Anouar Majid, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 270 pages.

Freedom and Orthodoxy is a brilliant apology for dismantling the hegemonic and false pretensions of western universalisms in favor of a world in which local groups (e.g., religious communities, regions, and nations) are allowed to construe their own strategies for cultural, political, and economic flourishing. A Moroccan intellectual teaching in the United States (chair of the Department of English, University of New England) and a leading young cultural critic who writes in a lucid and often elegant English prose, Anouar Majid’s French cultural background also shines through, judging by his abundant use of French sources (though not one in Arabic).

Building on his previous book, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Duke University Press: 2000), Majid expands and deepens his historical and philosophical analysis, exhorts both Muslims and westerners to search their souls, remove the roots of their own cherished certainties that exclude the Other (i.e., fundamentalisms), and engage in the path of creative dialog. Yet as the book unfolds, it turns out that over 90 percent of the material relates to the western universalisms born of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – ideals that, in fact, cannot be separated from the historical realities of the Reconquista, the Spanish conquest of Latin America, the Anglo-American colonization of North America, and the subsequent genocide of the native population. Even the revolutionary ideals of the American and French revolutions, however universal the reach of freedom and human rights might have been in theory, came to be wedded to a capitalist ideology that has, in the postcolonial era, become an economic and cultural steamroller, a globalization process that consolidates western hegemony and imposes its secular and consumerist values on the non-western world.

Besides the already heavy toll in human suffering,Majid argues that far greater clashes loom on the horizon if this scenario continues. This brings us to the remaining 10 percent of his book: although Muslims must take responsibility for their own extremists and find ways to reinterpret the traditional Shari`ah in a polycentric world, nevertheless, contemporary Islamic militancy should be seen as an offshoot of “the triumph of capitalism and its ongoing legacy of conquest” (pp. 213-14). Hence, most of the book unveils what he has coined “the post-Andalusian paradigm,” or the history of western greed and arrogance, including its bouts of well-intentioned paternalism.

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