Arab Political Thought: Past and Present.

• Author: Ertoy, Birkan

By Georges Corm, translated by Patricia Phillips-Batoma and Atoma T. Batoma

London: Hurst & Company, 2020, 367 pages, $50, ISBN: 9781849048163

Arab Political Thought: Past and Present is an attempt to distinguish between Arab and Islamic political thoughts to advocate the idea that Arab political thought is more than what the literature generally presents. In his book, Georges Corm advocates the idea that Arab political thought is not responsible for political Islam, but rather a victim of it (p. 288). In this sense, Corm claims that reducing the Islamic world to Arabs is an Orientalist "stereotype" and a "fossilized" understanding (pp. 2-16). He examines Arab literature, music, and poetry as well as political thinkers such as al-Farabi, al-Kindi, Ibn-Rushd, and al-Gazali to illustrate that Arab culture is a rich one.

Along with such discussions, in the early chapters of the book, Corm argues that Arab culture was "enriched by Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman culture" and thus that Arab political thought "cannot be reduced to Islamic religious thought." In other words, the main motivation of the author is to challenge the general idea of believing that there is only "one rigid theologico-political structure of Arab mindset" that impoverishes the Arab societies (pp. xii, 16). A noteworthy point regarding the nucleus of the author s attempt is an important subject. Corm does not simply try to generate a nationalist discourse in favor of Arabization. While discussing many causes, he argues that Islamization or the rooting of political Islam in the region has contributed to a decrease in focus on "poverty, illiteracy, massive unemployment and the lack of mastery of science and technology" which are the major problems in Arab societies (p. 293).

In line with his aim, Corm discusses his epistemological perspective regarding the literature on political Arab thought. According to Corm, researchers are mostly guided to their destinations based on either Orientalist (Self's) or Islamic (Other's) perspectives (p. 43). While he criticizes both approaches to a certain extent, it is not clear where he positions himself; Orientalist or Islamic or somewhere between the two or completely out of these two lines of perspectives.

The book is divided into fourteen chapters in which the author attempts to separate Arab political thought from Islamic thought. While it might seem to some readers that the author repeats himself in some chapters, the chapters are mostly...