A review of Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies, by Leonard Binder.
About the Author
Shaul Bakhash is Robinson Professor of Middle East History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (1990). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was an editor with Kayhan Newspapers in Tehran, and reported from Tehran for the Economist, the London Times, and the Financial Times.
If Iraq is successfully to democratize and an inclusive democratic culture is to emerge, the Iraqi state must be reconstituted as a federal and strongly liberal system and thoroughly demilitarized.
The U.S.-led reconstruction effort has so far failed to establish democratic institutions in Iraq. But as troubled as that effort has been, it provides valuable lessons for future nation-building endeavors.
The journalistic and policy communities have been alive with speculation as to whether Islamist groups involved in politics—including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas— are true believers in democracy or…
