SOURCE: Cooke, Miriam. Review of Islam and Democracy, by Fatima Mernissi. International Journal of Middle East Studies 26, no. 2 (May 1994): 356-58.

In the following review, Cooke evaluates the strengths of Islam and Democracy, but finds minor shortcomings in Mernissi's assertions about Western time and her rhetorical point of view.

This reinterpretation and re-presentation of Islam [in Islam and Democracy] by the controversial Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi is at once affectionate and angry. She presents a picture of a beautiful, flexible, self-renewing religion in conflict with its despotic and corrupt political superstructure from the perspective of an insider who as a girl attended Qur'anic school.

Like several recent studies, this one uses the Gulf War as context. Mernissi regards this confrontation between East and West as a turning point because it emphasized the debilitating division that has characterized Islamic history: “an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of...