On Dec 4, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Charles A. Grimes wrote:
> I also thought it would interesting to hear what Yoshie would have to
> say about such a critique... as long as she wrote it
I'm not going to make a habit of it, but since you asked, here's what she posted to the Debate list in response to a provocation from, um, me:
For those who have read Samir Amin over time, there's little new in the essay ("Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism," Monthly Review 59.7, December 2007, <http://monthlyreview.org/1207amin.htm>), except there are two points that are interesting from my POV:
1. As is clear from the introductory part of the essay, Amin has obviously been hearing from those on the Left in the MENA region as well as elsewhere who "encourage social movements as a whole to enter into dialogue with the movements of political Islam" (Amin, December 2007). In this essay, Amin argues against that, but in the real world, Amin is apparently one of the signatories to the invitation to the "Cairo International Conference and Liberation Forum, 27-30 March 2008," which includes the Muslim Brotherhood: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cairo021107.html>. There is an interesting tension between theory and practice.
2. The section titled "Questions Relative to the Front Line Countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Iran)" in Amin's essay stands in contradiction to the rest of it. Amin argues that "Democratic and progressive European forces have the duty to dissociate themselves from this policy of the imperialist triad and support the proposals of the Iraqi resistance." But many of the "democratic" and "progressive" people in the West who agree with Amin on the question of "political Islam" do not regard "the Iraqi resistance" in the same way that Amin does, nor do they think of "Iranian nationalism" as "altogether historically positive" as Amin asserts, to take just two examples. This is another interesting tension in the essay -- this time between Amin's empirical observations on how things are on, and what is to be done about, the front lines of the struggle between the empire and various predominantly Islamic forces in the MENA region on one hand and his theory of an abstraction called "political Islam."
My own view of the matter is found here among other places: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/socialism-highest-stage-of- democracy.html>