Muslims, Islams and Occidental Anxieties

Muslims, Islams and Occidental Anxietiesdeconstructs our common prejudices about both the compatibility and incompatibility of Muslim and Western civilizations. Rather than reinforcing the well-meant, but misinformed, opinion that the religions all fundamentally teach identical values, we identify what seem different distinctive Muslim "goods." Rather than offering the facile moral choice between an Islam either "all good" or "all bad," we argue the case for pluralism derived from Sir Isaiah Berlin. In many cases, Islam thus represents a distinctive system of alternative ethical and religious "goods" to those valued in the West. In other cases, differences will remain different and unresolved. Far from necessarily threatening Western moral and religious identity, we explore how the alternative "goods" Islam offers the West can enrich our notions of what constitutes "the good," even to the extent of reviving or enlivening certain Western religious practices. Along with instructional guidelines for classroom use, the book in informed by the powerful and intellectually rigorous device of investigative, empathetic "dialogue" or "conversation," as articulated by MIT's Sherry Turkle and Oxford's Theodore Zeldin, respectively. This form of dialogue steers clear of the didactic mode and instead recovers the open models of philosophical dialogues pioneered by Plato, Socrates, and the "tolerant" Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus and Jean Bodin.