether they be the leaders of the Islamic nations or of the Western powers, to demand citizenship for all equally and to call for demilitarization. Men will never do it alone.

However, I am less convinced by her argument about the nexus between women and time, the anxiety about women's power being connected with fears of mortality, and the need to overcome such obscurantism so as to be able to resist the worst, probably because the most hidden colonization, that of Western time. She seems to be advocating a complete rupture with the modern world, especially America. Also, there are some slippages that occur because of the reformist polemics of the project. It is not always clear whom Mernissi is addressing. Sometimes it seems that she is targeting Arabs, then all Muslims, and sometimes even a Western audience. She alternately blames each and then warns of the coming revolution led by women. Her admonitions as from an insider merge into pleas for unity as from an insider. With whom does she identify? Or, does she feel herself to be sufficiently distanced that she can choose the perspective she wants depending on the rhetorical goal? Islam is at once good and bad. Although the implication is that the good is at the heart of essential Islam and the bad is on the surface of a historical system, she may invoke a recent glorious past so as to rail against a destructive West: “The cold war derailed the cultural development of Muslim societies and, in Iran, allowed the imams to emerge as deformed mirrors of stifled aspirations” (p. 113).

Islam and Democracy provides a rich mix. It is at once scholarly in tone and emotive, political and personal, theoretical and activist, serious and sometimes surprisingly informal. It will be of interest to all students of Islam as a religion and a culture.