Secularism, not fundamentalism, holds Arab Muslim societies together

Evidence

Karabell makes an excellent if ironically understated point when he says that “the forces of modernism and secularism are far from spent in the Middle East.” In an essay originally published in 1993, and then collected in my book The Politics of Dispossession (Pantheon, 1994), I attempted to show how it was secularism, rather than fundamentalism, that held Arab Muslim societies together, despite the wild exaggeration of the sensationalist and ignorant American media, most of whose ideas were taken from anti-Islamic, careerist publicists who had found a new field for their skills in demonology At the very least one should say that in the contest between the Islamists and the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the former have by and large lost the battle. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Olivier Roy’s The Failure of Political Islam and Esposito’s The Islamic Threat, both cited here, as well as the broader revisionist claim throughout this book. — connects to: Arab regimes sustain solidarity chiefly through ideological dialogue, not arms or trade — Youssef Cherif, Neo-pan-Arabism: a renewed contract of…, 32