"New Age" Islam

"New Age" Islam Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality. Edited by Ron Geaves, Markus Dressler, and Gritt KJinkhammer. London and New York: Routledge Sufi Series, 2009. 224 pp. $150. We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities. By Anouar Majid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 240 pp. $24.95.

These volumes epitomize two related, similar, but finally marginal trends that have penetrated the West in recent decades, and which were inflated in the aftermath of the Islamist atrocities of 2001 and other developments: New Age Sufism and "literary" meditations on the clash of civilizations.

In the instance of New Age Sufism, faddish imitations of esoteric Islamic traditions are adopted by Western spiritual seekers. The second trend involves "high concept" meanderings in revisionist Islamic, European, and American history. Both represent attempts to respond to the Islamist challenge without recourse to politics or the military. With the broadening and frequent weakening of Western anaylsis about Islam, both styles of discourse are increasingly offered to the global reading audience.

The editors - Geaves, a comparative religion professor at Liverpool Hope University, U.K., Dressier of religious and Islamic studies at Hofstra University, and Klinkhammer, a religion professor at Bremen University, Germany - have assembled a volume striking in its attempt to accommodate academic standards of analysis to Western popular mysticism. Sufis in Western Society emerged from a 2003 panel held by the American Academy of Religions. Its title is misleading in...