Lahouari Addi's book on Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam addresses a relationship that has been a topic of scholarly and popular debate for decades. Since the end of World War II, modernization theory has played a paramount role in Western perceptions that world history would follow a path of rational development towards secular (and at best democratic) government and society where a free market economy prevails and religion is relegated to the private sphere. Addi endorses this paradigm in his complex and at times confusing book. As a social scientist he tries to grasp what, in his view, is an irrational clinging of the Arab world to Islam and religiously framed modes of organizing state and society. In this, he seems to share the puzzlement that befell adherents of modernization theory in the 1970s when Middle Eastern governments granted space to religious discourse and political agitation in an apparent response to a groundswell of grassroots Islamist activism. For Addi, the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s represents most violently the cataclysmic failure of the secular project in the Middle East.

The image of Middle Eastern political development that Addi lays out in his book is set against a perception of society that posits Western secular modernity as an absolute against the imperfect secularization of the Arab world. In his view, the Arab nationalist autocrats of the 20th century chose populism as a seemingly unmitigated representation of the popular will because they lacked the cultural foundation to commit to economic liberalism and the establishment of a civil society. Addi sometimes uses questionable terminology to explain this alleged cultural retardation. For example, he speaks of the “medieval religious culture” in Arab societies that led to the interruption of the liberal modernization trends of the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Addi, the lack of a separation between religion and the state, between dīn wa-dawla, is one of those medieval legacies plaguing the modern Arab world. This is a problematic assertion. From a historical perspective, the conflation of the religious and political spheres is in itself arguably a modern phenomenon, a consequence of the emergence of Islamism as a political ideology with a claim on absolute and comprehensive primacy in social, political, and economic decision-making. According to the historical record, rulers of earlier centuries were more pragmatic in the extent to which they allowed Muslim ethics to determine their government, and in how much they decided to listen to the ʿulamaʾ and other religious voices. The sphere of the legal expertise of the scholars on the one hand and that of administration and policing on the other hand were often separate. The Ottoman Sultans emphasized their claim on a global caliphate only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the same time as reformers promoted the individualization of Islamic morality.

Many of these developments were part of a modernization process that was shaped by the confrontation between Islamic societies and Western imperialism. Colonialism and Western hegemony hardly feature in Addi's account, however. He largely ignores that today's radical Islamism is a post-colonial phenomenon. It is therefore important to distinguish between Wahhabism as a rigid form of early modern establishment Islam on the one hand, and Salafism as a modern and often militant antiestablishment frame of thinking on the other hand. It is not productive to read them as forms of a quasi-medieval false consciousness, as Addi proposes.

It strikes this reader as paradoxical that Addi himself switches his position in the second half of the book to acknowledge that Islamism and the project of Islamist state-building are indeed part of a modernization process. He explains that the surge in Islamist political activism in the last quarter of the 20th century was based on the absence of a free market society, the weakness of the middle class, and only lastly on a cultural heritage hostile to secularism. He rejects that the success of Islamism is grounded in religious belief in Middle Eastern societies and could be understood in terms of theology and Qurʾanic tradition. The reasoning of crucial thinkers like Mawdudi and Qutb, he argues in the chapters of the second half, was shaped by political experiences and societal needs rather than their religious insights. Their ideas are therefore context-bound and do not represent a form of cultural essence. They laid the foundations for an ideological movement that offered a utopian vision of an ultimately just society without corruption and in the service of the people, which was thus in accordance with the divine will. These ideas are not so dissimilar to other revolutionary movements of the 20th century. It is therefore an open question for Addi whether Islamist movements that are participating in democratic processes, as is currently happening in Tunisia, will also eventually recognize these shared goals and accept an open society. In current debates about the role of Islam in politics, this is still an important point to make.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconcile such a useful assessment with the earlier ones outlined above that are grounded in modernization theory. Addi addresses a great deal of topics, dwells on some for a short while to move on to others without offering much evidence or developing a stringent argumentative line. There is little background information and context to help the non-specialist reader. Whoever is looking for a systematic analysis of political and socioeconomic developments of Middle Eastern states in the 20th century will be disappointed. Rather, the book documents an intellectual's effort to make sense of complex developments. In this, Addi adopts the vantage point of a keen secular observer and adherent to Western social theory, but unfortunately at the expense of a convincing argument.