"New Age" Islam

Islam Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality. Edited by Ron Geaves, Markus Dressler, and Gritt KJinkhammer. London and New York: Routledge Sufi Series, 2009. 224 pp. $150. We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities. By Anouar Majid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 240 pp. $24.95. These volumes epitomize two related, similar, but finally marginal trends that have penetrated the West in recent decades, and which were inflated in the aftermath of the Islamist atrocities of 2001 and other developments: New Age Sufism and literary meditations on the clash of civilizations. In the instance of New Age Sufism, faddish imitations of esoteric Islamic traditions are adopted by Western spiritual seekers. The second trend involves concept meanderings in revisionist Islamic, European, and American history. Both represent attempts to respond to the Islamist challenge without recourse to politics or the military. With the broadening and frequent weakening of Western anaylsis about Islam, both styles of discourse are increasingly offered to the global reading audience. The editors - Geaves, a comparative religion professor at Liverpool Hope University, U.K., Dressier of religious and Islamic studies at Hofstra University, and Klinkhammer, a religion professor at Bremen University, Germany - have assembled a volume striking in its attempt to accommodate academic standards of analysis to Western popular mysticism. Sufis in Western Society emerged from a 2003 panel held by the American Academy of Religions. Its title is misleading in that the collection deals minimally with indigenous Sufism in Eastern European Muslim polities such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, or Albania, and the vigorous Sufi presence in such major diaspora communities as that of Germans of Turkish and Kurdish origin (with one exception, discussing Bosnian Muslims in Sweden). Rather, it treats with high seriousness and full credibility the attraction of certain Westerners to religious posturing in Sufi costume. Most of the Geaves-Dressler-Klinkhammer tome describes prominent new age Sufis, some of whom become Muslims but recruit disciples who do not; some who adopt extravagant Islamist positions while projecting themselves as masters of Sufi wisdom; and some who disseminate selfimprovement advice with little or no Islamic ornamentation. The volume gives notable attention to such dubious figures as Feisal Abdul Rauf, best-known for his association with the scheme for the Ground Zero mosque in New York, and Nuh Keller, the American fundamentalist Muslim convert who published The Reliance of the Traveller,1 a classic, though backwards-looking volume of Islamic law. The chapter Home, Nation, and Global Islam: Sufi-oriented activities and community building among Bosnian Muslims in Southern by Catharina Raudvere, a professor of religions at Copenhagen University, and Ashk Gashi (Ask Gasi in original text), a Bosnian emigrant to Sweden, includes errors but presents a useful profile of a Muslim community in which Sufi influence has diffused into a general Islamic identity. Perhaps the most immediately relevant chapter is Globalizing the Soundworld by Michael Frishkopf, a professor of music at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. …

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