Islam Instrumentalized

The author of this ambitious work is not a specialist in Middle Eastern history, nor an ‘Islamologue’, to allude to the overbearing title with which any academic on the Continent may now crown him/herself. He specialises in economics, a discipline that claims to be a universal science, and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Namur, Belgium. To my knowledge, this is his first comprehensive study on Islamist politics. For all these qualifications, however, Platteau’s text is not amateurish and uninspiring. No, it is stringently academic, well-meaning and earnest-minded; it explores the subject of Islamist politics in a spirit of legitimate intellectual inquiry, albeit with the innocence and zeal of the beginner, and brings to his new field, a disciplinary vision that is, paradoxically, both fresh and stale, both novel and dated. The work thus presents a record of the author’s personal odyssey and is a testimony to his serious engagement with a field that he discovered late in his academic career. However, while the author examines ample empirical data, ultimately it is an exercise in meta-theory, for what Platteau seeks is nothing less than to unravel ‘the relationship between state and religion in the history of Islam’! And it is as an exercise in grand theory that Platteau’s work is most problematic, not because it is radical and troubling, but because it proves out to be familiar and reassuring.