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In The Path Of God
Director of the Middle East Forum and columnist for the New York Post and Jerusalem Post , Pipes explains to western readers the political dimension of Islam, and especially the importance of controlling territory, that had been leading to misunderstanding and conflict. He adds a new preface in light of the September 2001 attacks, and a page of corrections to the 1983 Basic Books edition. Annotation c. Book News, Inc.,Portland, OR
373 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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October 31, 2025
From early 2006 through the COVID-19 years, I immersed myself in the study of comparative religion. It was during that contemplative phase that I read this book.
Reading this book [is like stepping into a furnace of reason and fear, where the historiography of Islam and politics is forged in the tension between modernity’s promise and tradition’s claim. Pipes, who originally published this work in the early 1980s and updated it through later editions, sets out to explain the connection between “Islam” and political power across fourteen centuries.The ambition is vast; the terrain is colonial-and-postcolonial, doctrinal-and-geopolitical, theological-and-temporal. But in that very sweep lies both the appeal and the fault-lines of the work.
Pipes divides his inquiry into three parts: pre-modern legacy, encounter with the West, and current affairs. In the first, he charts how Islamic law (shariʿa) and Islamic polity (caliphate, sultanate) created a synthesis—a civitas of the dar al-Islam—in which religion and politics were not only intertwined but fused. In the second, he observes how Western military, economic and cultural power disrupted that synthesis, precipitating what he calls a “crisis” of modernity for Muslim societies. In the third, he offers a survey of the so‐called “Islamic revival” of the late 20th century, reading it as a reaction to both colonial/historical decline and contemporary humiliation.
At its strongest, the book’s first two sections shine as a coherent interpretation: Pipes does not shy away from the fact that the political dimension of Islam has deep roots, nor from the structural tensions between the universalist impulse of Islam and the particularist claims of polity. In these chapters he demonstrates historical erudition and analytical clarity—he is able to trace how early Islamic governance, theology, jurisprudence and empire merged in a way few generalist texts attempt. This is commendable: in a field where polemics dominate, Pipes attempts a grand synthesis, and in many readers’ judgment, succeeds.
Yet the postmodern reader must ask: whose archive is this, and whose story is being told? Pipes presents Islam as a monolithic tradition battling modernity, and the West as the inevitable challenger. But the very structure of his narrative reproduces the binary it purports to explain.
By positing “Islam” as a single subject—timeless, coherent, stretching across centuries—he falls into a universalizing trap that the study of religion, politics, and history is increasingly wary of. In Foucault’s terms, the book functions as a “regime of truth”: the narrative that sustains our modern anxieties, articulates the problem—“Islam and political power”—in a way that implicitly justifies the observer’s vantage.
Consider one of his central claims: that Muslims, confronted with the overwhelming force of Western civilization, rejected its methods while coveting its successes—“Muslims saw what the West had and wanted it too, but they rejected the methods necessary to achieve this.”
This is a seductive phrase, but its neatness masks the complexity of cultural contact. It assumes a continuity of Muslim reaction across centuries, simplifies heterogeneous experiences of modernization and colonialism, and flattens local variation into a global pattern of decline and resistance. Postmodern criticism would call this a narrative of teleology: Islam → decline → revival → confrontation. The scholarship risks turning into prophecy, not just interpretation.
In the section on “Islam in Current Affairs,” Pipes himself acknowledges that his earlier causal link—between oil revenues, Islamic revival and militancy—is less convincing today. “I no longer try to account for the rise in militant Islam with a single explanation,” he admits.
This is important: it shows Pipes’ awareness of the mutable nature of the phenomena he describes. But its presence also highlights that the third section of the book is the most dated and the most vulnerable to critique. While the historical sections remain robust, the contemporary analysis—anchored in the 1980s lens—works less well for our post-9/11, digital era of Islamist networks, ideological hybridity and global flow.
What does the text reveal about the epistemic structure of the West’s engagement with Islam? I would argue it shows the West’s longing for coherence in the face of complexity. The desire to identify a “path of God” that leads toward political power is a form of narrative therapy—assuaging the disquiet that modernity’s liberal rationality finds when confronted by faith, identity, and insurgency. The mode is diagnostic: Islam is the patient. The West is the observer. Knowledge becomes control. In this sense, the book partakes in what Derrida would call the metaphysics of presence: the assumption that the West’s act of naming, analyzing, and intervening is itself an act of mastery.
And yet, despite these critiques, the book still has value. It forces readers to grapple with the intertwining of religion with political sovereignty—and to ask questions that many avoid: What happens when a faith that offers ultimate claims enters a world where claims are accountable? How does a civilisation constructed on religious universality adapt to the pluralist, secularised, normative world order? Pipes presses those questions. His strength lies in his willingness to view religion not as private belief but as public power. For students of modern Islam, this is an unavoidable dimension.
The style of the book is crisp, sometimes brisk. Pipes writes like a scholar intent on being accessible to the general public yet rigorous enough for specialist reflection. The punctuation between historical narrative, law-text summary, and policy implication is swift. The effect is at times exhilarating—an intellectual promenade through caliphs, jurists, colonial officers and contemporary militants. But for those attuned to nuance, the abrupt transitions from empire to modernity to “Islamic revival” can feel like leaps rather than bridges.
I found particularly compelling the section on Islamic law as prime mover. Pipes argues convincingly that shariʿa has always been inherently politically relevant—that it was never merely private piety but public order. This challenges the common Western assumption that Islam is primarily a spiritual or private domain. Recognising Islam’s political dimension is essential to any serious discussion of Islamist movements, states like Saudi Arabia or Iran, or non-state actors today. He writes: “My goal was to present an overview of the connection between Islam and political power through fourteen centuries.”That ambition matters.
However, the ambition also generates one of the book’s structural weaknesses: the tendency to compress time, to treat the longue durée of Islamic history as a single continuum, and thus to imply continuity where rupture and variation occur. The postmodern reader may critique this as a flattening of difference: medievalist Islam, Ottoman reformism, modern nationalism, Islamism—they are treated as points on the same path rather than as qualitatively different phenomena. In historicizing Islam as always already political, Pipes sometimes conflates context-specifics into general law.
The political dimension of the West-Islam encounter is treated through military, economic and ideological lenses. Pipes notes, for instance, the impact of Western armies invading Muslim lands, or the attraction of socialist ideologies among Muslims disappointed by Arab nationalism. He identifies multiple “responses to Western political ideologies.”
Yet the emphasis remains on Islam’s reaction, not on Islam’s internal dynamism or on the agency of Muslims as actors in worlds beyond the West-Islam binary. One could argue that this reflects a broader epistemic imbalance: the studied object (Islam) is defined in relation to the studying subject (West) rather than on its own terms.
In the current era—where Islamist movements operate transnationally, digital flows reshape radicalisation, and faith communities engage in hybrid modernities—the relevance of Pipes’ framework is both affirmed and challenged. His historical sections confirm the durability of religion-politics intersections; his predictive sections reveal the limits of linear modelling. He writes in the preface: “The debates over causes of the Islamic surge has become less important. The surge … has become part of the landscape.”
That admission acknowledges the shift from novelty to constancy—but also suggests that the study of Islam and politics now needs frameworks that account for multiplicity, fragmentation, and networked power.
One of the more provocative aspects of the book is its normative conclusion: Pipes argues that modernity, liberal values, and secularisation represent the future; that Islamist impulses are doomed, or at least fundamentally incompatible with Western norms. Critics and admirers alike have flagged this as triumphalist, as projecting secular liberalism as inevitable. The postmodern stance questions inevitability itself: the belief in progress, universal rights, and liberal rationality may themselves be ideological, not descriptive. In claiming the future, the book asserts a moral architecture—one that privileges the West’s form of modernity. From this vantage the text is both analytic and ideological—a duality worthy of scrutiny.
To read this book during those long, solitary days of the pandemic felt oddly apt: the world had become more interconnected, more volatile, and more uncertain. The need to trace constellations of power, identity, faith and violence felt urgent. Pipes’ text offers one such map, even if its legend is incomplete. It invites the reader into a space of critical reflection: to recognise that religion can be power, that political order can be sacred, and that modernity’s claims cannot eliminate the ghosts of the past.
In closing, I would say that *In the Path of God* stands as a checkpoint—a benchmark in the scholarship of Islam and politics. It is not the final word (no such thing exists in the postmodern landscape), but it continues to provoke, to raise questions, to force reckoning. Its strengths lie in its dalliance with scale, in its boldly drawn sweep of centuries, and in its refusal to treat Islam as simply a cultural curiosity. Its limitations lie in its monolithic framing, its implicit Western vantage, and in its teleological leanings.
For the reader committed to understanding how faith, law, and power have intersected in Muslim history, this book remains worthy of attention—so long as one reads it not as Gospel truth but as a starting point for deeper inquiry.
In the path of understanding, then, Pipes invites us not simply to watch history but to walk its contours, to feel its tremors, to recognise that the “path of God” is never linear, never final.
Reading this book [is like stepping into a furnace of reason and fear, where the historiography of Islam and politics is forged in the tension between modernity’s promise and tradition’s claim. Pipes, who originally published this work in the early 1980s and updated it through later editions, sets out to explain the connection between “Islam” and political power across fourteen centuries.The ambition is vast; the terrain is colonial-and-postcolonial, doctrinal-and-geopolitical, theological-and-temporal. But in that very sweep lies both the appeal and the fault-lines of the work.
Pipes divides his inquiry into three parts: pre-modern legacy, encounter with the West, and current affairs. In the first, he charts how Islamic law (shariʿa) and Islamic polity (caliphate, sultanate) created a synthesis—a civitas of the dar al-Islam—in which religion and politics were not only intertwined but fused. In the second, he observes how Western military, economic and cultural power disrupted that synthesis, precipitating what he calls a “crisis” of modernity for Muslim societies. In the third, he offers a survey of the so‐called “Islamic revival” of the late 20th century, reading it as a reaction to both colonial/historical decline and contemporary humiliation.
At its strongest, the book’s first two sections shine as a coherent interpretation: Pipes does not shy away from the fact that the political dimension of Islam has deep roots, nor from the structural tensions between the universalist impulse of Islam and the particularist claims of polity. In these chapters he demonstrates historical erudition and analytical clarity—he is able to trace how early Islamic governance, theology, jurisprudence and empire merged in a way few generalist texts attempt. This is commendable: in a field where polemics dominate, Pipes attempts a grand synthesis, and in many readers’ judgment, succeeds.
Yet the postmodern reader must ask: whose archive is this, and whose story is being told? Pipes presents Islam as a monolithic tradition battling modernity, and the West as the inevitable challenger. But the very structure of his narrative reproduces the binary it purports to explain.
By positing “Islam” as a single subject—timeless, coherent, stretching across centuries—he falls into a universalizing trap that the study of religion, politics, and history is increasingly wary of. In Foucault’s terms, the book functions as a “regime of truth”: the narrative that sustains our modern anxieties, articulates the problem—“Islam and political power”—in a way that implicitly justifies the observer’s vantage.
Consider one of his central claims: that Muslims, confronted with the overwhelming force of Western civilization, rejected its methods while coveting its successes—“Muslims saw what the West had and wanted it too, but they rejected the methods necessary to achieve this.”
This is a seductive phrase, but its neatness masks the complexity of cultural contact. It assumes a continuity of Muslim reaction across centuries, simplifies heterogeneous experiences of modernization and colonialism, and flattens local variation into a global pattern of decline and resistance. Postmodern criticism would call this a narrative of teleology: Islam → decline → revival → confrontation. The scholarship risks turning into prophecy, not just interpretation.
In the section on “Islam in Current Affairs,” Pipes himself acknowledges that his earlier causal link—between oil revenues, Islamic revival and militancy—is less convincing today. “I no longer try to account for the rise in militant Islam with a single explanation,” he admits.
This is important: it shows Pipes’ awareness of the mutable nature of the phenomena he describes. But its presence also highlights that the third section of the book is the most dated and the most vulnerable to critique. While the historical sections remain robust, the contemporary analysis—anchored in the 1980s lens—works less well for our post-9/11, digital era of Islamist networks, ideological hybridity and global flow.
What does the text reveal about the epistemic structure of the West’s engagement with Islam? I would argue it shows the West’s longing for coherence in the face of complexity. The desire to identify a “path of God” that leads toward political power is a form of narrative therapy—assuaging the disquiet that modernity’s liberal rationality finds when confronted by faith, identity, and insurgency. The mode is diagnostic: Islam is the patient. The West is the observer. Knowledge becomes control. In this sense, the book partakes in what Derrida would call the metaphysics of presence: the assumption that the West’s act of naming, analyzing, and intervening is itself an act of mastery.
And yet, despite these critiques, the book still has value. It forces readers to grapple with the intertwining of religion with political sovereignty—and to ask questions that many avoid: What happens when a faith that offers ultimate claims enters a world where claims are accountable? How does a civilisation constructed on religious universality adapt to the pluralist, secularised, normative world order? Pipes presses those questions. His strength lies in his willingness to view religion not as private belief but as public power. For students of modern Islam, this is an unavoidable dimension.
The style of the book is crisp, sometimes brisk. Pipes writes like a scholar intent on being accessible to the general public yet rigorous enough for specialist reflection. The punctuation between historical narrative, law-text summary, and policy implication is swift. The effect is at times exhilarating—an intellectual promenade through caliphs, jurists, colonial officers and contemporary militants. But for those attuned to nuance, the abrupt transitions from empire to modernity to “Islamic revival” can feel like leaps rather than bridges.
I found particularly compelling the section on Islamic law as prime mover. Pipes argues convincingly that shariʿa has always been inherently politically relevant—that it was never merely private piety but public order. This challenges the common Western assumption that Islam is primarily a spiritual or private domain. Recognising Islam’s political dimension is essential to any serious discussion of Islamist movements, states like Saudi Arabia or Iran, or non-state actors today. He writes: “My goal was to present an overview of the connection between Islam and political power through fourteen centuries.”That ambition matters.
However, the ambition also generates one of the book’s structural weaknesses: the tendency to compress time, to treat the longue durée of Islamic history as a single continuum, and thus to imply continuity where rupture and variation occur. The postmodern reader may critique this as a flattening of difference: medievalist Islam, Ottoman reformism, modern nationalism, Islamism—they are treated as points on the same path rather than as qualitatively different phenomena. In historicizing Islam as always already political, Pipes sometimes conflates context-specifics into general law.
The political dimension of the West-Islam encounter is treated through military, economic and ideological lenses. Pipes notes, for instance, the impact of Western armies invading Muslim lands, or the attraction of socialist ideologies among Muslims disappointed by Arab nationalism. He identifies multiple “responses to Western political ideologies.”
Yet the emphasis remains on Islam’s reaction, not on Islam’s internal dynamism or on the agency of Muslims as actors in worlds beyond the West-Islam binary. One could argue that this reflects a broader epistemic imbalance: the studied object (Islam) is defined in relation to the studying subject (West) rather than on its own terms.
In the current era—where Islamist movements operate transnationally, digital flows reshape radicalisation, and faith communities engage in hybrid modernities—the relevance of Pipes’ framework is both affirmed and challenged. His historical sections confirm the durability of religion-politics intersections; his predictive sections reveal the limits of linear modelling. He writes in the preface: “The debates over causes of the Islamic surge has become less important. The surge … has become part of the landscape.”
That admission acknowledges the shift from novelty to constancy—but also suggests that the study of Islam and politics now needs frameworks that account for multiplicity, fragmentation, and networked power.
One of the more provocative aspects of the book is its normative conclusion: Pipes argues that modernity, liberal values, and secularisation represent the future; that Islamist impulses are doomed, or at least fundamentally incompatible with Western norms. Critics and admirers alike have flagged this as triumphalist, as projecting secular liberalism as inevitable. The postmodern stance questions inevitability itself: the belief in progress, universal rights, and liberal rationality may themselves be ideological, not descriptive. In claiming the future, the book asserts a moral architecture—one that privileges the West’s form of modernity. From this vantage the text is both analytic and ideological—a duality worthy of scrutiny.
To read this book during those long, solitary days of the pandemic felt oddly apt: the world had become more interconnected, more volatile, and more uncertain. The need to trace constellations of power, identity, faith and violence felt urgent. Pipes’ text offers one such map, even if its legend is incomplete. It invites the reader into a space of critical reflection: to recognise that religion can be power, that political order can be sacred, and that modernity’s claims cannot eliminate the ghosts of the past.
In closing, I would say that *In the Path of God* stands as a checkpoint—a benchmark in the scholarship of Islam and politics. It is not the final word (no such thing exists in the postmodern landscape), but it continues to provoke, to raise questions, to force reckoning. Its strengths lie in its dalliance with scale, in its boldly drawn sweep of centuries, and in its refusal to treat Islam as simply a cultural curiosity. Its limitations lie in its monolithic framing, its implicit Western vantage, and in its teleological leanings.
For the reader committed to understanding how faith, law, and power have intersected in Muslim history, this book remains worthy of attention—so long as one reads it not as Gospel truth but as a starting point for deeper inquiry.
In the path of understanding, then, Pipes invites us not simply to watch history but to walk its contours, to feel its tremors, to recognise that the “path of God” is never linear, never final.
February 25, 2023
an old book (1984, a meaningful number) but still worth reading, actually somehow predicted the rising trend of Fundamentalism and the failure of westernization.
What I noted is, a lot of description also applies to Chinese culture (which used to be a superpower of the world but now laments and resents westernization, and also advocates for the revival of traditions in 2020s). An interesting coincidence.
What I noted is, a lot of description also applies to Chinese culture (which used to be a superpower of the world but now laments and resents westernization, and also advocates for the revival of traditions in 2020s). An interesting coincidence.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews