Norman Oliver Brown

"I am Defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I spent a couple of weeks in June 2009 reading the unpublished archived notes and typescripts pertaining to all things Islamic of the late, great Norman O. Brown.

In my view, Brown belongs to the intellectual tradition that Professor Timothy Marr has termed "American Cultural Islamicism" (ACI). For Marr, ACI "is ultimately a complex configuration of cultural ideologies that reveals more about the constitution of American imaginations than it does the character of Muslim beliefs" (Marr, 7).

Marr discerns three trends of thought (he calls them "valences") operating within the ambit of ACI: domestic, comparative, and romantic (ibid, 10) and finds all three deeply problematic. I tend to agree with Marr on this score (and here I should disclose that I was a colleague of Marr's at the University of North Carolina, that I admire his work, and that I consider him a friend); that said, I would also say that I have read my Kant and Schleiermacher and, consequently, affirm that every attempt at interpretation, of coming to terms with the "Other," necessarily proceeds by way of misunderstanding. Of the three misunderstandings of Islam on offer under the rubric of ACI, the romantic is the least troubling to my conscience--so long as by "romantic" one understands the Islamicism of Ralph Waldo Emerson's love affair with Sufi poetry and not the variety of romanticism that exoticises Islam and caricatures Muslims as the passive objects of over-heated Orientalist sexual fantasies. See Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Brown, in my view, belongs to the Emersonian "school" of ACI. In his engagement with Islamic materials, he found much food for thought, much inspiration, much to love. Indeed, he found in Ismaili political thought and life a counterpart to the project he initiated with his book Life Against Death and continued in Love's Body. Centuries before Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche diagnosed the worminess in the apple of Western civilization, Muslims experimented with a pre-modern version of what Brown would admiringly describe as "a subterranean counter-culture of protean polymorphous complexity"--an apt description of what I have advocated in these pages as the "invisible Whitmanian republic" (Brown, "Shi'ite Islam"--a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the AAR in Dallas, TX, December 21, 1983).

In Brown's notes and in the recently published volume Norman O. Brown, The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition, ed. Jerome Neu (Santa Cruz, CA: North Pacific Press, 2009), one witnesses NOB thrill to the discovery that--despite his friend Herbert Marcuse's trenchant critique--the cultural revolution he had called for in the 1960's had not only historical precedents but had experienced some (short-lived) historical successes.

The conclusion Brown drew from his studies of Islam is that more study was needed--of Islam as, in Marr's words, a "horizon for expanding the global repertoire of domestic expression" (Marr, 14). In other words, 20th (now 21st) century Americans should stop demonizing Islam and Muslims and, instead, sit at the feet of the history of Islamic thought and culture and learn how we might best re-invent our own.