Yet more on Voegelinians...

-- Prof. Barry Cooper, catching some rays on the deck of the Titanic, and catching up on his Koran.

I've mentioned Barry Cooper, a luminary among Voegelinians, before (here, and especially here).  (As to why I keep harping on this, I have summarized it in one pithy paragraph.) I have not yet read Cooper's book (with its title suspiciously if not inauspiciously smelling of equivalencism), New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, but I have read his lengthy essay, The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism (briefly discussed in the second link cited above) on the official Voegelinian website, VoegelinView.  

In that essay, and in a review he wrote of a book by Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Cooper seems to subscribe to a meme that has become common (if not probably dominant) among PC MC and asymptotic Western analysts -- namely, that Islam only became problematic at a certain point in time (the relative date may vary, but usually it is set in the medieval period), when the "Mutazalite School" lost sway (and, it is asserted with dubious evidence, the "gates of ijtihad slammed shut" as though those gates were ever really open in the first place), steering a supposedly new course for Islam, thus implying that Islam was hunky-dory (if not positively peachy keen) before that point in time.  Thus:

The “traditionalists,” as Reilly called the non-Mutazalites, believed in a lot more than in the uncreated status of the Koran, though that was a central pillar of their position. If eternal God had spoken to humans in the eternal Koran, there was no need for reason because reality and instruction had been finally and completely revealed. This was the fundamental position of the Asharite School founded by Abu Hasan al-Ashari in the early tenth century. In contrast to the Mutazalites, the Asharites emphasized the unlimited will of God, not His reasonableness.

And, the implication is painfully throbbing beneath the surface of all this nonsense:  if Islam was hunky-dory (if not positively peachy keen) before that point in time, it can be so again, if only we can make sure to avoid our innately Western propensity toward bigotry, and if only we can help all those decent Muslims (probably the "vast majority"...?) who so desperately want to be decent and peaceful and abide by a respect for the equality of all minorities!

While this meme seems to be Reilly's main thesis, Cooper's review in turn seems to reflect no problems with it, and effectively endorses it as useful for our purposes of analyzing our present problem of "Islamism".  Only in one place that I could find in Cooper's review does he show a glimmer of a recognition of a way out of the Cave he and so many other Westerners seem to be in on this issue -- in a rhetorical question posed in the very last paragraph.  Referring to that alleged diremption Islam manifested in the medieval period when it made a wrong turn (from, therefore, apparently, a right course), Cooper writes:

...what was it in Islam that made such a perversion possible? 

When, however, he follows that immediately with the claim that --

Robert Reilly raises just that question and provides a clear answer in this splendid book...

-- we are made to wonder what Reilly could possibly say that would so markedly depart from the meme that dominates his book's title; and we are also made to wonder what this mysterious answer is that Reilly provides that Cooper couldn't summarize, by which we could answer that most pressing question, which is really the searingly crucial point of all analysis of the problem of Islam.

Alas, in Cooper's first sentence of that last paragraph --

Most of us can see that Islamism is a perversion of Islam...

-- we see that whatever the answer could be, it cannot for Cooper rise to any substantive condemnation of Islam qua Islam.  He's already stacked the deck.

Which no doubt comes in handy for his day job, re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.