UNE Professor's New Book Sees Ideological Roots of East-West Conflict Stretching Back to 1492
 
A new book by University of New England English Professor Anouar Majid, Ph.D., argues that conflicts such as September Anouar Majid11th and the war in Iraq are not an ominous clash of civilizations but the failure of our one and only human civilization to capitalize on its tremendously rich cultural resources to establish a more humane global order.

Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age is published by Stanford University Press. In the book, Majid takes the view that the inflexible, all-encompassing worldviews of Euro-American ideologies that have characterized world history since 1492 have resulted in the retreat of Islam and other non-European traditions into dangerous orthodoxies and a growing climate of suspicion, fear and terror.

Majid believes that the critics of President Bush who believe that the administration invaded Iraq because of the oil bonanza that could accrue to well-connected U.S. companies are forgetting the long view of American history.

U.S. intervention in Iraq, he writes, is a "manifestation of a strain that is part of a larger and complex history, one that not only began with the American Revolution (to which the president alludes in his inaugural address), but goes back further in time toAnouar Majid's book Freedom and Orthodoxy the early colonial settlers and even to the Spanish conquistadors before them in other parts of the Americas. What unites the Iberian conquests of the New World, the British settlements in North America, and the American Revolution is not only a quest for freedom, but also a messianic will to (re-)Christianize or remake the world anew."

"Hence," he adds, "the agenda of reshaping the Middle East is perfectly consistent with this enduring pattern."

Majid calls these three moments in history "post-Andalusianism" and believes that they forged a fundamentalist view of the world that "is almost unbendingly universal in its outlook and that tolerates no alternatives in the management of human affairs."

This world order that has characterized world history since 1492 is racing headlong toward a global wasteland, an apocalyptic landscape that will ultimately engulf winners and losers alike, he says.

In "Freedom and Orthodoxy," Majid offers an alternative to perennial discord, suggesting that the world needs a philosophy of the "provincial," one that reattaches individuals and societies to their heritages and memories but connects them to the rest of the world in solid, non-alienating, meaningful ways.

For this to happen, Majid contends, globalization must be re-imagined as a network of human solidarities and rigorous conversations across the world's multiple cultures.

In a review of "Freedom and Orthodoxy," Gil Anidjar, of Columbia University, writes "Through erudite textual readings, Majid provides us with the tools to interrogate the seemingly inevitable legacy of post-Andalusianism."

Majid is professor and chair of the Department of English at UNE. His previous books include Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Duke University Press 2000) and the novel Si Yussef (1992). He is the editor of a new quarterly magazine, Tingis: A Moroccan-American Magazine of Ideas and Culture.

(Press release issued Dec. 29, 2003)
   
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