The actual confrontation of Islam and the West in a British context is touched on in a somewhat scattered description of the Salman Rushdie affair. Usefully, Kepel notes that the famous fatwa arose out of a power struggle in the Islamic world, and was meant principally to revive the fading prestige of Khomeini after the Iraq-Iran War. He says, a bit sadly, that the famous book burning in Britain was misunderstood. Taped by the fundamentalists themselves and sent to a media establishment that had until then ignored them, it was meant only to stress the separateness of the faithful from an "ungodly" Western society. The British, with different cultural baggage to carry, saw instead ghosts of Nazi-style tyranny and reacted accordingly. Kepel hints, without actually saying so, that the British should have cut the Islamic fanatics a bit more slack.

The book's implicit argument, that not all the Islamic faithful are driven by an anti-Western animus, is little more than a coded (and badly mistaken) conviction that Islam in the West--indeed Islam in general, except for fundamentalists--is evolving into one more creed on our religious supermarket shelves. It follows that we should discount the activists who are hostile to us--within the West and elsewhere. Since these activists are making a more or less credible run at taking or holding on to power in Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, Sudan, and much of the Middle East--some of these countries closer than ever to possessing weapons of mass destruction--this seems a dangerously quixotic form of special pleading.

Even more basically, Kepel recognizes but never plumbs to any depth the fact that there is a fundamental clash between Islam and Western democratic culture, and that this, as a religious matter, is not accessible to compromise. One cannot help but recall the severe but wise conclusion of T.S. Eliot in East Coker: "Ultimately, antagonistic religions must mean antagonistic cultures; and, ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled." In this case, one of the reasons for Western-Islamic antagonism is that our wariness of theocratic politics, the result of bitter experience some centuries ago, does not exist among the Islamic faithful. Basic to Western culture is a private realm in which the individual conscience makes choices about religious matters. This is alien and inimical to Islam, as the gut instincts of the faithful tell them. A close friend among the faithful once remarked to me, "We do not want Islam secularized, like the Church of England, into a human branch of the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals]."

This fundamental difference has important implications for the influence of Islamic pressure groups on politics in Western societies. It is evident in the way Islamic groups deploy Western rhetoric about human rights and demand the rights and privileges conferred by a Western liberal tradition while rejecting those rights and privileges to others on religious grounds. Another curious omission is any mention of the rabid anti-Semitism that exists among Islamic activists. The nearest he gets to it in the American section is to describe the relationship between the "Nation of Islam" and Jews as "complex."

There are other problems. In France, as in Britain, Kepel describes Islam as fissiparous, with several groups and sects competing for official recognition and favor, as well as for adherents among the faithful. While in itself Kepel's account of these groups is more often than not useful and enlightening, it inadvertently undermines his thesis on the growth and importance of "communalism." By his own account, Muslim schismatics spend so much time fighting each other that it seriously impairs their attempts to create a genuine group identity among all the faithful.

Muslim communalists in France who wish to attain some political influence, or reach a sort of compromise with Western values while remaining "apart", find themselves at a special disadvantage: the French system of centralized politics aims, as Kepel says, at assimilation, with less tolerance for these sub-groups than the more pluralist societies across the Channel and the Atlantic. There has been a certain amount of political effervescence in France over Islamic issues--e.g., the "veil affair", the bulldozing of a mosque near Lyon in 1989, and the building of mosques elsewhere. These Kepel mentions, but, as in his discussion of the American case, he omits any detailed discussion of Islamic terrorism on French soil. He writes with approval of Islamic activists who "made the state yield" over the veil in state schools--but notes that this, as with other such conflicts, was mostly important in the power struggle among competing Islamic groups. In the politics of France at large these things have to a degree given ammunition to Le Pen and his ilk; but, pace Kepel, they have not shaken the political structure of the French Republic as did, for example, the Algerian War.

The most interesting aspect of Kepel's discussion of Islam in a French context is his accurate description of the tension between French and Islamic cultures among educated Algerians. It is a tension that I observed at first hand during the Algerian War, in the poignant confessions of ALN officers and FLN officials that they often felt "more French than Arab." The West-Islamic conflict is in sharper focus here, underlined by Kepel's quotation of a flat statement by the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front leader Ali Benhadj: "Democracy as the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people contravenes the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, which is the political credo of Radical Islamic activists. Democracy must therefore be rejected wholesale."

Time and again Allah in the West speaks melodramatically of Islamic communalist issues "splitting" the societies of the United States, Britain, or France "down the middle." But the phenomenon of "communalism" is neither as new nor as nationally divisive as Kepel makes it seem. Such pressure groups, sometimes religious, sometimes not, have long existed in Amero-European society. Their recent influence on American higher education in the form of political correctness has been ghastly, but this has provoked satirical opposition; and the American political center-of-gravity seems not to have been skewed. In Britain, ethnic pressure groups are being absorbed into the social structure more easily than before, mainly due to the syncretic influence of the media on British politics. Small groups there, ethnic or otherwise, can occasionally exert influence out of proportion to their size; but the integrity of British society is not under threat.

There is a book to be written about the newer, quasi-tribal patterns of democratic pressure group politics among us. An even more interesting book might analyze the cultural and political contradictions between Islam and the West. Allah in the West tries to do both, but, despite much interesting content, does neither one nor the other to any convincing degree.

Essay Types: Book Review