BOOK REVIEW Predicting the death of Islam The Crisis of Islamic Civilization by Ali A Allawi

A grim assessment of Islam's

survival prospects concludes this book-length essay by a prominent Iraqi politician who recently served as minister of defense and finance in the American-backed Iraqi government. Unless Muslims can restore Islam as a "complete way of life" embracing the public as well as the private sphere,

The much heralded Islamic "awakening" of recent times will not be a prelude to the rebirth of an Islamic civilization; it will be another episode in its decline. The revolt of Islam becomes instead the final act of the end of a civilization.

These are the last words of Ali W Allawi's book and might serve as Islam's epitaph, for the restoration of the Islamic civilization he proposes seems fanciful. Allawi dismisses the notion that Islam might evolve into a personal religion

of private conscience. Islam, he insists, offers an all-or-nothing proposition. Muslims either will "live an outer life which is an expression of their innermost faith" and "reclaim those parts of their public spaces which have been conceded to other world views over the past centuries", or "the dominant civilizational order" will "fatally undermine whatever is left of Muslims' basic identity and autonomy".

He rejects the "frantic hyper-modernity only scantily garbed in Islamic idioms" that characterizes the Western-looking Gulf states, but reserves even greater disdain for the "radical Islamists" who "suffer from a different conceit, namely that, by picking and choosing from the menu of change, a happy compromise between Islam and what is acceptable from modernity can be fashioned".

Allawi's book provides an antidote for the superficial, condescending sort of reform-mongering that too often characterizes Western discussions of Islam. The previous administration in Washington, for example, seemed to think that simply by appropriating the democratic norms of the West, Muslim countries could join the modern world. But the differences between Islam and the Judeo-Christian West run far deeper than the political surface, Allawi argues, and they begin with a radically different view of the individual, or more precisely, the view that the individual human being really does not exist to begin with.

It is a commonplace to compare Islamic theocracy to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. That has been the approach of such critics as Daniel Pipes and Paul Berman, among others. But Islam is much older than modern totalitarian forms, and Allawi, like Tariq Ramadan

and other modern Islamic philosophers, offers a persuasive case that the "totalitarian" character of Islamic society requires no emulation of European models, but stems directly from Islam itself.