Commissioned Book Review: François Burgat, Understanding Political Islam
| Author | Sümeyye Sakarya |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211031859 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) NP5 –NP6
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1031859PSW0010.1177/14789299211031859Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
Understanding Political Islam by François
Burgat (translated by Thomas Hill). Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2020. 248 pp., £80.00
(h/b). ISBN 9781526143433
Despite being White, male and French, just as
the luminaries Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel,
François Burgat has been the ‘other’ of
Islamism literature. Understanding Political
Islam narrates the odyssey of this otherness.
The book consists of two parts. Part I,
Discovering the Muslim ‘Other’, provides a
snapshot of Burgat’s journey and transforma-
tion as a researcher. These voyages, ranging
from Algeria, Egypt, Yemen to Palestine,
Syria, Libya and the ‘Home’ – France – not
only recount a memoir of a Western traveller
but also shed light on the dynamics in the
region and among and around the Muslims by
telling a relatively unique history of them.
Drawing on the experiences mentioned in the
first part, Part II, Political Islam: The Stakes of
an Alternative Interpretation, explores the piv-
otal moments and facets of this distinguished
history-telling with a focus on political Islam.
By juxtaposing his work to the dominant schol-
arship and milieu, Burgat maps the venture of
Islamism in those discussions and practices. As
a ‘political scientist of the Muslim World’ who
retains ‘the deep conviction that remaining
close to the field was a sine qua non of aca-
demic research’ (145), Burgat carries out this
mapping through his encounters and their
reviews. These encounters vary from the meet-
ings with political actors, activists, journalists,
intelligence agents and academics to being a
witness or part of crucial meetings, critical
exile and exportation processes and unusual
exchanges and moments. In that sense, beyond
traditional travel memoirs or autobiographies,
the book emerges as a critical analysis of
Islamism and the relevant literature.
In the light of this account, what differenti-
ates Burgat’s work from the bulk of literature is
twofold. Initially, unlike the explanations of
Roy and Kepel, his explanations of Islamism
do not conform to French – in general Western
– norms of ‘political correctness’ (197). In
other words, his approach to Islamism dis-
tances him from the Eurocentric and Orientalist
Western tradition, which is the dominant one
both in the academy and in policy/politics
(when there is any separation). The instances
of the backlash he has received due to his
stance on several issues such as the Algeria
war, Palestine, the 9/11 (169–187) and the
Charlie Hebdo attacks (212–226) are among
the indications of his political marginality and
dissent. The reason for this political position is
partly related to his second difference. As
opposed to the researchers whose foot ‘no
longer touch the ground’ (43) due to too much
theory, Burgat states that his ‘first contacts in
the field of political Islam were sociological
and human ones, rather than merely reading-
based and theoretical’ (149). This emphasis on
the field, ground over or against the theory,
iterates several times throughout the book. For
instance, while criticizing Roy’s ‘post-Islam-
ism’, he states that Roy’s work ‘more theoreti-
cal, or archetypal, than it was sociological or
based on observation of dynamics in the field’
(200).
It is undeniable that this sociological and
ethnographic approach grants Burgat an excep-
tional place in the literature. For, as he stated,
by enabling him ‘to contextualize, and there-
fore to humanize, the breach that the players of
political Islam represented’ (149), this
approach permits him to construe and analyse
Islamism in its ‘omnipresent diversity’ (5). On
the contrary, paradoxically, it develops as the
main limitation of Burgat’s work, for it pre-
vents him from articulating a framework that
can explain Islamism as a dynamic transna-
tional phenomenon beyond MENA, the Arab
world and occasionally even the nation-state.
By reducing the solution to the sociology of
knowledge – epistemology – through too much
focus on the field, Burgat neglects the need for
To continue reading
Request your trial