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Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution
This book traces the essence of the Islamist Revolution from its origins in Egypt, through Najaf, Lebanon, Iran and the Iranian Revolution to today. Alastair Crooke presents a compelling account of the ideas and energy which are mobilising the Islamic world.
Crooke argues that the West faces a mass mobilisation against the US-led Western project. The roots of this conflict are described in terms of religious themes that extend back over 500 years. They represent clashing systems of thinking and values. Islamists have a vision for the future of their own societies which would entail radical change from Western norms. Resistance is presented as the means to force Western behaviour to change and to expose the essential differences between the two modes of thinking.
This is a rigourous account that traces the threads of revolution of various movements, including the influence of 'political Shi'ism' and the Iranian Revolution and its impact on Hezbollah and Hamas.
Crooke argues that the West faces a mass mobilisation against the US-led Western project. The roots of this conflict are described in terms of religious themes that extend back over 500 years. They represent clashing systems of thinking and values. Islamists have a vision for the future of their own societies which would entail radical change from Western norms. Resistance is presented as the means to force Western behaviour to change and to expose the essential differences between the two modes of thinking.
This is a rigourous account that traces the threads of revolution of various movements, including the influence of 'political Shi'ism' and the Iranian Revolution and its impact on Hezbollah and Hamas.
328 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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December 30, 2024
قبل الحديث عن الكتاب لابد من معرفة الكاتب. ألسدير كروك شخصية دبلوماسية بريطانية بارزة اشتهرت بآرائها النقدية للسياسات الغربية في الشرق الأوسط. أسس منتدى النزاعات في بيروت، وهي منظمة تعمل على حوار الأديان والثقافات. ما يميز هذا الكتاب أنه يغوص في أعماق الأسس الفلسفية والفكرية التي بنيت عليها الحركات الإسلامية الاكثر بروزا في وقتنا الحاضر ومقارنتها بالأسس الفلسفية والفكرية للدول الغربية.
November 3, 2016
İngiliz yazar Alastair Crooke'un Batı merkezli ve Oryantalist ağırlıklı İslam dili ve algısını eleştirdiği kitap ezber bozucu...
Bilhassa 'Sartre-Foucoult'cu perspektifle işlediği Politik Şiiliğin yükselişi ve Filistin-İsrail ihtilafına dair ABD-Avrupa yaklaşımının ele alındığı bölümler kaydadeğer.
Diğer taraftan, örneğin Hizbullah ile ilgili olarak 2006'da İsrail'i hezimete uğrattıkları mücadelenin ardından, günümüzde Suriye özelindeki menfi ve yıkıcı rolünün kitaptaki 'Direniş' algısı ve kimliğiyle ne kadar örtüştüğü tartışılır...
Bilhassa 'Sartre-Foucoult'cu perspektifle işlediği Politik Şiiliğin yükselişi ve Filistin-İsrail ihtilafına dair ABD-Avrupa yaklaşımının ele alındığı bölümler kaydadeğer.
Diğer taraftan, örneğin Hizbullah ile ilgili olarak 2006'da İsrail'i hezimete uğrattıkları mücadelenin ardından, günümüzde Suriye özelindeki menfi ve yıkıcı rolünün kitaptaki 'Direniş' algısı ve kimliğiyle ne kadar örtüştüğü tartışılır...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 29, 2024
Depois do fim da Primeira Guerra, foram conduzidas uma série de reformas liberalizantes no então Império Otomano. O objetivo não era apenas criar uma noção turca, mas destruir as intituições islâmicas vistas como obsoletas e obstáculos à modernização da economia. As Reformas Kemalistas são vistas de forma bastante positiva pelo Ocidente. Elas representam, em certo sentido, o template de modernização que o Ocidente gostaria de ver nas demais sociedades islâmicas.
Muitos muçulmanos, porém, têm uma perspectiva oposta. Para uma série de intelectuais e militantes islâmicos, o modelo das Reformas Kemalistas representam um grande retrocesso. Nessa perspectiva, a modernização no modelo Ocidental é um trade-off onde se ganha prosperidade material, mas paga-se o preço com o declínio moral da sociedade. A prosperidade material do Ocidente exigiu a criação de instituições que fazem a vida social, cultural e religiosa girarem em torno do mercado. A mercantilização de todas as dimensões da vida gera uma economia mais próspera, ao custo de destruir outros aspectos da existência humana. Dessa forma, a discordância do Islã com o Ocidente é sobre a essência do homem. Para o Ocidente o homem existe para satisafazer suas necessidades materiais, enquanto para o Islã esse hedonismo deveria ser evitado em prol de uma visão do homem centrada na comunidade e na justiça social.
Esse livro conta a história desse movimento de resistência ao longo do século XX, destacando intlectuais, como Sayid Qutb, Ali Shariati e Baqr Sadir e Musa Sadir; além de grupos militantes como Hamas e Hezbollah. No coração da resistência está, naturalmente, a Revolução Iraniana, mas também todo o arcabouço intelectual anti-colonial que tem em seu âmago a obra de Fanon. Fica claro na argumentação do livro que "Resistência" é o caminho encontrado por shiitas e palestinos para se humanizarem frente ao projeto de desumanização colonial conduzido por Israel e potências Ocidentais.
É uma leitura muito agradável principalmente por apresentar uma visão que nunca é articulada nos principais canais de mídia que, normalmente, limitam-se a tratar o mundo islâmico como bárbaros. Nesse sentido, esse livro é um antídoto ao orientalismo vigente na imprensa ocidental. Leitura altamente recomendável, especialmente no momento em que vivemos.
Muitos muçulmanos, porém, têm uma perspectiva oposta. Para uma série de intelectuais e militantes islâmicos, o modelo das Reformas Kemalistas representam um grande retrocesso. Nessa perspectiva, a modernização no modelo Ocidental é um trade-off onde se ganha prosperidade material, mas paga-se o preço com o declínio moral da sociedade. A prosperidade material do Ocidente exigiu a criação de instituições que fazem a vida social, cultural e religiosa girarem em torno do mercado. A mercantilização de todas as dimensões da vida gera uma economia mais próspera, ao custo de destruir outros aspectos da existência humana. Dessa forma, a discordância do Islã com o Ocidente é sobre a essência do homem. Para o Ocidente o homem existe para satisafazer suas necessidades materiais, enquanto para o Islã esse hedonismo deveria ser evitado em prol de uma visão do homem centrada na comunidade e na justiça social.
Esse livro conta a história desse movimento de resistência ao longo do século XX, destacando intlectuais, como Sayid Qutb, Ali Shariati e Baqr Sadir e Musa Sadir; além de grupos militantes como Hamas e Hezbollah. No coração da resistência está, naturalmente, a Revolução Iraniana, mas também todo o arcabouço intelectual anti-colonial que tem em seu âmago a obra de Fanon. Fica claro na argumentação do livro que "Resistência" é o caminho encontrado por shiitas e palestinos para se humanizarem frente ao projeto de desumanização colonial conduzido por Israel e potências Ocidentais.
É uma leitura muito agradável principalmente por apresentar uma visão que nunca é articulada nos principais canais de mídia que, normalmente, limitam-se a tratar o mundo islâmico como bárbaros. Nesse sentido, esse livro é um antídoto ao orientalismo vigente na imprensa ocidental. Leitura altamente recomendável, especialmente no momento em que vivemos.
March 8, 2026
My one complaint about this book is the sheer amount of intervening clauses that Alastair's writing relies on. Even as a native English speaker it becomes overwhelming without the typical in person indications that the speaker is going off into a tangent or giving you a small aside.
Ok now for the content. This is a book that has taken me over a year to read. There's much to digest in each chapter and plenty of footnotes that lead you down a rabbit hole of further reading material.
Things I want to read next that were referenced in this book: Chesterton's Orthodoxy; Gray's Black Mass; Zizek's Violence; Armstrong's Islam: A Short History and Holy War; MacLean's Re-Orienting the Renaissance; Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language and Foucault and the The Iranian Revolution; Sayyid Qutb's Islam, the Religion of the Future and Social Justice in Islam; Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; Eagleton's Holy Terror.
I read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine in the middle of reading Crooke's Resistance.
Below is a section of the final chapter in which Alastair gives a summary of the 10 major themes of his book:
"Islamist resistance was jolted into existence by the trauma of social engineering, ethnic cleansing, political disruption, repression and massacres that were the direct consequence of the western experiment in exporting to Muslim societies its vision of economic market-based life, freed from social and political control. The enforced westernization and secularization of Turkey, and the brutality of its nation-state building have come to symbolize the worst aspects of secular modernism. This is the first argument of Resistance.
"The second argument is that the western myth of the free market acting to reconcile the self-interested, individualistic choices of men and women, operating through the invisible hand to produce the optimal human welfare - is simply irreconcilable with Islam and poses an existential threat to it. It was a vision built on the myths of an invisible hand and of a spontaneous order emerging naturally from the 'disorder' of selfish competitive contention. The western nation-state, human rights doctrine and the institutions of western democracy are all derived from these same myths.
"Resistance's third theme has been that underlying this conflict are differing religious insights - and that Christian religious themes underlie western thinking on economics, on the nation-state and on the principles around which society is organized. It is therefore fundamentally a conflict touching on profound religious sensibilities, which subsequently synthesized into secular modernism.
"It is not, however, a straight confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, which America embodies, originated from the long-running struggle between the personalized, free-enterprise and Abrahamic embrace of change associated with Protestantism versus the community-based religiosity of Catholicism. These same originally Protestant themes can now be observed reflected in western language towards Islam.
"A fourth theme has been that, at bottom, the dispute comes down to two opposing views as to what constitutes the 'essence of man'.
"Resistance has argued that, in evolving an Islamist ideology, something important happened. Islamists, who had been constrained by western instrumentalist 'scientific' thinking along with most people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suddenly broke free. This was the crucial importance of the Iranian Revolution: it freed Islamists from self-imposed constraints resulting from an hegemony of instrumentalist thought. This is the fifth main argument.
"The ideology that evolved is dynamic and substantive. Islamism is acquiring 'open' society characteristics associated with a dynamic and evolving matrix of thinking, whereas the West is acquiring some of the characteristics of a 'closed' society. This represents and inversion of the popular western perception, and is the sixth major theme of Resistance. Islamist social and economic components are the ideological re-politicization of culture and of politics. They are the instruments of political mass mobilization, rather than life-choices marking the personal domains of an individual.
"The Islamist system makes little sense, however, if analyzed simply as a competitor to western systems and judged by its efficacy in meeting those norms. Islamist economics can only properly be understood against the aspiration to regulate the personal within the context of a collective and just society.
"Unlike the western project, the Islamist one is not utopian: it represents a system that is predicated on a realistic view of human nature. It does not aim to transform humans through human action, but believes that behavior is influenced by the experience of living in a just and compassionate community, and by humans behaving with each other, as God directed.
"The seventh argument of Resistance is that mainstream Islamist resistance is an expression of the human spirit in adversity, and represents a natural evolution from events that can be explained and understood historically...
"Resistance distinguishes between the emancipatory resistance of movements such as Hamas and Hesballah, the 'burn-the-system-to-build-anew' philosophy of al-Qae'da and the eschatological leanings of some Salafi groups. It argues that the failure of the West to make this distinction empowers the more extreme movements at the expense of the mainstream.
"Resistance maintains as its eighth theme that Islamist resistance is no more 'divine caprice' than the systematic violence deployed by western states as 'legitimate force'. Both have roots in religious insights. It argues that the reaction of the West to Islamist resistance has been the drive to foreclose any possibility of historical and rational explanation of resistance, and to close down the means of communication...
"The ninth argument is that the demonization of Islamism is not the result of a poor understanding of Islamism, or a 'legitimate', but ultimately flawed, exercise of judgement. It represents a deliberate ideological operation, one of whose objectives has been to weaken liberalism everywhere, to strengthen America's scope to take 'decisive action'; and another of which has been to justify greater American intervention in the Middle East in pursuit of the neo-liberal agenda...
"And the tenth argument of Resistance is that the pursuit of these objectives has been a failure that is ascribed to a way of thinking that has strewn its wreckage across 300 years of history, and which in recent years has added another astonishing mound of debris in the Muslim world - a legacy that will haunt the West for years to come.
Ok now for the content. This is a book that has taken me over a year to read. There's much to digest in each chapter and plenty of footnotes that lead you down a rabbit hole of further reading material.
Things I want to read next that were referenced in this book: Chesterton's Orthodoxy; Gray's Black Mass; Zizek's Violence; Armstrong's Islam: A Short History and Holy War; MacLean's Re-Orienting the Renaissance; Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language and Foucault and the The Iranian Revolution; Sayyid Qutb's Islam, the Religion of the Future and Social Justice in Islam; Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; Eagleton's Holy Terror.
I read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine in the middle of reading Crooke's Resistance.
Below is a section of the final chapter in which Alastair gives a summary of the 10 major themes of his book:
"Islamist resistance was jolted into existence by the trauma of social engineering, ethnic cleansing, political disruption, repression and massacres that were the direct consequence of the western experiment in exporting to Muslim societies its vision of economic market-based life, freed from social and political control. The enforced westernization and secularization of Turkey, and the brutality of its nation-state building have come to symbolize the worst aspects of secular modernism. This is the first argument of Resistance.
"The second argument is that the western myth of the free market acting to reconcile the self-interested, individualistic choices of men and women, operating through the invisible hand to produce the optimal human welfare - is simply irreconcilable with Islam and poses an existential threat to it. It was a vision built on the myths of an invisible hand and of a spontaneous order emerging naturally from the 'disorder' of selfish competitive contention. The western nation-state, human rights doctrine and the institutions of western democracy are all derived from these same myths.
"Resistance's third theme has been that underlying this conflict are differing religious insights - and that Christian religious themes underlie western thinking on economics, on the nation-state and on the principles around which society is organized. It is therefore fundamentally a conflict touching on profound religious sensibilities, which subsequently synthesized into secular modernism.
"It is not, however, a straight confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, which America embodies, originated from the long-running struggle between the personalized, free-enterprise and Abrahamic embrace of change associated with Protestantism versus the community-based religiosity of Catholicism. These same originally Protestant themes can now be observed reflected in western language towards Islam.
"A fourth theme has been that, at bottom, the dispute comes down to two opposing views as to what constitutes the 'essence of man'.
"Resistance has argued that, in evolving an Islamist ideology, something important happened. Islamists, who had been constrained by western instrumentalist 'scientific' thinking along with most people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suddenly broke free. This was the crucial importance of the Iranian Revolution: it freed Islamists from self-imposed constraints resulting from an hegemony of instrumentalist thought. This is the fifth main argument.
"The ideology that evolved is dynamic and substantive. Islamism is acquiring 'open' society characteristics associated with a dynamic and evolving matrix of thinking, whereas the West is acquiring some of the characteristics of a 'closed' society. This represents and inversion of the popular western perception, and is the sixth major theme of Resistance. Islamist social and economic components are the ideological re-politicization of culture and of politics. They are the instruments of political mass mobilization, rather than life-choices marking the personal domains of an individual.
"The Islamist system makes little sense, however, if analyzed simply as a competitor to western systems and judged by its efficacy in meeting those norms. Islamist economics can only properly be understood against the aspiration to regulate the personal within the context of a collective and just society.
"Unlike the western project, the Islamist one is not utopian: it represents a system that is predicated on a realistic view of human nature. It does not aim to transform humans through human action, but believes that behavior is influenced by the experience of living in a just and compassionate community, and by humans behaving with each other, as God directed.
"The seventh argument of Resistance is that mainstream Islamist resistance is an expression of the human spirit in adversity, and represents a natural evolution from events that can be explained and understood historically...
"Resistance distinguishes between the emancipatory resistance of movements such as Hamas and Hesballah, the 'burn-the-system-to-build-anew' philosophy of al-Qae'da and the eschatological leanings of some Salafi groups. It argues that the failure of the West to make this distinction empowers the more extreme movements at the expense of the mainstream.
"Resistance maintains as its eighth theme that Islamist resistance is no more 'divine caprice' than the systematic violence deployed by western states as 'legitimate force'. Both have roots in religious insights. It argues that the reaction of the West to Islamist resistance has been the drive to foreclose any possibility of historical and rational explanation of resistance, and to close down the means of communication...
"The ninth argument is that the demonization of Islamism is not the result of a poor understanding of Islamism, or a 'legitimate', but ultimately flawed, exercise of judgement. It represents a deliberate ideological operation, one of whose objectives has been to weaken liberalism everywhere, to strengthen America's scope to take 'decisive action'; and another of which has been to justify greater American intervention in the Middle East in pursuit of the neo-liberal agenda...
"And the tenth argument of Resistance is that the pursuit of these objectives has been a failure that is ascribed to a way of thinking that has strewn its wreckage across 300 years of history, and which in recent years has added another astonishing mound of debris in the Muslim world - a legacy that will haunt the West for years to come.
December 20, 2019
Excellent on the good intentions and solid reasoning behind Shi'ite Islamists' confrontation with the West; completely blind to the possibility that their alternatives may be just as illusory.
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