Editorial 

In this issue of MZSS 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 Butter- 
worth’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, colonial- 
ist memoirs, or orientalist texts that have been the main field of research for 
studying western attitudes toward Islam. In contrast, Ralph Coury’s contri- 
bution 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 cul- 
tural unconscious in order to provide an alternative insight to his works. 

Looking at the issue from a different perspective, Charles E. Butter- 
worth 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 rele- 
vant 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 



paradoxes: 1) western secularism might be good news for Muslims in the 
West, though western materialism might be bad news; 2) recent Repub- 
lican, rather than Democratic, foreign policy has been more friendly to 
Muslims, whereas Democratic, rather than Republican, domestic policies 
are probably more friendly toward Muslims; and 3) the contrasting attitudes 
and affinities of the two Islams in the United States, that is, indigenous 
Islam and immigrant Islam, in terms of their ethnic and linguistic back- 
ground, their sensitivity to domestic American policies, their political and 
economic weight, and their attachment to the “American dream.” 

The review of M. Hazim Shah ibn Abdul Murad deals with the works 
of Akbar S. Ahmed and the late Emest Gellner on Islam and postmod- 
emism. Registering the difference in scope and intellectual depth between 
the two volumes under review, Murad nonetheless presents a vigorous and 
comprehensive analysis of both. He observes rightly that while Ahmed 
“views postmodemism favorably as inaugurating a mood that would allow 
for a more tolerant accommodation of Islam in contempomy western soci- 
ety, Gellner states bluntly that postmodemism and religious fundamental- 
ism are incompatible and basically opposed to one another.” 

The other three studies in this issue focus on some important aspects of 
modem Islamic intellectual preoccupations. TW J. al ‘AlwMi’s “The Tes- 
timony of Women in Islamic Law” is an extensive rereading of Islamic 
sources and a challenging analysis of classical Islamicfiqhi opinions con- 
cerning the weight of a woman’s testimony vis-i-vis that of a man. 
Mohammed Hashim Kamali‘s “Islamic Commercial Law: An Analysis of 
Futures” is a synthetic and innovative study of the Islamic law of transac- 
tions (mu‘dmakdt), which covers a large part of daily life in a typical Mus- 
lim society. His approach of accounting for the increasing complexity of 
life and of giving the Islamic primary sources, the Qur’an and hadith, prece- 
dence over the Islamic traditionalfiqhi heritage, is also apparent in S. 
Shawkat Mi’s “Foundation for Communication in the Qur’an and Sunnah.” 

Finally, we would like to bring to our readers’ attention two impor- 
tant corrections of the last issue of MISS. Abdul Majid al Najjar’s 
“Classification of Sciences in Islamic Thought: Between Imitation and 
Originality” (vol. 13, Spring 1996, pp. 59-87) was, in fact, written origi- 
nally in Arabic. The English translation that we published was produced 
through the collective efforts of the Translation Department of the 
International Institute of Islamic Thought. Also worthy of mention is that, 
on page 11 1 of the same issue, the fourth life from the bottom of Yushau 
Sodiq’s book review of Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial 
State of Bundu, we wrote: “Third is the claim that many of the Almaamis 
did not adhering to the Islamic teaching, and drank alcohol and had more 
than four wives.” This should be read as follows: “Third is the claim that 
many of these Almaamis were not adhering to their Islamic teachings, 
and thus they engaged in alcohol consumption and marrying more than 
four wives.” We deeply apologize for these oversights. 

Basheer Nafi