Western Imaginings

Rohan Davis

Description

A comprehensive account of the current contest among Western intellectuals to define Wahhabism
Wahhabism is often understood as a radical version of Islam responsible for inspiring and motivating Islamic terrorism. Western Imaginings: The Intellectual Contest to Define Wahhabism is an inquiry into how Wahhabism has been understood and represented by Western intellectuals, particularly those belonging to the neo-conservative and liberal traditions. In contrast to the existing literature that treats Wahhabism as a historical phenomenon or a monolithic theological ideology, a literature often written by authors keen to promote geopolitical interests or with ideological axes to grind, Davis's work considers Wahhabism as a discursive construct crafted and popularized by a Western intellectual elite. This comprehensive study speaks to how and why Western intellectuals have chosen to represent Wahhabism in specific ways, ranging from an analysis of the particular rhetorical techniques employed by these intellectuals to a consideration of the religious and political beliefs that inspire and motivate their decisions.
Western Imaginings is aimed at students of political philosophy, intellectual traditions, and sociology; media and policy professionals; and anyone interested in how Islamic doctrines like Wahhabism have been represented in an international context framed by a heightened anxiety about radical Islam.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Wahhabism as a Contested Category
2. On Intellectuals, Prejudice, and Understanding the Social World
3. Dialectics, Ideal Types, Fuzzy Categories, and Analyzing Language
4. Spreading the Rule of Reason: Liberal Imaginings of Wahhabism
5. Themata, Generative Metaphors, and Making Sense of Liberal Intellectuals' Representations of Wahhabism
6. Those Evil and Violent Savages: The Neoconservative Assault on Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Sociology of Religion
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617978760
• Langue: English

Extrait

WESTERN IMAGININGS
WESTERN IMAGININGS
The Intellectual Contest to Define
Wahhabism





ROHAN DAVIS








The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York
Copyright © 2018 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 www.aucpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 977 416 864 2 eISBN: 978 161 797 876 0
Version 1
For my parents, Janice and Phil And thank you Rob, I’m eternally grateful
Contents
Introduction
Wahhabism: A Contested Category
The Role of Intellectuals
The Nature of the Political
1 Wahhabism as a Contested Category
Intellectuals, Imagined Geographies, and Imagined Communities: Wahhabism as Threat
Understanding Wahhabism through a Feminist Lens
Saudi School Textbooks and the Problem of Translation
Wahhabism Is Not So Bad After All
2 On Intellectuals, Prejudice, and Understanding the Social World
On the Collective Identity and Attachment of Intellectuals
Intellectuals and the Nation-State
Making Sense of Truth
3 Dialectics, Ideal Types, Fuzzy Categories, and Analyzing Language
Dialectics
On Fuzziness and Ideal Types
Metaphors, Analogies, Similes, Neologisms, and the Cognitive Structuring of Violent Accounts
Critical Discourse Analysis: Language Is Made in and Makes the World
4 Spreading the Rule of Reason: Liberal Imaginings of Wahhabism
Understanding Liberalism: Many Freedoms?
Understanding Liberalism: Toward an Ideal Type
Wahhabism Restricts Freedoms
Wahhabism as Backward and an Obstacle to Progress
Wahhabism Is a Threat to the Ideal Secular Society
5 Themata, Generative Metaphors, and Making Sense of Liberal Intellectuals’ Representations of Wahhabism
Themata
Generative Metaphors
Individualism, Progress: The Key Themata and Generative Metaphors Influencing Liberal Thinking
6 Those Evil and Violent Savages: The Neoconservative Assault on Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination
Introducing the Neoconservatives
Toward an Ideal Type
The Wahhabi Is a Savage
An Unwavering Support for Israel: Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia as Enemies of the Jewish State
Key Themata: The Holy Land and Welcoming the Savior
Good versus Evil
Animal Metaphors and the Noble Savage
7 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Like so many other authors, my researching and writing this book was inspired and motivated by an experience that had a profound effect on me. In 2008 I was in Stockholm, Sweden, staying in a small student apartment in the south of the city. It soon became clear to me that if I wanted to have something close to an authentic Swedish experience, then I needed to speak and understand some of the Swedish language. So I enrolled in a beginner-level Swedish language course, two classes a week. The classes had few students, and they were relaxed and enjoyable. The most interesting aspect of this experience was the friendships I made with other students while talking during coffee breaks and after class. It was a chance encounter with one young man in particular that would forever change how I would understand the world and which would inspire the years of researching and writing this book.
My new friend was from Palestine. We got to know each other during lunch and coffee breaks, and each week we shared more about life in our home countries. His story was particularly interesting because it gave me an insight into what it was like for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. He told me about how the Israel Defense Forces had forcibly removed him and his family from their homes, and with no place to live, they fled to a Jordanian refugee camp. He lived in the camp for a few years until his application for asylum was eventually accepted by the Swedish government.
With the help of the Swedish refugee services, he was resettled in Kiruna, one of Sweden’s most northern, darkest, and coldest cities. The small city is located north of the Arctic Circle, meaning it experiences both the midnight sun and the polar night throughout the year. Even for Swedes, Kiruna is especially cold, and it could not be any more different to the parched Palestinian landscape. Following the end of his employment in a factory, my new friend moved to suburban Stockholm where he lived with three other Middle Eastern refugees. Unable to speak Swedish fluently, he wanted to both communicate with the people of his adopted nation and have better employment opportunities. This inspired him to join the Swedish language class.
Up until this point in time I had never shown great interest in the situation in Palestine. When I thought about the ongoing conflict, far away from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, where I grew up, all I could recount was the narrative that tended to dominate the Western media: the Palestinians were by and large terrorists whose desire to violently attack Israelis was in part motivated by their radical Islamic beliefs. While we hear a lot more stories now about the dire situation in places like the West Bank and Gaza, my thoughts about the ongoing conflict were dominated by media reports about what they referred to as pro-Palestinian terrorist groups.
This narrative was however completely contradicted by what my new Palestinian friend was telling me. He was neither a terrorist nor a hater of Jews. He abhorred violence and did not want retribution against those responsible for displacing him, his family, his friends, and neighbors from their land. He wanted to spend his time doing what he loved—playing soccer, drinking coffee, and smoking. He called smoking his dirty habit, which he began during his time in the refugee camp to help him relieve stress, suppress his hunger, and pass the time. Like most people he also dreamed of falling in love and having a family. Most importantly, my conversations with him revealed to me another viewpoint about the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The stories I was told by the mass media about the conflict simply did not match up with what this man was describing, so I went online, searching for alternative news sites. The more I read, the more I became aware of the many competing narratives and categories writers were using when representing the alleged terrorist threat posed by Palestinians. One of the categories used by some writers that piqued my interest was something they were calling Wahhabism.
More research helped reveal to me that this was a term that became increasingly popular among Western scholars and commentators following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Prior to these attacks few Western scholars and commentators wrote about this phenomenon, and of those who did it was usually in relation to the role it played in the forming of the modern Saudi state. Articles about Wahhabism rarely appeared in popular US newspapers and magazines, and it was largely ignored by the plethora of US-based think tanks and foreign policy organizations now churning out documents about this primarily religious phenomenon. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a turning point, as commentators began using the term when describing the influence it supposedly had on the Saudi Arabian hijackers. Furthermore, Western scholars and commentators began linking this Saudi state-sanctioned religion to Islamic radicalism and violent extremism throughout the world. The more reading I did, the less convinced I was of the apparent relationship between Wahhabism and Palestinian violence, which many US-based right-wing, conservative, and pro-Israeli commentators were claiming. My Palestinian friend had certainly never used the term. That experience planted a seed that has since grown to become this book.
This book is my modest attempt at understanding how the phenomenon Wahhabism has been represented by authors writing in a post–9/11 world characterized by anxiety about terrorism between and inside states. I am particularly concerned with how intellectuals belonging to the liberal and neoconservative traditions represent Wahhabism, and the different truth claims they rely on to support these representations. This book is also designed to understand some of the ways in which different ethical, political, and religious motivations are informing these representations.
I have set out a number of questions to help focus my book. They are: How have scholars represented Wahhabism? What kinds of problems are there with these interpretative exercises? What kinds of problems can we find in the sociology of intellectuals that warrant this kind of enquiry? How do liberal and neoconservative intellectuals in particular represent Wahhabism? And how are we to understand and make sense of these representations?
At this point it is important to briefly set out why I am focusing on representations of Wahhabism and not what is referred to as Wahhabism. There are numerous considerations that are shaping my inquiry. Though this proposition needs and gets some more elaboration later in the book, I want to highlight the basic difficulty of engaging with Wahhabism itself. There are good grounds for doubting that the phen