| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Vali Nasr Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Now before we get into those issues [of the politics of Islam], let's talk about becoming a political scientist. Was it inevitable that you would become a political scientist and study these problems from that discipline?
I liked political science ever since I was an undergraduate student at Tufts. I was greatly attracted to political analysis, understanding political movements, understanding roles of governments and states and the like. Given the circumstances of the time, I became interested in understanding Islamic fundamentalism and the role of Islam in politics, as part of political analysis -- not as a religious discussion, which was largely the case then. And, increasingly, my intellectual development jelled around providing an understanding of this phenomenon as a political phenomenon.
Beyond your background, who were your mentors in the course of your studies? What were the important influences?
Interestingly, the problem at that time in the study of Muslim politics is still the problem in the United States -- there is a complete disjuncture between those who study Islamic history, arts, culture, and Islam's religion, and social sciences. Particularly in the late seventies and eighties, when I was a student, there was no body of theory that actually provided a fused and a comprehensive and uniformed approach to these topics.
You had political scientists that provided you with the tools of political analysis, and then there were the historians and the Islamists who gave you the detailed knowledge about the religion, and the culture, and history. It was largely up to you to put these together. That was the challenge that I took as I moved forward with my studies, that there has to be a place in political science for understanding the role of religion.
This linkage had been ignored in the social sciences? I mean, there were some exceptions -- in anthropology, for example, Clifford Geertz, but not in political science.
You're absolutely correct, and I believe it's still a problem. Part of our difficulty in understanding religious movements, particularly Islamic movements, stems from this. Anthropology and history, by definition, rely on what Geertz himself called "thick description." In other words, you need to get your feet wet in actual facts of the religion of the culture. How you interpret it is a different issue. But you cannot ignore what culture and religions say.
Political science, on the other hand, has been largely focused on theoretical issues, and when it comes to the Muslim world, it actually has demonstrated this absence even in area studies. It's very rare that there had been a study of Islam in political science in any notable political science department in the United States. And that's still true to form to this day. In fact, in recent years, political science as a discipline has been more interested in political economy, and then rational choice. And, therefore, has not really been interested in understanding culture and cultural behavior, or culturally motivated behavior within the parameters of political science theory.
Next page: Islamic Fundamentalism
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