The Mirage (Al-Suwaidi book)

The Mirage highlights the struggle of the Arab and Islamic world against the actions of religious extremist organizations that pose military and security threats but also a significant intellectual challenge. One of its main objectives is to protect future generations from the misleading calls of “rebuilding the Islamic Islamic Caliphate” from Islamist groups that do not represent true Islam. After careful research on the intellectual, political, cultural and social implications of religious extremism, its author Al-Suwaidi suggests appropriate solutions such as “separating religion from power”. The book also emphasizes Islam as a source of identity and social cohesion in both the Arab and Islamic world.

The author tracks the historical evolution of the phenomenon of religious extremism and studies specific examples from their inception through their peak in the early 2010s, to their downfall. In particular, he explains the causes of recent failures of the Muslim Brotherhood-led governments that took power in some Arab and Muslim countries. Then, Al-Suwaidi exposes the fallacy of the slogans that attracted such veneration among sympathizers. He advocates “separating religion from power” as a method of dealing with this issue.

The book suggests similarities between certain aspects of the ideologies and practices in the European Middle Ages and the intellectual and political structures, relationship between religion and politics, and the role of clergy in religious extremist groups in the modern Arab and Muslim world.

For researchers, decision makers and the general public, this book reveals the intellectual and ideological characteristics of religious extremist groups and appears as an effort to deconstruct the various obstacles they pose to progress and development in Arab and Muslim countries.

The Mirage poses five main existential questions:

• Modern Arab and Muslim countries may be reenacting the same political and religious battle fought by Europeans five centuries ago during the Middle Ages. If this assumption is true, are Islamic civilizations lagging five centuries behind their European counterparts?
• Should we consider religious Dark Ages as prerequisites for reaching modern civilization as we know it?
• Can a modern, secular civilization coexist with religion and include its teachings?
• Why do some groups in Arab and Muslim societies consider that a religious discourse should end where progress and development start?
• Why have referential concepts been overwhelmed by destructive ideas disseminated by political religious groups?

• Political aspects of Islam
• Islam and secularism
• Islamism

• Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi (2014) Islamic Political Movements and Authority in the Arab World: The Rise and Fall. Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research in Abu Dhabi. ISBN 978-9948-23-045-8.
• Ayoob, Mohammed. The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World. University of Michigan Press, 2007.
• Marina Ottoway, et al., Democratic Mirage in the Middle East, Carnegie Endowment for Ethics and International Peace, Policy Brief 20, (October 20, 2002).

• Emirates Center For Strategic Studies And Research
• Islam and Politics from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives
• Liberal Democracy and Political Islam: The Search for Common Ground
• Evaluating the Islamist movement by Greg Noakes, an American Muslim who works at the Washington Report.