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three years. His PhD dissertation became his first book, Slave Soldiers
and Islam (1981). Then his interest in purely academic subjects expanded
to include modern Islam. He left the university because, as he told an
interviewer from Harvard Magazine, he has “‘the simple politics of a truck
driver, not the complex ones of an academic.” His story of being
harassed through the legal system by a Muslim who later committed
suicide was recently told in The American Spectator (“A Palestinian in
Texas,”’ TAS, November 2012). He has been personally threatened but
prefers not to talk about specifics except to note that law enforcement has
been involved. I interviewed Pipes shortly before Christmas, when the
Egyptians were voting on their new constitution. I started out by saying
that the number of Muslims in the U.S. has doubled since the 9/11 attacks.
DP: My career divides in two: before and after 9/11. In the first part I was
trying to show that Islam is relevant to political concerns. If you want to
understand Muslims, I argued, you need to understand the role of Islam in
their lives. Now that seems obvious. If anything, there’s a tendency to
over-emphasize Islam; to assume that Muslims are dominated by the
Koran and are its automatons—which goes too far. You can’t just read the
Koran to understand Muslim life. You have to look at history, at
personalities, at economics, and so on.
TB: Do you see the revival of [slam as a reality?
DP: Yes. Half a century ago Islam was waning, the application of its laws
became ever more remote, and the sense existed that Islam, like other
religions, was in decline. Since then there has been a sharp and I think
indisputable reversal. We’re all talking about Islam and its laws now.
TB: At the same time you have raised an odd question: “Can Islam
survive Islamism?” Can you explain that?
DP: I draw a distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism. Islamism
emerged in its modern form in the 1920s and is driven by a belief that
Muslims can be strong and rich again if they follow the Islamic law
severely and in its entirety. This is a response to the trauma of modern
Islam. And yet this form of Islam is doing deep damage to faith, to the
point that I wonder if Islam will ever recover.
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