دانلود کتاب Enemy in the mirror: Islamic fundamentalism and the limits of modern rationalism

Drawing on postmodernism, critical theory, comparative politics, Islamic thought, and anthropology, Euben situates Islamic fundamentalist thought within a transcultural theoretical context.

Her main objective is to explain how the rationalist discourse explains the appeal of fundamentalist ideas by reference to their function as conduits for processes and tensions in the material and structural realm thus deriving meaning from function.

Because of this tendency to derive meaning from function, our understanding of Islamic fundamentalism has taken certain shapes. In other words, there are epistemological issues at stake. How do we know what we know? The rationalist paradigm sets the epistemological framework, within which Islamic fundamentalism is explained as something people turn to because it can fulfill material needs.

According to Euben, Islamic fundamentalism should be analyzed not only for its function, but also for the value of its ideas. Her treatment of Sayyed Qutb is excellent and a must-read for any expert on political Islam. Euben suggests that Qutb's preoccupations with questions about the moral foundations of political communities challenges narrower, ethnocentric definitions of political theory, and a reading of political theory as a distinctively secular enterprise.

Euben lays out her opposition to the imposition of a Western rationalist analytical paradigm to explain and categorize Islamic Fundamentalism. She critiques the assumptions and worldview of Western rationalism and the types of analyses it therefore undertakes and attributions to essentialism, socioeconomic causes, etc. because it takes IF as epiphenomenal. She says we should instead discover IF's own categories through dialogic analysis, which takes Habermas' framework of intersubjective meaning creation (Gadamer) and distance from the subject through critical deconstruction of language and power (á la Foucault).

Her critiques of rational actor and rational analysis is that it presupposes a one-to-one correspondence with an objective, outside reality/truth as opposed to seeing how it is constructed through language. For anyone seeking to understand postmodernism, Islamic thought and the application of a postmodernist analysis to a real-world, contemporary issue this is a must read. If you want more postmodernism and Islam check out Cultural Revolutions: Reason Versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, And Jihad