Islam and Political Violence

The ambitious nature of the title of this volume may be a bit misleading as it does not cover the entire Muslim world nor does it dilate on all the Muslim communities amidst Western nations. However, it has still tried to bring in the global and theoretical aspects of both the realms—Diaspora as well as International Relations—through the contributions of scholars of diverse disciplines who are mostly academics at Australian universities with one or two exceptions. However, a piece on Muslims in Australia—their native turf—is missing, unless, that is, they view it as ‘the ultimate East’ though pieces on Indonesia, Bosnia and Kosovo have been thoughtfully added. In an area of a significant scholarly and international merits, the repetitive nature of studies have already turned this into a saturated field with predictable hairsplitting on Political Islam, Diaspora activism often seen as ‘the enemy within’, and an oft- beaten clash of cultures. Yet, the present volume does make conscious efforts to offer some new grounds by avoiding the predictable generalizations based on apologia or sheer denigration, even though most of the papers date from the beginning of the second Bush Presidency. Not feeling comfortable with the existing categorization of the world’s Muslims into extremists and moderates within a socio-theological premise, they locate ‘Islamism …as a response to the failure of the top-down state-building project in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world’.