re orienting orientalism

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Re-Orienting Orientalism

Wael B. HallaqColumbia University

IThe study of any culture, as of any phenomenon, must ineluctably be framed by thevalue-system and cultural imperatives of the scholar, irrespective of any claim toobjectivity. This is what it means not to have –or the impossibility of having-- a neutralpoint of view from which to study anything in the world. When Muslim scholars“studied” their Shar ! ‘a1 system, or any aspect thereof, they took it as a given that theywere teaching and writing as expositors of the values in which the system itself wasgrounded and enshrined. The entire range of the discursive formations they havestructured – be they theological, philosophical, linguistic, logical or “legal”2 –responded not only to the moral grundnorm (a foundational act strictu sensu) butcontinued to react and adjust itself to the evolving challenges that the system and itspractitioners continued to pose. Thus the jurists wrote for their fellow Muslims aboutthe norms and principles of their own society, whether for theoretical or practicalends. They assumed or took for granted a considerable amount of knowledge about thesystem (precisely that which we as historians take most pains in the twenty-firstcentury to unravel), but they also had much to say that was not taken for granted.Within the internal logic of the system in which they found themselves, and within theconstraints and conditions that made their system possible in the first place, theyrationally responded to the arising stimuli as any community of scholars and “legal”practitioners would. And as in any legal or intellectual community, there was nothing“objective” about their project except for the resultant social reality produced by therationality that the internal logic of their world imposed.

As of about the middle of the nineteenth century, Orientalists too made it theirbusiness to study what they perceived as Islam; but the manuscripts, archives, andartifacts of that world were patently not deciphered within an Islamic cultural context.

1 As a rule, and unless otherwise specified or qualified, I use the term “Shar ! ‘a” to refer to the pre-modernexperiences of Muslims. As I have argued elsewhere,

the modern reincarnation has been eviscerated, rendering at least the institutional structures defunct.See Hallaq, “Can the Shari‘a Be Restored?” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Barbara F. Stowasser, eds.,Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004): 21-53.2 Whenever the reference is to the Shar ! ‘a, my use of the term “legal” connotes a concept, phenomenonor category that must always be taken as subservient to the moral, this latter being an envelopingstructure of norms that, conversely, both subordinates and commands the legal. In a system that did notdifferentiate between the moral and the legal, but was a comingled admixture of both (as the Shar ! ‘a wasfor centuries before the onset of modernity), the segregated uses of the terms, including the “moral,”must be understood as conditioned by modernity’s inescapable conceptual-linguistic repertoire thatinsists on corralling the two terms into separate spheres.


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For the first time in the history of Islam, its cultural production, especially its text-based tradition, was to be subjected to an entirely foreign, but also hegemonic anddomineering, hermeneutic. This was not an enterprise intent on organizing Europe’s“scholarly curiosity,” but one that effectively appropriated, refracted, and redefinedthe way Muslims themselves thought about the world. Thus, by the end of the

nineteenth century, no serious Muslim historian, for instance, could even attempt –much less be capable of producing -- a" abarian, Mas‘#dian or Kath ! rian history, thesestanding at one time as indubitable exemplars of Islamic historiographical narratives.Nor was it conceivable in the least that a Juwayn ! , a R$z ! or a Nasaf ! be replicated in theShar ! ‘a sphere. These paragons of paradigmatic Islamic learning effectively became,nearly overnight, expressions of a dead past.

The context of interpretation and the assumptions of Orientalist hermeneuticswere entirely and solidly grounded within a distinct and unprecedented intellectualand material European formation, one dominated by a newly forged enlightenmentwhose values reflected a particular – though narrowly corralled -- conception ofreason, and specific, if not unique, notions of secularism, religion, humanness,

materialism, capitalism, instrumentality, emotion, pain, violence, and much else. Allthese categories were no doubt found in the Islamic East (however their boundariesand substantive thickness or thinness may have been defined) but were manifestedthere in often dramatically different ways, expressed in different forms, and, mostimportantly, marshaled and utilized for different ends.

The Muslim project may be said to have been largely geared toward self-construction -- the psychological, moral, and “legal” being paramount and overridingin importance and scope over the material (a category emerging as paradigmatically3 paramount only with modernity). These aspects were exemplified in the emergenceand maintenance of particular theoretical and practical technologies of theself/subject, narratives of collective moral engagement, discursive codes of juridical

conduct, and a socio-economic system that ranged in its interests from socialorganization to economic activity and civil society, to a limited conception and practiceof politics, and to much else. The project was chiefly one carried out by the civic orderon behalf of and for the sake of that order.4 In this project, “Islam” and things Islamicwere the subject, the predicate and the object, all at once.5

3 An explanation of the theory of paradigms (crucial to my overall argument) is to be found in myImpossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament(New York: Columbia University Press,2013): 6-13.4 An argument advanced in my Impossible State, 37-97, as well as inShar ! ‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 125-221, and, in certain respects, developed further in“Regarding Liberty, Freedom, Representation, and the Rule of Law: How would the Shar ! ‘a Fare?” an

unpublished lecture delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Feb. 4, 2014.5 In many significant ways, the concept of “Islam” as a generic category in effect represents a moderntranslation (often crude and reductive) of the various formations that worked together throughout timeto produce the conditions of possibility for immensely diverse ways of life that had their commondenominator reside in a varied subscription to Islamic conceptions of ethics, morality, mysticism, law,theology, philosophy, economy, or, at times, in as partial a conception as that of religious works (whatwas generally identified as ‘ibad"t ). Yet, the abstracted totality of the historical interactions between andamong all these conceptions – as well as their implementation in practice -- would be claimed, forinstance, by newly converted societies as their own, and inherited as a matter of course, as if thosesocieties had always been participants in that history (observe, e.g., the history of Islam in the Malay


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anthropocentricism. Said was – and I suspect remained so to the end -- blind to theprofound effects of the Enlightenment distinction between the Is and Ought as well asbetween fact and value, thereby failing to see the necessary effects of the modernproject in general, and the liberal project in particular. Said’s work, liberal in everyimportant way, saw light at the end of an era, one that still held some promise for a

better future. But since the eighties and the nineties, Said’s cherished values of secularhumanism, and especially its implied but ontologically and epistemologically entailedanthropocentricism have been at the center of critique that recalls the disenchantmentwith the modern condition of a number of major intellectuals since the eighteenthcentury (ranging from Herder and Nietzsche, to Max Scheler, the Frankfurt School andbeyond).

But the critique has become both more trenchant and more urgent since Saidwrote. The crucial matter of the survival of the human species was not atop thatphilosophical agenda, not even on Said’s when he wrote his Orientalism; but now it is,and at every level. One can now speak even of a scientific consensus on climate andecological crisis.9 Colossal environmental destruction; unprecedented forms of

violence; the construction of lethal political identities; the poisoning of food and water;extermination of alarming numbers of species; melting of Himalayan, polar and othermajor glaciers; increasingly worrying health threats; indecent disparity between richand poor; social and communal disintegration; the rise of narcissistic sovereignindividualism; an alarming increase of mental health disorders; a “growing epidemic”of suicide, and much more (the list is long enough to require, literally, an entire ledger),are now calling attention to a revaluation of modernist, industrial, capitalist 10 andchiefly (though not exclusively) liberal values. The increasingly proliferating andwidespread understanding that the modern project, together with its knowledgesystem, is unsustainable11 (even in the relatively short run) is in the process of takingover center-stage, and not only in Western industrialized countries. Influential activist

groups and prominent intellectuals in India, China and several other countries in Asia,Latin America and elsewhere, have come to realize that a major restructuring, if notoverhauling, of the paradigmatic structures of modernity is now in order. 12 The crisisaffects the global village, and is not the concern of only particular groups or countries,

providence to society, a “scandalous” “detail” that would perhaps tarnish, in Said’s mind, Vico’s image asan advocate of “human freedom.” Unlike Vico, and situating himself at the center-right of theEnlightenment, Said saw a contradiction between religion and freedom, a contradiction resolved by

secular humanism. On some aspects of Vico’s “scandalous” thought, see Robert C. Miner, Vico:Genealogist of Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002): passim but also see p. 137.9 Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We Are Not Wrong? in Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman, eds.,Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and OurGrandchildren (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007): 65-99.10 See thesis 3 in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,”Critical Inquiry, 35, 2 (2009):197-222, especially at 215-17.11 For a powerful argument in this direction, see Sanjay Seth, “’Once Was Blind but Now Can See’:Modernity and the Social Sciences,”International Political Sociology, 7 (2013): 136-51, especially at 144.12 On paradigms, see my Impossible State, 6-13.


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although the genealogy of the sources of destruction are widely recognized asEuropean and more recently Euro-American.13

In the argument I am setting forth here, a series of premises should be madeexplicit before we proceed further, namely, that (1) the ecological and environmentalcrisis is endemic to the very modern system producing it, which is to say that the crisis

itself is systemic; (2) the modern system that cohesively marshals capitalism,technology, industrialism and a legal system that regulates their conduct is based onforms of knowledge that are claimed to be rational and thus are far from haphazard oraccidental; (3) this rationality, in its fully-fledged practical manifestations, in effectamounts to nothing short of an epistemology, a conscious, deliberate and fairlyconsistent way of understanding, interpreting and living in the world; and (4) thisepistemology lacks sufficient moral and ethical content so as to (a) allow living in theworld without -- to put it minimally--14 a noticeable penchant for destructiveness; and(b) successfully remedy ecological and environmental problems as may happen to arise.The upshot of these premises is that the present crises are not only indicative, but infact an integral effect , of the forms of knowledge and ethics commanding modernity as a

way of living in the world. It is then wholly plausible to argue that there is “no area ofethical thinking that pushes us to examine the foundations of ethical thought morethan environmental ethics.” 15 Here, the “foundations of ethical thought” must beunderstood as entailing virtually the entire range of modern forms of knowledge,especially those involved directly in violent and destructive ventures.

The critical global situation during the last three decades calls for a moreprofound critique of the Orientalist project -- as it does of most others in the sciences,the social sciences and the humanities -- even as Orientalism stands now in its modifiedform (and despite the due recognition that Orientalism has somewhat changed courseafter Said’s critique). Said’s own foundational premises are no longer sufficient, and infact utterly inadequate. Secular humanism, anthropocentricism, and liberalism (all of

13 In fact, it is plausible to argue, as Andrew Vincent does, that it is the very values and practices of liberal justice theory that “constitute the key environmental danger.” Vincent, “Liberalism and theEnvironment,” Environmental Values, 7 (1998): 443-59, at 443.14 The minimalism here is intended to avoid entering the fray over whether or not pre-industrialsocieties contributed to the deterioration of environment and ecology. See, in this respect, theinstructive arguments made by Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Nonetheless,these arguments may not be sufficient. Skeptics may still be unconvinced that industrialist societydeparted radically from earlier epochs of human degradation of the environment, this latter having beenless extensive and occurring in piecemeal fashion. But the disagreement cannot be resolved just byrecourse to quantitative data. The argument insisting on pre-industrial degradation stands in collusionwith a conception of history that is not only pre-determinative but also one that squarely rests on adogmatic theory of progress. This narrative insists that any society, “civilization” or culture would have

done exactly what the west has in fact done had it stood in its place, the logic being that progress isinevitable and that it happens to have (or, alternatively, must have) a price. The question that, amongothers, is never raised is why didn’t such massive degradations take place elsewhere and before modernEurope came along. In this narrative, it seems that the questions pertaining to the specific conditionswhich made destructive modernity possible are readily universalized within a trajectory that knowsnothing but predetermined progress. This is not merely a historical force, but metaphysics galore.Further on these themes, see Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of ClimateChange(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).15 David Schrader, “Living Together in an Ecological Community,” Journal of Philosophy, 7, 18 (Fall 2012):42-51, at 42.


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which rest on a mechanistic view of the world), are increasingly viewed as too costly tomaintain, and an excessive and unjustifiable -- if not immoral -- overreach, and all thisnotwithstanding their benefits (undoubted benefits with equally undoubted disastrousside-effects). In fact, it is precisely these benefits – supposed and real – that are directlytied to the pervasive destruction of nearly every aspect of modern human, animal and

insentient life (all of which, one can safely say, are experiencing, andliving, the moderncondition).It is therefore the benefits that we claim to derive from the modern project that

does the work of vindicating the moral basis on which the project itself becomes bothrationalized and justified. This has been the cornerstone and thrust of Bentham’s and J.S. Mill’s philosophies, among others, which continue to flourish in various, evenpervasive, forms in the twenty-first century, both intellectually and institutionally.Their effects have not been merely practical, in the sense that they afford a guide to anactionable way of life premised on certain foundational conceptions of utility, pleasureand pain. Rather, the effects have gone deep into the formation of the modern subject,determining not only the manner in which that subject understands and interrogates

the world, but also, and consequently, how it cognitively situates itself in the world.In order to reckon with the unbearable heaviness of the ensuing contradictionswithin its fabric, this understanding of the world had to be framed as a theory ofmorality, a necessary myth that makes irreconcilable contradictions bearable – for,after all, this is precisely one of the functions of myth. Hence, we often encounter theargument that modernity has developed its own concept – if not system – of morality,including the morality (even virtue ethics) of its liberalism, capitalism, Marxism,scientism, and of course the interminably but deliberately vague doctrine of progress.The structure of justification of this morality has behind it a venerable philosophicaltradition that begins with Machiavelli and Hobbes down to Rawls, Dworkin and JosephRaz. The venerability is of course partly associated with intellectual integrity, but not

wholly. Venerability, and particularly the much acclaimed universalist validity andrelevance, rest on foundations that also have little to do with the honorable weight ofintellectual attirement, and much to do with the politics of knowledge and its functionin the production of regimes of truth. Upon entry into any debate about the nature ofthis morality as compared to, say, pre-modern cultural or religious systems, thecontention that inevitably arises is one to do with either the superiority of the modernsystem of value and thus of its moral basis (an honest position openly admitting itsstructural associations with power-based forms of knowledge), or, at best, of therelativism (and thus subjectivity) involved in weighing one moral system againstanother (a relativism that does not acknowledge the absolutism of the very system ofknowledge which gives rise to it in the first place). The balance between superiority

and subjectivity has paradigmatically worked in favor of modern forms of morality, andlargely of epistemology, for the colosseum of debate, including its presiding Caesar,remains undeniably modern. In a system that a priori sets limits to what can and cannotbe acceptable standards of legitimate discourse, subjectivity and relativism work hand-in-hand and complement the stance of superiority – that which we know by the nameof progress.


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The modern constitution of moral value rests on a posited metaphysic 16 ofindividual freedom and rationality that in turn inheres in an enveloping political andcapitalist system of value that shapes the qualities, and therefore specific types, offreedom and rationality -- all this being a process formative of the self but one that waskept distinct from that (unacknowledged) metaphysic. Which is to say that it was

necessary, in order to maintain the idealized conception of freedom and rationality, toset this ideal apart from the otherwise determining and dominating effects of economy(and to some extent even from state policy of inventing and managing citizenship), andtherefore of its metaphysic.

Thus the subjectivity of moral value is not to be confused with unintelligibleabstractness. When all else fails, a moral system can be judged and adjudicated on lessabstract grounds than metaphysics, whether in its coherent or blurred(unacknowledged?) versions. If the structures of technology/technique, 17 industrialism,science, rationality, capitalism, and, no less, the nation-state, are admitted to beparadigmatic, defining in the most decisive of ways the contours and substantivecontent of modern life, then it may not be implausible to regard them as having failed

the consumers of the good life who live in and with the world rather than above andagainst it, be these consumers human, animal or insentient (this latter beingdetermined as such, like all else, by the admittedly constrained forms of humanknowledge).

Our concern in all this is of course rationality – presumably that discrete andautonomous process that remains, despite all claims to autonomy, necessarilyconditioned by the paradigmatic structures of modernity (not least of which arecapitalism, nationalism, industrialism, technology, science, and the entire range ofperipheral domains 18 that give it severally and aggregately their perspectival props).This rationality, of a specific type and structur e, may not be disentangled from modernforms of life, the very forms that have led to the state of current crises. The crises have

clearly been precipitated by a human – and no other – agency, one that is self-professedly rational,19 but also one whose quest for knowledge is, as Scheler put it

16 Modernity appears unique in the imperial and “civilization-defined” history of mankind, at leastinsofar as it is a complex system (perhaps too complex) that has failed to acknowledge and articulate itsown metaphysical doctrine. Indeed, any attribution to modern phenomena of a metaphysic hasinvariably been articulated as a critique of, rather than as an internal elaboration of, the modern project.The denial of the metaphysical doctrinal structure undergirding modernity is, needless to say, deemedboth integral and indispensable to the continued justification and survival of the project as a “rational”one – the assumption being that metaphysics is a commodity of myth belonging to a primordial past. Seealso Jan C. Schmidt, “Defending Hans Jonas’ Environmental Ethics: On the Relation between Philosophyof Nature and Ethics,”Environmental Ethics, 35 (Winter, 2013): 461-79, at 467-69.17 On technique as technology and its determining role on modern life, see Jacques Ellul,The Technological

Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964).18 On peripheral domains as subservient to paradigmatic or central domains, see Hallaq, Impossible State,6-13.19 Whence another contradiction in the modern project ensues. Rationality is presumed to be thefoundation of Enlightened modernity that moves in a progressive line, always toward a better future; yet,a few would deny that this modernity (or our current condition, at any rate) is heavily involved in lessthan healthy ways of living, and engendering a marked increase (rather than decrease) of health,economic and environmental-ecological problems, among many others. To exonerate rationality of theoutcomes of its own work (as in the claim that side-effects justify the goal, or that side-effects justifiablycannot be foreseen) is to embark on yet another contradiction, namely, that rationality is ipso facto


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aptly, garnered for systematic control and domination. 20 And it is this rationality thathas dictated the way we construe ourselves as well as the Other in the world, includingIslam and its history and cultures.

III

What are the implications of this crisis in the modern project for the study of Shar ! ‘a?To begin with, the implications are foundational, profound, and entirely epistemic,which is to say that much of the way of understanding and doing things in the worldnow requires rethinking. This is also to say, in the first instance, that the very questionswe ask must reflect the new critical reality of the last three decades. This claim,however, demands a clearer vision than I have thus far offered of the context in whichsuch questions might be formulated.

When Europe developed Orientalism, it was a project integral to the rise of neweconomics and forms of politics directed and commanded, respectively, by the nationstate. But the project, as a subset of the larger European experiment that createdmodernity, was profoundly anchored in the paradigmatic concepts of the

Enlightenment (however much it may be seen nowadays to have gone astray). It is inthis sense that Orientalism was a project of culture, and not merely an academicenterprise. And as such, it was most natural for the agents of this enterprise to operatewithin the cultural boundaries that modernity had come to require or, more precisely,determine. Whether Orientalists wanted it or not, they all (or nearly all) engaged in theproduction of that culture, and thus consciously or not, willingly or not, contributed tothe formation of that culture, which was deeply rooted in a massive colonialist projectthat involved a structured and pervasive market of slavery, 21 economic exploitation,and control and subjection of the lives of countless millions of non-Europeans (anddisenfranchised Europeans as well).22 This is the world into which Orientalism wasborn, and it was this world that it lived in and served.

By the middle of the twentieth century, and with the majority of “third world”countries gaining so-called “independence,” Orientalism entered a new, post-colonialist stage, one that left it with residues of the colonialist heritage, but with newforms of power. This stage, beginning sometime after World War II and partly ending inthe eighties, shifted the focus of the field from direct forms of colonialism and its

deficient, unreliable, and cannot provide solutions to the very problems that it, through human agency,creates. This is not all, however. This rationality descends furthermore into metaphysics, the same kindof traditional metaphysics that our secular world vehemently shuns. The stubborn insistence on thebelief that our rationality and its resultant sciences can and will accomplish our ideals has developedinto a theology, if not a myth; namely, that like God, reason and rationality as conceived by modernitymust be served irrespective of how punitive they are or might become. This is no different than the

inquisition besetting Biblical Job, who accepts God’s severe punishment in the hope of salvation.20 Max Scheler,Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, trans. M. Frings (London: Routledge, 1980): 78, 118, 119;W. Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1960): 114-15.21 A “market” (economic, cultural and ideational) that was essential for the development of liberalismitself. On the connections between ideals of liberal thought and slavery, violence, colonialism andhorror/demonization, see Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011); LisaLowe, TheIntimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Panjak Mishra’s usefulreview essay “Bland Fanatics,”London Review of Books, vol. 37, No. 23 (December 3, 2015): 37-40; andElisabeth Anker, “The Liberalism of Horror,”Social Research, 81, 4 (Winter 2104): 795-823.22 The Basks, Irish, and Quebecers being prime examples.


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justification as mission civilisatrice to one of re-elaboration and adjustment of the waysin which the “Orient” was now to be seen. It was owing to a shift from a conception ofthe modalities of reconstituting and governing it in effective terms to a strategy (again,conducted through representation) of how to deal with it, that it now gained“independence” and presumably the ability to represent itself (now that it has become

reconstituted). Whether under the colonialist forms of the nineteenth century or thestill hegemonic influences of most of the twentieth, the prevailing attitude was alwaysone of strength and power: what Europe has said and done was the norm, the standardand decisive way according to which the world must be run, even seen. This remainedthe case to a significant degree even after the Saidian critique, although the attitudetoward the Muslim world after the rise of Islamist movements was one heavily coloredby a renewed fear of Islam and its “political” (and often cultural and “religious”) threat.Nonetheless, Orientalism in this latter phase acquired a diversity that is patentlyunprecedented. Its narratives and sub-narratives have been highly contentious, thistime integrating not only “native” voices who have militated against it from within, butalso enlisting an array of scholarly voices who are otherwise ethnically and culturally

embedded within the West and its dominant academic institutions.Yet, the paradigmatic narratives of this varied tradition we call Orientalismremain highly politicized: the field generally remains preoccupied with what might becalled the relationship of Islam to the West and the world (the directionality of thisrelationship being precisely that). Whether sympathetic or hostile to “Islam” as areligion or culture, the concern is with representing it to the West with a view toequipping the latter with a “better” and “more accurate” way of “understanding” it.Clearly, a majority of Orientalists are no longer sympathetic to their governments’policies as carried out in Muslim countries (a stark contrast with nineteenth and earlytwentieth century scholars, notwithstanding the rare, even at times powerful,exceptions23), but the general preoccupation remains representation “so that we know

how to deal with Muslims,” although this “dealing” often aspires to a set of attitudesthat show relatively more respect and tolerance than any preceding period. But thecommon denominator of Orientalist academia undoubtedly remains one of epistemicsuperiority, which is to say that respect and tolerance come with a doze of epistemicself-confidence that still assumes – consciously or not -- the validity of the Euro-American modern project, especially as it has been guided by the paradigmaticprinciples of the Enlightenment. One is tempted to say that it is only because Said’scritique remained foregrounded in a liberal, incurably secularist understanding of theworld – as well as in a particular conception of humanism -- that Western academiatook his work so seriously. It represented, despite an initial opposition to its message, anecessary inoculation – a much needed correction from within liberalism to liberal

discourse itself.24

23 I have in mind examples like Louis Massignon and, most notably, René Gué o n. For the latter, see PaulChacornac, The Simple Life of René Gué n, trans. Cecil Bethell (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001).24 The implications of this diagnosis are of course grave, for if Said’s critique squarely rested, as it did, onliberal foundations, then the very question of what is Orientalism (as apposed to its effects, which hestudied) remains entirely unexplored, both in the Saidian and post-Saidian projects. It is the contentionhere that a satisfactory answer to this foundational question precludes both liberal analytical tools andan applied liberal epistemology, the reason being that satisfactory answers to the question require ananalytical-theoretical apparatus whose location lies outside the boundaries not only of liberalism but


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It is the argument of this essay that such epistemic self-confidence, as well asthe concomitant corrective measures, are neither justified nor, respectively, sufficient– and that the earlier they are abandoned the better. The implications of such a stanceare admittedly grave: the radical crisis of the modern project in Euro-America, aselsewhere, demands a radical solution, a fact that bears directly on how we should

henceforth study Islam, its Shar ! ‘a and nearly everything else. At the center of thisargument stand two essential facts, namely, (1) that the crises of the modern projectare global, in both causes and effects,25 which is to say that the modern structuresproductive of the ill-effects have spread to all continents and are currently found innearly every country, to one degree or another; and (2) that every sector of ill-effecthas impacted material and social reality in virtually all aspects of existence. Thedisappearance of one species or the pollution or deforestation of one region has createdchain reactions negatively impacting ecological and social balance in other spheres.And if the crisis is undeniably common to all, in effect representing a serious threat tothe natural and social commons, then the commensurate moral responsibility (assumedhere to be more binding than any legal or political responsibility) must be borne by all

those who have a say about it.

IVSince states and governments have either shirked that moral responsibility orotherwise felt incompetent to offer any significant solution to the crisis, it falls to theintellectual traditions of the world to take up the challenge, and Orientalism isundoubtedly one such tradition that must now face up to that challenge. And it isthrough undertaking this challenge in meaningful ways that it can transform itselffrom a parochial, if not politically and theoretically backward, tradition into one thatcan contribute, however modestly, to pioneering a promising future and to building a

sustainable path for humanity. If the equivalent traditions in China, Latin America andespecially India can chart innovative ways in this direction, there is no reason whyOrientalism cannot find its own way toward such a worthwhile goal. This, forOrientalism, is a particularly urgent moral requirement, since, as has been rightlyargued, “ecological crisis is the product of a culture, originating in Western Europe,which now dominates the world.”26

Essentially and originally a product of Europe, Orientalism has evolved as anintellectual tradition representing, if not encapsulating, what I have elsewhere calledthe paradigms of modernity and the Enlightenment. 27 It has been largely – though notexclusively --defined by a potent theory of progress, with an omnipotent andmetaphysically latent concept of linear history. It is also considerably liberal in its

also and mainly of the central domains and structural paradigms of the modern project (domains whosediagnostic expression is liberalism, among other less important phenomena).25 Although it is eminently arguable that despite the global spread of modern technology and industry,the destructive effects have been far greater on the non-Euro-American world than the latter world wasresponsible for the causes of destruction.26 Arran Gare, “MacIntyre, Narratives, and Environmental Ethics,”Environmental Ethics, 20 (Spring 1998):3-21, at 14; Schmidt, “Defending Hans Jonas,” 463.27 W. Hallaq, “On Orientalism, Self-Consciousness and History,”Islamic Law and Society, 18 (2011): 387-439;idem., Impossible State, passim.


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disposition, even in the devastating critiques leveled against it-- Said’s being the mostprominent case in point. But above all, it lends itself to the characterization that it is, inthe coinage of MacIntyre, a rational tradition of inquiry, but one that encapsulates theimperatives of the Euro-American modern paradigm. In its entirety, and with all itsinternal disagreements and divergences across nearly two centuries of its existence, it

continues to lend itself to the definition (again by MacIntyre) that it is an extendedargument through time in which fundamental agreements are defined and constantlyredefined in the context of debates within it, and (tacitly) outside it. 28 If it does notexhibit on the surface all the features of a tradition (such as a conception of justice or aparticular view of practical rationality), it is not because these features do not exist:they do, albeit in a tacit and un-articulated manner, for such paradigmatic features as aparticular conception of rationality, a theory of progress, a linear notion of history, anda liberal conception of reality (including a latent theory of justice and ethics) -- allgovern its narratives and internal logic in structured ways.

As a tradition of rational inquiry, Orientalism directly confronts other traditionsof equally rational nature but differing in their conception of rationality (the

assumption being that every tradition has its own version of rational method derivedfrom its own experience and view of the world, including traditions based on what – asoutsiders -- we might characterize as mythological, metaphysical or otherwise).29 Thesehave been called rival traditions, not necessarily in the sense of incompatibility thatbars dialogue, but rather in the sense of difference that in fact compels these rivaltraditions to engage in dialogue with a view to (re-)evaluate their own narratives,defend them, justify them or modify them as a response to the challenge from anothertradition. In some cases, the rivaling tradition comes associated with political andmilitary power that overwhelms and eventually destroys a rivaling tradition. Anexample in point is Orientalism itself, as it existed and operated in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries in the lands of Islam. But there are other examples of

traditions that have been forced to modify their internal narratives under theintellectual pressure and stress of other rival traditions, of the sort that MacIntyrestudied in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.

As an expression of Western modernity and European Enlightenment,Orientalism now faces an unprecedented intellectual, but specifically epistemological,challenge. It must reckon with the devastating ill-effects of the paradigmatic socio-epistemic structures that have given rise to it. But before suggesting ways to cope withthis challenge, I must resolve a problem posed by the works of MacIntyre and Said,both of whose writings bear direct relevance on the present discussion.

It is by now abundantly acknowledged that MacIntyre has “ignored therelationship between traditions and power,” 30 limiting the conflict between traditions

to the challenge of rational inquiry. More a case of deontological aspiration than anactual description of reality, his account fails to consider the success of a tradition as aresult of sheer raw power, and not necessarily rational power. MacIntyre’s entire

28 A. MacIntyre,Whose Justice, Which Rationality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988):12.29 Patrick Joyce, “The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain,”Past and Present , 158 (1998): 223.30 Gare, “MacIntyre, Narratives, and Environmental Ethics,” 10.


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representations made and continue to make little difference to the functioning of anoverwhelming colonial power.33

Nonetheless, it is also possible to see in Said a narrowing of possibilities even inFoucaultian terms. Foucault, I think, allowed for a more complex picture of power,having viewed discourses as capable of existing, at one and the same time, and in the

same context, within oppositional trajectories. These oppositional discourses couldconceivably remain inseparable since they “are tactical elements or blocks operating ina field of force relations” that can exist as “different and even contradictory discourseswithin the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing theirform from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.” 34 In the colonialist context ofconquest and rupture, hegemonic strategies cannot – indeed -- turn into theiropposites, for if they did, there would emerge the absurdity of the perfectinterchangeability of actor and subject, of subject and predicate. This dynamic of powerwas possible in the staggered, cross-fertilizing, and symbiotic socio-economic andpolitical systems of Europe, but not within a geographically and culturally segregatedAfro-Asian countries, where the “tactical elements” could not travel beyond their own

field of force relations. Thus, the processes and strategies of power – in theirconfluence and opposition – must yield particular effects that both directly andobliquely flow from these processes and strategies. That power can neither exercisetotal control, nor precisely predict its own effects, is evident both in Foucault’s Europeand in the colonial laboratory. But this is not to agree with the argument that in thecolonial context the same strategy, as opposed to the effect, can itself turn into an“opposing strategy.” For to argue this position with regard to Europe’s colonialistventures would amount not merely to undermining the very nature of power, but todepriving it fully of its own agency, let alone potency. This is what Said was talkingabout, but it is not all that Foucault allowed for.

Put differently and in a simplified form, Foucault’s theory – as I understand it –

implies, though it does not consciously articulate, a distinction between what I wouldcall the mechanics and substance of power. The mechanics of power are to be foundeverywhere, and their logic governs its operation universally. In its logic of mechanics,power may well militate against itself. But the substance of power can circulate andchange, at times from one kind to its opposite. In their temporality, the agents of powernormatively do not themselves undergo change, nor can they turn into their ownopposites. But they themselves can change as sites of power. If transformations withinpower’s substantive structures were not possible, then we would be unable to explainhow, for instance, modern Europe emerged out of its pre-modern Christian-monarchical self. With its own episteme and formation of power, modernity sprangfrom a pre-modern system of knowledge and control.35 And to appreciate the

33 For a more favorable interpretation of Said’s position, see Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Edward Said and thePolitical Present,” American Ethnologist , 32, 4 (November 2005): 538-55. However, such favorableallowances cannot travel far enough, since Said’s mild approval of certain Orientalists (like Massignon)does not amount to an articulated and theoretically self-conscious attitude. Said simply did not develop atheoretical position outside of, or beyond, the unilinear trajectory of power structure within thecolonizing-colonized setting.34 M. Foucault,History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans., Robert Hurley (London: Pantheon, 1978): 101-2.35 W. Hallaq,Shar ! ‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 6-12.The argument that power, by its very nature, substantively militates against itself is, I think, little


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possibilities of present and future transformations, we must identify the coreassumptions of Christian-monarchical Europe that were converted into their“opposites.” Among others, it is eminently arguable that a changing attitude towardthe physical world represented a locus of structural substantive change. Viewing natureas conquerable, as anything but an enchanted existence, permitted a mechanical view

of the world that in turn opened it up to exploitation. Nothing in it remained sacred,and everything became (at least potentially) subject to control and domination, notexcluding the “noble savage” who is an “extension of the state of nature.”

Of course, this is a continuation of a Christianity of redemption and self-denial,but it is nonetheless Christianity under a different guise – precisely what Foucault hasallowed for within a power theory of oppositional trajectories. The core assumption ofcontrol of nature, it must not be forgotten, emerged out of a European Christiandogma,36 but also as a reaction to it;37 for when even Hobbes advanced his revolutionaryand influential idea of the body politic, he did so under the secularized assumption of adivine creation in which the Lord made the world for Man to run, having Himself leftthe scene upon that fateful act. (In more than one sense, this Hobbesian transmutation

also characterizes the Schmittian over-arching argument that the central concepts ofmodern politics are secularized reincarnations of their Christian predecessors.)Secularizing Hobbes – at the end of the day – emerges out of a religious Hobbes.

VBe that as it may, MacIntyre’s theory of rival traditions can therefore survive Said’spurported foreclosures and further enlist Foucault’s complex and dynamic notion ofpower in its service. In fact, if one considers rationality a form of power, then therewould be no divergence between Foucault’s theory and that of MacIntyre, for

understood, and one that seems to escape many of the critics of my The Impossible State. The implicationof the critics’ argument is that any critique of modernity is ipso facto modern and that by virtue of thevery fact that it springs from a modern habitat, it must per force be embedded within the deep structuresof this habitat -- thus left eternally unable to transcend either the boundaries or constraints laid againstit by the modern condition. This familiar argument misses the methodological and theoreticalsignificance of evolutionary laws as well as historical processes of the kind thatlongue-durée narrativescompetently address (notwithstanding reservations regarding a certain version of the latter; see n. 45,below). The critics do not seem to realize that the logical conclusion of their critique would mean thathistory (both human and natural) would simply not be ontologically possible, and along with it theentirety of our body of knowledge of ourselves. This critique therefore descends into utter nihilism. Justas Hellenism emerged out of the Phoenician-Egyptian “civilization,” the Roman world out of theHellenistic-Semitic cultures, Islam out of the cultures of Late Antiquity, and modernity out of theEuropean Middle Ages, there will be a time when modernity, with its massive structures of power, will

have to gradually give way to another age or to a different human condition. However power and historyare calculated, none of these historical, contemporary, and future transformations can be explicable ormade intelligible outside the theory of the internal dynamics of power (it being taken for granted herethat power within the same system does not have to be always associated with a particular kind, e.g.oppressive, dominating, charismatic, ethical or otherwise). See also n. 41, below.36 See, for instance, Ian Harbour,Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes Toward Nature andTechnology (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1973): 5-7, as well as Lynn White’s celebratedarticle therein, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” 18-30.$( ,-. /0 1021345678 /99-705 -6 5412 701:7;8< =7.->;/0 5./026-.?/51-0@ 2;; A/.B C188/@ !"# %&'(()*+,-*./ 0#('1'*,2 3*('&'452 6,. &"# 7*.#+, 8#5& DE;F G-.BH I105/3; J--B2@ #++)KL


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rationality would then operate as an integral “tactical” element in the “field of forcerelations.” In other words, its place would be comfortably located within the mechanicsof power. And it is precisely here, in the most unlikely of places, that Orientalism canprovide an oppositional discourse that facilitates the change needed to deal with thecrises generated by the modern project. I would venture to argue that Orientalism

occupies a privileged epistemic position that can allow it to accomplish this task,precisely due to its unique location (as a specialist in Islamic history and culture) in thecurrent systems of knowledge.

As a tradition of rational inquiry, Orientalism presently finds itself within aculture dominated by an awareness of the ecological crisis, to which this culturecontributed, and continues to contribute, in large measure. This culture is obviouslynot just a set of ideas, but also an agglomerated structure of practices, social andscientific institutions, popular, national and artistic narratives, and a variety oftraditions of inquiry and discursive practices. It clearly exhibits an endless variety ofsuch institutions, narratives and traditions; but, as I have argued elsewhere, all of theseare governed by certain central domains or paradigmatic structures, 38 not least of

which is a particular concept of rationality, a particular worldview of materialism andeconomy (modern capitalism), an entrenched – and nearly unconscious – theory ofprogress, a dangerously linear concept of history, and most significantly, a mechanisticview of the world that differentiates between fact and value, creating an attitude to theworld and nature that has proven utterly disastrous for the world.

All these central domains regulate a particular structure of human action, onethat is no longer just western. All other traditions and institutions, weather havingsurvived the thick dust of history or modern counter-narratives and even practices,have been struggling against these central domains, often relegated to the margins. It iscrucial here to place the right importance on the malleability of the ideas of the centraldomains, since these ideas not only dictate the actual courses of action but they always

have the potential to affect, integrate, and transform traditions of inquiry. Indeed, theythemselves have internal dynamic force-fields that are capable of challenging the verynarratives making up the larger cultural traditions of a society. The absence of such apower source in any tradition inevitably ushers in the collapse or destruction of theentire culture that it sustains. This, for instance, is what happened to Islamic cultureduring the nineteenth century, when its force-field that once allowed it to adapt itselfto worldly realities has nearly suddenly ceased to function in the face of the dramaticand structurally violent colonial assault of Europe. This is the moment when cultures,together with their traditions of inquiry, die out.

In the face of the ecological and environmental crises (here assumed to besymptomatic of deep structural problems in the modern project), a reassessment of the

central domains of the project is in order. For Orientalism to survive as a tradition ofrational inquiry, it must reckon with the emerging need for an internal critique, onethat rationality demands. This internal critique has proven its own validity and necessityin countless other traditions (and even social movements) in the West but alsoelsewhere. In addition to the “Green philosophers” of Euro-America, India and China,the academic fields of history, philosophy, environmental science, and even

38 See n. 3, above.


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engineering, among others, are now undergoing self-evaluation, however meager theseefforts have been in relation to the colossal magnitude of the crises. Entire programs,departments, institutes, scholarly journals and much else are being established with aspeed that only underlines the sense of urgency. Orientalism has not so far picked upon these trends in any remarkable way. But its privileged epistemic site and vast

erudition give it great potential to catch up and perhaps even provide leadership.During the last three decades or so, there have emerged important movementsand scholarly groups in China and India that bank on a heuristic retrieval of pre-modern tradition and religion in an effort to combat the modern structures of powerthat have contributed to the deterioration and destruction of the natural habitat. Theyhave rejected the modern western attitude toward nature and the environment,especially its non-organicist and mechanical view that has denuded nature of anymetaphysics. Science of the kind that is harnessed with a single-minded ambition toserve the ends of greedy capitalist ventures and to exploit the natural commons is nowregarded as violent in the extreme, destroying the lives of people, cultures andsustainable habitats and traditions. 39 They have also rejected the exclusivity of a linear

concept of history, having stressed the need to expand the concept to include what hasbeen called circulatory history, a rich and fertile notion that converts the modernisticview of history from a national and thus ideological project into an ethical conceptionthat treats the other in history with appropriate epistemic respect. Most significantly,they have come to spurn the worldview of fragmented reality, a worldview that hasproven its utter failure to see the interconnectedness of the various aspects of life inthe world -- human, animal and insentient. The common denominator of Asianenvironmental movements is their refusal to separate ecology, environment and thephysical world, on the one hand, from an enveloping frame of metaphysical unity, onthe other -- where the intrinsic value of physical objects is rationally posited ratherthan “rationally” proven (just as we presume people innocent until proven guilty,

without having to develop an entire philosophical field to prove the rationality of thisproposition). This is precisely where Euro-American environmentalism faces a crucialdifficulty, for its essentially Enlightenment concept of rationality has been incapable –as I show elsewhere40 -- of providing the logical and epistemological link necessary toassign intrinsic value to insentient life.

The failures of Western anthropocentricism and rationality therefore invitesfurther reflection on the heuristic sources needed to supplement, if not displace, theWestern search for an exit from the current ecological (and thus epistemological)predicament. It need not be overemphasized that such an exit cannot merely consist of yet another “modern” solution to a modern problem. This approach has been tried overand over again only to meet with failure. A solution to the crises of modernity cannot

be modern, in the sense of applying traditionally-modern methods to problems

39 See, for instance, Prasenjit Duara,The Crisis of Global Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2015); Zhao Tingyang, “A Political World Philosophy in Terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia),”Diogenes,56, 5 (2009): 5-18; Xiang Shiling, “A Study on the Theory of ‘Returning to the Original’ and ‘RecoveringNature’ in Chinese Philosophy,”Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 3, 4 (2008): 502-19; Mukul Sharma,Greenand Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012).40 See Hallaq, “The Metaphysics of Gratitude: Anthropocentricism versus Ethicocentricism,” in Hallaq,Re-Citing the Quran to Modernity (in progress).


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resulting from modern paradigmatic structures. 41 The solution furthermore cannot belimited to an in situ, localized, diagnosis – again a perception that is the result of anotoriously fragmented view of reality. Rather, the diagnosis must go to the deepstructures of modernity, and thus of existence, for it is quite obvious that an economicproblem is never just in or about economics, and a political problem is never just in or

about politics. The core values of the system -- political, economic, psychological,social, and otherwise – must be subjected to scrutiny as an aggregate group of problems,as a holistic phenomenon.

VIThus Orientalists, who are among the most erudite students of Islam, may now beforced to shift direction and develop a new theory – philological or otherwise – fortheir study of the subject. The needed change will have to involve a move from anextroverted concern to an introverted one. The study of Islam, insofar as it has beenconducted to this point, has in effect resulted in domination and violence,

notwithstanding the good intentions of certain individual scholars.42

This isextroverted Orientalism. The new approach will avoid such consequences, and at onceharness the Islamic heritage for self-constructive projects. This would be introvertedOrientalism, an approach that will help the self first , and hopefully the Other as well, tounderstand the ways in which Islamic cultures of pre-modernity – in their organicistview of the world and of living in it -- can provide heuristic sources for articulating newways of living.

The first task in the study of Shar ! ‘a is to treat it as a rational project, howevermuch (or precisely because) its rationality differs from the thinking to which we havegrown accustomed. Once the internal logic of this tradition is unraveled, the projectshould make as much sense to us as any other (despite the nonconformity of certain of

its derivative rules to modern taste, rules we may set aside without prejudice to thegeneral precepts from which they derive). In light of a certain critical assessment ofmodernity, this logic may be deemed normative and readily accessible to us. Take, forinstance, Max Scheler’s critique of modern life, a critique that can hardly be dismissed

41 While I take it for granted that non-modern discourse within modernity is both an ontological andepistemological impossibility, I draw a distinction between paradigmatic discourse – that whichrepresents the enduring power and perpetuation of the central domains – and subversive discourse, thatwhich is embedded in the multi-layered constitution of substantive power, often but not alwaysassociated with peripheral domains. (See discussion toward the end of section IV, above, for thedistinction between the substance and mechanics of power). For instance, a re-enchanted philosophy ofthe world insisting on subordinating capitalism, materialism, and secular humanism to an organicist,

mildly mystical, ethicocentric, and non-fragmented/integrated view of the world is no doubt a moderncreation and no more than a re-enactment of a modern narrative whose authenticity cannot be validatedoutside of a squarely modern conception of reality. Yet, this very modern conceptualization – integral tothe discourse of power – substantively militates against the paradigmatic domains, both as a discourseand as a structure of power. It does so as a substantive alternative to the dominant forms of knowledgeand power, an alternative that – by virtue of its drastically different conception of the world – provides aqualitatively and (perhaps “genetically”) different kinds of solutions than those produced by modernity’sparadigmatic domains. Also see n. 35, above.42 On individual intention within the Orientalist sociology of knowledge, see Hallaq, “On Orientalism,Self-Consciousness and History,” 407-08, 412, 416.


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as anything less than modern to the core. Nor can it be accused of being anti-modern;in fact, the label of post-modern may be apt, though insufficient. Scheler very muchsounds like any Muslim jurist or theologian when he argues that the cosmos containsan underlying ethical order, and that it is integral to its essence to be connected to atranscendental deity. The cosmos, for him, is a divine order, a Qur’$nic and cherished

Islamic concept par excellence. Because the ordo amoris exhibits the moral character ofthe cosmos, humankind is intimately connected to the world in every way they are ableto love. Much like Muslim intellectuals, both jurists and mystics and a combinationthereof, Scheler argues that the heart (Ar. qalb) “deserves to be called the core of manas a spiritual being much more than knowing and willing do.”43

As Timothy McCune has perceptively explained, one need not be inclinedtoward theistic views or accept any traditional concept of divinity to appreciate, oreven accept, Scheler’s argument.44 The entire range of Islamic traditions – Qur’$nic,Shar‘ ! , Sufi, theological, metaphysical, historical – rests on this kind of attitude, anattitude that dictates much of what these traditions -- in general and in particular –consider essential on the cosmological, ontological and (especially) epistemological

levels. Likewise, these traditions -- and the Shar ! ‘a no doubt foremost among them --cannot conceive of the world as anything other than interconnected, the unity of thecosmos reigning as a supreme doctrine (and not only in Sufism). Stemming from theidea of ontological design – that everything in the world has a reason to exist – emergesthe concept of the sacredness of life, human or otherwise. This is an overwhelminglyfoundational concept of the Shar ! ‘a, and it stands at the core of many principles andrules across the entire span of fiqh doctrines. Equally pervasive and counter-modern isthe primacy of human value over material worth in human relationships. In thisworldview, capitalism and instrumentalism are relegated to a secondary status,answering to the diagnosis that in modernity humans have lost a sense of who they areand what their purpose in life is. In this system of thought and action, the value of

humanity paradigmatically resides in communal love, the community being theultimate measure of existence. (This is why it is impossible to comprehend juristicworks without an adequate understanding of Islamic communal structures).

The forgoing doctrines and principles, governing, among others, the entirestructure and values of the Shar ! ‘a, represent the substrate of a world of discourse thatmay be utilized heuristically for a study of Islam within the context of the critique ofmodernity’s current crises. The study of the Shar ! ‘a, as indeed of Islam as a whole, holdslimited promise and viability as long as it is not informed by the most pertinent andoverarching theoretical concerns of our day. Preoccupation with what we call micro-history can be validated only by reference to, and with an understanding of, thestructural and paradigmatic features not only of macro-history and longue-durée,45 but

also those of an emerging critique whose starting point is the environmental crisis –43 Cited in McCune, “Solidarity of Life,” 57. Cf. Ghazz$l ! ’s discourse on qalb in I # y"’ ‘Ul$m al-D! n, vol. 1(Aleppo, 2004): 117-22, 209-24.44 Ibid.45 The re-emergence of longue-durée history (particularly as exemplified in J. Guldi and D. Armitage,TheHistory Manifesto [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]) suffers from certain structuralproblems, on grounds of modernist and largely Eurocentric standards, but also on the grounds that thisconception of longue-durée fails to give credit to (if not even understand the significance of) circulatoryhistory, stubbornly insisting on linear and singular historical time.


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crisis, we have insisted, that are symptomatic of a larger epistemological and thereforeethical deficit (one that stems from an ethical structure that is designed to operateexclusively within economic and political considerations). It might seem to us a perfectlylegitimate project of research to study, say, a ruler’s intervention in market activityduring a particular dynastic period. Yet, the legitimacy of the project rests on a host of

broader questions inevitably informed by even larger philosophical and theoreticalconsiderations. Reducing methodological concerns to the common modernistassumptions about, say, the role of “state” in the management or control of the Shar ! ‘ais not only a narrow and highly biased way of studying history, but it also represents adistorted view of reality, both of Islam’s as well as of ours. Research projects of thiskind, while seemingly acceptable and valid, clearly lack theoretical and evenconceptual clarity, not to mention intellectual maturity. They only tell us, or presumeto tell us, how things happened in an Islamic instance (what we call “a particularcontext”) from a modernist perspective, the same perspective that is now beingcritiqued and rejected as the source of the very crises that humanity is experiencing.Such ventures, it must be recognized, are nearly always situated within a latent context

of (oppositional) comparison with a modern (or rather modernist) situation, one thathas driven the question of research in the first place. 46 This has been the generalapproach of much recent scholarship, as evidenced, among other things, in theproliferation of studies on women and gender issues “in Islam,” on social and economicpractices within the parameters of “Shar ! ‘a and state,” and on what might be called a“hero history” that re-entrenches (after early forms of Orientalism) the “civilizationalinfluence” a master-jurist exercised over an entire legal-moral tradition, therebydisregarding the discursive traditions without which no jurist could have beenconstructed as an authority in the first place. 47 Such topics of research – as important asthey may be -- have no future promise without reckoning with the immediate andcritical questions of the day, those that are increasingly compelling us to interrogate the

very foundations of the premises underlying these fields.If we assume, as we should, that knowledge is never innocent of the social,conceptual, material, political and power networks within which it is cultivated, thenengaging in knowledge production – inter alia the mission and, indeed, raison d’etre ofthe scholar – comes with a grave ethical and moral responsibility. As an instrument ofpower, knowledge is a weapon that can inflict cruel violence.48 To cultivate it within anethical framework is to engage in a series of self-interrogations about the justifiabilityof the very concept of scholarship in the first place; why, that is, the very choice ofentering into this domain of production. But whatever supposes itself to be anexplanation, justification or rationalization of the choice of entering does in no way

46

Not to mention the anachronistic implications of such projects, implications that have far too longescaped the standard definition of anachronism.47 The most intellectually problematic of such research questions is the sort which proceeds with aninquiry, posited as self-evident, as to why a certain concept or practice “did not develop” or “failed todevelop” in Islam (or anywhere else in Asia and Africa), where the governing assumption is the success ofthe concept or practice in modernity.48 The assumption being that violence extends over a wide typological spectrum, ranging from thenatural violence of birth (seen, if at all, as happy and blissful violence) to the coercive violence involvedin cultivating the disciplinarian technologies of the moral self, a type that one may characterize asethical violence.


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circumscribe or circumvent the ethical quality of the derivative questions that thescholar asks of the field, and what it is that the answers to these questions aim toaccomplish.

The prevalent attitude within professional historiography is of course thathistory is a field of knowledge, and as such, any question posed within its boundaries is

as legitimate as the next. In other words, who is to say what is a legitimate or validhistorical question and what is not. The entire range of historical space and time isequally open to investigation, without prejudging the legitimacy of membership qua membership. Only the results or answers given to the initial question are subjected toevaluation as good, bad, solid, persuasive, flimsy or otherwise. But as a rule the veryquestions or choices of historical topics are never themselves interrogated. No one, tomy knowledge, has ever cast a shadow of doubt on a historian’s work insofar as thetopics chosen for study are concerned, be they minting practices under the Qingdynasty, the uses and economy of salt in the New Kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, thestructure of Mamluk armies, filth in nineteenth century Paris, or the history ofmosquitos in the Malayas.

The non-restrictive, freely open attitude is largely the function of thefoundational assumption that history is there for us to discover, that its truths areultimately objective, and that it is -- in a mimesis with the natural sciences (a modelthat history always subconsciously aspired, however unsuccessfully, to replicate)--knowable. Undeniably, the widespread belief among professional historians is thathistory and historiography are cumulative in nature, revisionist along the way, butultimately destined toward a teleology, namely, discovering a particular truth about aperiod, a field or sub-field, an event, a dynasty, an emperor, an economy, or an “issue”in an endless series of “issues.” All this race for the “truth” of history is also claimed tobe self-evident, as an endeavor that is intrinsically valuable and in need of no prior justification. Knowledge, including historical knowledge, is self-justifying. Yet, as many

a critique have shown, the project of history and historiography are implicated in thepower structures of the modern nation-state, a venture that has been undeniablyassociated with cruel violence and destruction.

The inquisitive freedom afforded by the discipline of historiography replicatesthose freedoms propounded in liberal democracies, freedoms unquestioned as long asthey operate, more or less, within both the acceptable norms within the profession andthe forms of knowledge that regulate a particular view of history (the liberal parallel tothese is the socio-political order and the knowledge forms governing capitalist modesof production, forms that in turn determine the teleology of that order). It is, forinstance, a canonical truth of professional historiography to reject any understandingoppositional to its concept of Enlightenment reason that, for instance, separates

between fact and value, a sacred distinction in the very natural sciences that it strivesso hard to imitate. It would be an incurable sacrilege therefore to even gesture towardthe possibility that history has, in the main, no other function than to provide ethicalinstruction.

Such a heresy is inextricably entailed by another pervasive creed thatdominates the very course and content of historiographical practice.Walter Mingolo has argued that modernity’s concept of history is singular, recognizinga single line of narrative. When a new development occurs, what existed before it is


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pushed back into the past, precisely into “history” and the “historical.” 49 This process,pervasively epistemological, carries with it profound implications, since the veryconception of linear, singular history, coupled with a trenchant doctrine of progress,always locates the past within the marginal and less privileged. History is history, less“developed” and thus wholly or partially primitive, medieval, anti-modern and most

importantly irrelevant to the new and modern, to the “true” expression of “progress.”50

Beginning with Vico and Nietzsche and ending more recently with Hayden White, thisconception has been challenged to the core, for especially with the latter,historiography and the modern historical imagination have been shown to be deeplyimplicated not only in nationalism and modern state domination, but also inimperialism and colonialism; that is, in the mechanics of destructive power.51 History,to play on one of White’s famous terms, plots violence. By contrast, in its circulatorymodel – the form that prevailed in pre-modern Islam, China and India – historypossessed, as Nietzsche vehemently argued in another context, a moral and ethicalbackbone.52 Instead of being instruments of building destructive political and nationalidentities, it contained narratives of ethical instruction (precisely the central themes of

classical Islamic history, which stood at no remove from Shar‘ ! discourse. Once werecognize that our modern historiography is plotted in no less mythical and imaginaryways than any other (a thesis argued forcibly and convincingly by White, his followers,and many others 53), we will be on our way to articulating a more healthy conception of

49 Walter Mingolo,The Darker Side of Western Modernity(Durham, Duke University Press, 2011): 30.50 These modernist religious convictions (like all convictions of traditional religion) also entail thederivative dogma that no modern form can be inferior to its pre-modern predecessor(s) or analogue(s).Thus, a claim to the effect that, say, the Islamic pre-modern conception of the rule of law is as robust as,if not more robust than, the Euro-American model is dismissed out of hand, without evidence whatever,as preposterous or mythical. What is not seen as preposterous is the power that this dogma exercisesover modernist minds, one that is self-justifying and entirely resting on unfounded supremacistideology.51 See the instructive debate between A. Dirk Moses and Hayden White inHistory and Theory, 44, 3 (Oct.2005): 311-332 (Moses); 333-38 (White); and 339-47 (Moses).52 F. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” inUntimely Meditations, trans. R. J.Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 59-123. I am perfectly aware that Nietzschemay have changed his mind about the concept of history he outlines in this essay, but the magisterialvision and philosophical tour de force of this discursive fragment is not altered in the least just because itsauthor changed his view, if he indeed did. For Nietzsche’s change of mind, see Thomas H. Brobjer, “TheLate Nietzsche’s Fundamental Critique of Historical Scholarship,” in M. Dries, ed.,Nietzsche on Time andHistory (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 51-60. Curiously, in the concluding paragraph (p. 59), Brobjerconcedes on behalf of Nietzsche the very grounds on which the latter is alleged to have “abandoned” hisessay. An insightful analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of monumental history and its relevance (contra Brobjer) to his later philosophy may be found in Scott Jenkins, “Nietzsche’s Use of Monumental History,”

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 45, 2 (Summer 2014): 169-81.53 See n. 50, above, but also the case that Dipesh Chakrabarty makes against Natalie Zemon Davis withregard to “magical” historiographical proofs, in his “The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge:Continuing the Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies, 14, 2 (2011): 243-50, at 247-50. Unfortunately,Chakrabarty’s defense of his position against Davis remains defensive, poignantly pointing to the factthat history’s “success as a hegemonic knowledge-form… depends on the destruction of the society thatmade some humans history-poor to begin with” (p. 249). Chakrabarty does not go the philosophical pathto argue that the inescapable metaphysics that modern historiography cannot but assume (knowingly ornot) as constitutive of its own foundations is no less mythical precisely because it rests on a particularconception of metaphysics, not least of which is the linear, singular, progress-based dogmas.


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the value of human life not only as embedded in a complex environment that sustainsus, but that also instructs us in our “study” of the Other. The academic study of theShar ! ‘a is just an instance in this overall picture, albeit one that commands a specialsense of urgency.

re orienting orientalism

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