Abstract
Girard’s comments on Islam-related topics are few and were mainly published after the attacks of 11 September 2001, that is, at a rather late phase of Girard’s work. In addition, most of them were published in the context of interviews in which Girard focused more on contemporary Islamist radicalism than about Islam in its entirety. This chapter discusses Girard’s scattered comments from different angles: his methodological approach to Islam-related phenomena, his distinction between Islam and Islamist radicalism, and the latter’s function in the planetary “escalation to extremes” of mimetic rivalry. After a discussion of several blind spots in Girard’s approach toward Islam, the chapter finally outlines a possible “mimetic history of the Muslim world” as part of Girard’s unaccomplished project to write a “mimetic history” of our time.
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Notes
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With respect to the Communist “intermediary” period, Girard seems to suggest a gradual absorption of religious features into radicalism: While Leninism, according to Girard, “lacked” religion (2010, p. 213), Stalinism “already contained para-religious components that foreshadowed the increasingly radical contamination that occurred over time” (p. 214).
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Girard 2005a [1972], p. 4; see also Girard (2001). In Achever Clausewitz, and in his interview with Guillaume de Tanoüarn and Laurent Lineuil (Girard 2003), Girard erroneously claims the Qur’ān as the source of this tradition. In reality, however, the legend of the sacrificial link between the ram of Abel and the ram of Abraham can only be found in later apocryphal extensions of the Qur’ānic narratives, among others in the work of Ṭabarī (d. 923) or in Thaʿlabī’s (d. 1035) “Lives of the Prophets”. See Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (1989, p. 310 [139]); Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Thaʿlabī (2002, p. 159). Even without this apocryphal tradition, the nexus between animal sacrifice and temporary pacification emphasized by Girard is evident in the Qur’ānic version of the Cain/Abel narrative itself (Q 5: 27–31): Abel, threatened by Cain after Abel’s sacrifice has been accepted by God while Cain’s sacrifice was rejected, refuses to use violence against his brother even if the latter would kill him (Q 5: 28). His explanation, however, reveals an ambivalent fusion of aggressive and de-escalating impulses: Abel refuses to raise his hand against his brother in self-defense because he is fearing God (Q 5: 28), but also because he wishes to burden his brother with the whole weight of his sin so that the latter will be punished in hellfire (Q 5: 29).
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Scheffler, T. (2019). Islam and Islamism in the Mirror of Girard’s Mimetic Theory. In: Kirwan, M., Achtar, A. (eds) Mimetic Theory and Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05695-7_9
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