Feminizing the West

About the Book

This book utilizes the gender polemics of neo-Islam’s selective employment of a historical narrative which dwells disproportionately on the militant Islam of the post-immigration (hijra) period when the sword substituted the word for the spread of a spiritual faith. Given the fact that such neo-Islamists, like very many unlettered Muslims, mistake religion for history and vice versa, Al Da’mi justifiably hypothesizes that neo-Islam is not Islam. It is not the Islam of the God-fearing and virtuous mosque-goers as it propagates a cult of conflict, violence and hatred, rather than the faith of ‘peace’ from which it derives its very Arabic name, ‘salām’. Neo-Islam’s theorists manufactured their own ‘puritanical’ concepts of religious ‘renewal’, holy war and state-building in an endeavor to mobilize young zealots to restore power in the Islamic World to a ‘reformed’ Islam through their form of government, better known as the caliphate, a government which had deteriorated, failed and, eventually, lost its historical state for fierce foreign foes due to proven flaws. To activate the above renovation program, the neo-Islamists retreated to history for Shi’i Islam’s opposition techniques and secret societies (such as those of the Brethren of Purity and the Order of the Assassins) for inspiration and expertise to fulfill their ancestral dream of building a global Islamic state in the future. As they adopted the ‘masculine vs. feminine’ polemic, which was originally inspired by a desert low opinion of womanhood and by a post-colonial retrospective conception, the neo-Islamists proceeded on in an attempt to feminize the Western World. It is meant to reverse the discourse of the Industrial West which is conceived to have opportunely penetrated into a feminized, veiled Islamic World in times of passivity and frailty. To develop the above argument, Professor Al Da’mi explores various formulations of neo-Islam as those of the Wahabis, the Muslim Brothers and the later terror groups with a specific reference to their common principles and goals.

About the Author

Muhammed Al Da’mi, M.A., Ph.D. (born, 1955) is Professor of English and Orientalist Literature. His work in the academia exceeds twenty seven years in the universities of Baghdad, Aden, Irbid, Yarmouk and Arizona State. He is author of a number of books and published scholarly papers in Arabic and English. He contributes to the Arabic press weekly. Al Da’mi is a member in several Iraqi and Arabic cultural and specialized societies, including “The House of Wisdom”, Baghdad. He has been interviewed by several Arabic and American satellite channels. His books on the Middle East include: Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers (2002), The Other Islam, revised edition (2013), Caught in a Dream (2013) and The Other Spiritualities of the Middle East (2013). They all contribute to develop some of the arguments of this book.