June 7, 2010 Issue

Regarding Pankaj Mishra’s “Islamismism,” in this week’s issue, I’m going to repeat one of my pet peeves about New Yorker book reviews these days, to wit, the absence of extended quotation. Mishra reviews two books: Hirsi Ali’s “Nomads” and Paul Berman’s “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Mishra is so anxious to engage these books in argument, he forgets to carry out one of the reviewer’s main duties: to show what the author has written. And this is best done by quotation or by a series of quotations. In Mishra’s piece, the lines march down the pages, and, except for a smattering of fragments from Ali’s and Berman’s books, it’s all very much Mishra’s show. He’s on the side of conflict-avoidance - that much is clear. And he does a good job showing Ali’s lack of historical perspective. For example, he says, “But ‘Nomad’ reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam – fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism – are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity.” This is well said. On Berman’s “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” Mishra’s critique takes off from Berman’s description of himself as a “laptop general.” Mishra says, “Berman’s hopes for delivering reason and freedom at gunpoint have proved calamitous.” He is right. Mishra seems to be saying that people like Tariq Ramadan, “a Swiss-born Muslim professor at Oxford University, whose work seeks to integrate observant Muslims into secular Western societies,” point a reasonable way forward. Ramadan’s name is mentioned time and again all through the piece. I wish that Mishra had included a representative quote or two from Ramadan’s work so that I could get a taste of what kind of writer he is. However, I realize that space in the magazine is limited. I will have to look up Ramadan’s work for myself. Mishra’s review has motivated me to do so. Therefore, I concede its effectiveness, notwithstanding its violation of one of the central tenets of reviewing.