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Larbi Sadiki's The Search for Arab Democracy requires a great deal from its readers. This is not only because the book takes up a perennially challenging area of political inquiry, but also because its arguments are indeterminate and its structure kaleidoscopic rather than linear. Such absence of closure and order is largely deliberate, a reflection of Sadiki's indebtedness to a poststructuralist understanding of democracy in terms of a "democratic ethos." This approach takes democracy more as a commitment to perpetual disruption of those forces that concentrate power and establish political exclusion than as a system of governance or set of procedures to realize popular sovereignty. Although the subtitle of The Search for Arab Democracy promises an account of presumably democratic "discourses and counter-discourses," the book is less a systematic analysis of arguments about democracy conventionally understood than an attempt to recuperate a legacy of cultural syncretism, intellectual crosspollination, and creative disruption of supposedly fixed truths and texts from Arab Muslim traditions and histories. Indeed, the book is an admirable attempt not only to advocate but also to enact the democratic ethos by constantly interrogating its own assumptions and categories, and it is only in these terms that Sadiki's rather odd, and in some cases counterintuitive, choices of thinkers and arguments make sense. (The extensive discussion of al-Farabi--hardly a thinker concerned with democracy however it is construed--as a "source of inspiration to contemporary Muslims to engage Democracy" [p. 390] is a case in point.)
Sadiki's interest in recuperating this history is ultimately guided by contemporary politics, for the book seeks to destabilize a series of oppositions that currently govern much of current scholarship, political practice, and geopolitical maneuverings between West and East, Orientalism and Occidentalism, reason and revelation, politics and religion, democracy and Islam. Sadiki is particularly concerned to undermine the opposition between Islam and democracy, a polarity reinforced by both Orientalists and some Islamists (what Sadiki calls "the rejectionists"). He does...