media consumption

Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern

John Gray, respected author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, proposes an interesting thesis, neatly summed up in the title of this book. In a scant 119 pages, he argues that despite the Western assumption that Al Qaeda represents a throwback to medieval Muslim fundamentalism, in actuality they embody basic Western values and tradtions, rooted in the Enlightenment.

It's an intriguing argument and, if you're careful, you can follow the thread of this argument through the book. Unfortunately, the thread is easily lost among the rambling tangents and fuzzy asides as Gray tries to weave a web of connections from Positivism to socialism to market globalization to the theories of Sayyid Qutb and thence to Osama bin Laden.

Maybe I read this book too quickly or maybe I was distracted by the election, but I just didn't buy much of Gray's argument. Even the points I agree with were lost among vague and tenuous generalizations. Undoubtedly, Al Qaeda has used the tools of the global marketplace to its advantage and they do espouse the modern ideals of progress and perfectability, but Gray's attempts to connect their cause and their methods to a grand chain of modern thought is, in the end, unconvincing.

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