Engaging the Other: Public Policy and Western-Muslim

What is productive engagement between the Self and Other? How can it counter the war-on-terror conflict model dominant in geopolitics over the last two decades? Conceived as a learned attempt to displace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis—which Sut Jhally and Edward Said (1998) have called a “rather crudely articulated manual in the art of wartime status in the minds of Americans”—Engaging the Other: Public Policy and Western-Muslim Intersectionsmakes a crucial contribution to answers for these and other urgent questions. Like Said (1998), the editors Karim H. Karim from Carleton University and Mahmoud Eid from the University of Ottawa, begin by unmasking the Orientalist tricks in Huntingdon’s work. The contributing scholars in Engaging the Other are diverse in age, gender, and ethnic and disciplinary origin, writing from the perspectives of law, Ismaili studies, architecture, political psychology, communication, religion, and world politics. They share the view that the Muslim worlds—accounting for over a billion and a half followers globally and projected to equal Christians in number by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum (2015)—are pluralistic and restless, engaged in a “great and often silent exchange and dialogue” (Said, 1998) with the West. The articles in the book employ three main pedagogical approaches: counter-historiography, sociology of law, and analysis of political attitudes and participation. Karim and Eid start not from their subject positions in the West, but from the Muslim worlds, translating them for the neophyte Western reader. The Western caricatures of the history of Muslim civilization as leading “to scriptural dogmatism, authoritarian morality, and unreformed medievalism” (p. 76) are turned on their heads. Masud Taj, an expert on Muslim civilization and the history of architecture, explores Toledo in Spain over successive conquests to remind us that the early Muslim presence in Spain has been there for a period longer than since the Enlightenment. He points out that the Renaissance itself is indebted to a massive transfer of scientific knowledge and Moorish rationalism from Muslim lands to Europe and that Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is adapted from an earlier Arabic text authored by a Muslim scholar. Exchange is two-way, when successive rulers (from Alfonso VI to Alfonso X as pioneers of the “Convivencia,” or the period when Muslims, Christians, and Jews are said to have harmoniously co-existed) adapt their own construction of Muslim law from the first codified volume of laws in Europe. Marianne Farina (a sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross and student of interfaith scripture) demonstrates how, as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, formative Muslim thinker Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Christian scholar Saint Thomas Aquinas share a respect for “intellectual magnanimity” (p. 44) that “doesn’t wilt in the face of conflict” (p. 49) in its negotiation for the common Reviews • Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 41 (2)