Reconstituting Islam

I would not be in the least bit surprised if some of you should be somewhat bemused by the title of my talk this afternoon. After all, how could one have the temerity to question the solidity, the fastness, indeed, the self-evidence of the monolith, Islam, let alone talk of its re-constitution? How could one conceivably dis-associate the constituent elements of an entity which is daily reiterating its ubiquity, its exotic fastness, the pride and prejudice of it singularity, its massive presence: a presence which, moreover, constantly displays a savage energy, claims an authentic atavism, and enforces this claims with the spectacular display equally of piety as of blood, all the while asserting its inevitability as the pre-existent destiny of an entire host of nations, of territories, almost of entire continents, all of them termed Islamic?

There is to my mind no doubt that we could go some way together this afternoon if we were somewhat to curb the fascination by which the imposing visibility of matters Islamic and the political stakes associated with them ensnare the imagination. If we are to recall recent memories, they will tell us that this imposing visibility of mass political Islam is a new phenomenon which dates back a mere twenty or so years. Yet the all-to-human proclivity to short-sightedness colludes with political perspectives of the moment, to project the image of the present instant into the essence of eternity, and to postulate Islam as the trans-historical protoplasm in the life of all Muslims.

A vast culture, and indeed a vast industry of misrecognition is in place, by advocates of Islamism as by Western opinion, expert and inexpert, purporting to read over and above the complex and multiple histories and present conditions of Muslim peoples a homogeneous and timeless Islam, which, it is maintained, informs essentially the significant thoughts and actions of real or putative Muslims at all times and places. Thus these over-islamized creatures are made to yield Islamic economies unlike all economies, Islamic political systems with bizarre and irrational theocratic principles, Islamic forms of knowledge whose anachronism lends them, charming or repellent, according to taste, Islamic sensibilities in pronounced distemper, Islamic dress and coiffure, Islamic law as clear, univocal, and barbarous as it is superhumanly strict--in short, a total and totalizing culture which overrides the inconvenient complexity of economy, society and history; a putative culture which ostensibly liberal impulses in the West patronize for the dubious benefit to Muslims for whom it is taken to be appropriate: for this culture is taken to be one comprehensible only in terms of itself, impermeable to all but its own unreason, utterly exotic, thoroughly exceptional, fully outside. In this capacity, the religion of Islam becomes a term that fully describes peoples, histories, and countries, and equally becomes an explanatory principle, which, when cited, is regarded adequately to account for thought to be thought and done by Muslims.

In the practice of everyday discourse, such implicit notions as I have just referred to take the form of the proposition that, in some way, Muslims today are returning to matters that constitute them essentially, that they are reverting to type, rejoining a nature prior to their modern history, and that integralist or fundamentalist Islam is merely an acute yet adequate expression of this inherent nature. Impermeable to the normal equipment of the human and social sciences, the phenomena islamica thus come not only to acquire a radical exotism; their study comes consequently to require a particular effort of distanciation and estrangement. Hence the recent tendency towards a radical relativism regarding the study of matters Islamic, under the title of cultural specificity which, like other forms of exoticism, I take to be a grid of misrecognition.

All I need to say about this at present is to register my amazement at this extraordinary revival of nineteenth century procedures of ethnological classification in the guise of innovation, even after all the fertile debates on orientalism in the past two decades, and after history and professional ethnography had seriously--albeit unevently--contested its taxonomic equipment. Let me remind you that, whereas ethnography carries no necessary classificatory agendas or loyalties, ethnology is above all else a theory of racial and cultural types, and is in practice never free from an implicit or explicit normative ranking. Let me indicate parenthetically an unfortunate by-product of the use made, perfectly legitimately, of Edward Said's critique of orientalism: While this, under the rather grand title of post-colonial discourse, tapped a libertarian impulse, its excess of zeal--most characteristically in the United States or in work intended for circulation in the United States--has led to a reverse orientalism grounded in an ahistorical notion of East and West. This ejected the tools of the historical and social sciences implicitly, and in most cases inadvertently, in favour of an irrationalist and anti-historicist sympathetic sociology of singularity, and an instinctivist theory of society, in the name of restituting marginalized voices and histories. Yet such advocacy of singularity invariably results in confinement to unassailable clichˇs, and in conception in terms of stereotypes. Thus emerges a vicious circle, in which anti-orientalism leads directly in its claims for authenticity and singularity, to the re-orientalization of orientals. Thus arose a traffic in mirror-images between re-orientalizing orientals speaking for authenticity and orientalizing neo-orientalists speaking for difference.

I will leave this matter for the time being, and I shall propose to you that this construal of Islam as a culture which in itself explains the affairs of Muslim collectivities and overdetermines their economies, societies, and non-religious cultures is the fundamental element in the culture of misrecognition I have spoken of. And this is a culture of misrecognition with two main protagonists who provide mirror-images of one another: the one is the Islamist revivalist and politician, the other, the western writer or actor who shares the essentialist culturalism of the former, and who elevates his obscurantist discourse on the present, the past, and the future of Muslims to the status of indisputable knowledge: I mean here the all-too-common procedure, taken as self-evident, by which the essentialist reading of the past, present, and future propounded by Islamist political or otherwise apologetic discourse, is taken for an adequate reading of the past, diagnosis of the present, and blueprint for the future of Muslims. This essentialist reading is, of course, summed up in a number of basic propositions ceaselessly repeated and illustrated and fomulaically reiterated: that the history of Muslims is constituted essentially by religion, that the past two centuries of their histories are the story of usurpation and disnature, that the future can be no more than, with minor adjustments, a restoration of this essential nature which modernity has not altered, but only held in abeyance. You will see that there is here clearly an objective conceptual collusion between Islamist and Western representations of Islam, one which will emerge time and again in what I have to say today, and it is also, incidentally, an implicit but diffuse and not effectively concerned political collusion.

I can at this stage offer some elements of an answer to the question of what is meant by re-constituting Islam: If phenomena termed Islamic or reclaiming this or that interpretation of Islamism, are to be understood, the first step to be taken is critically to decompose the notion of Islam as a totalizing category, and to look instead at its conditions of emergence: social forces, historical mutations and developments, political conflicts, intellectual and ideological realities, devotional and theological styles and institutions, in addition to local ethnographic detail--it being clearly understood that ethnographic detail is to be regarded for what it is, and not simply as an instance or illustration of a pervasive Islamism of life. Without this decomposition, the totalizing category of Islam will continue performing its phantasmic role of calling things into being simply by naming them. Once this decomposition has been performed, once the reality of history has been disengaged from wanton fancy, we might be able properly to understand what is meant by Islam and by the appeal to this name: thus will Islam be subject to one manner of re-constitution, among many others that will emerge in the course of my talk.

I should like to comment immediately on the timing of the extraordinary visibility of what is today taken for Islam. This timing will help to demystify Muslim political phenomena today. As we know them, and I will confine my comments largely to the Arab World, these phenomena developed out of marginal pietistic and proto-fascist youth militias and sporting club movements in the 1920s and 1930s, some in brown shirts, other in gray shirts, mainly active in Egypt, but also in Syria broadly conceived. In the 1950s and 1960s, these were nurtured and provided with extraordinary financial largesse by which they built local and international cultural, educational, and organizational structures, all this in the context of an international climate dominated by the Truman Doctrine. The containment of Communism policy had a spectacular career, and in the Arab World, developed into a policy applied to counter secular Arab nationalist, socialist, and conceivably pro-Soviet regimes. Those of you who may have read expert Anglo-Saxon works on Arab politics published in the 50s and 60s will find very clear statements of the theory of Islam as a bulwark against Communism, and that the main cultural and ideological plank in pursuing the Cold War in the Arab World was the encouragement of social conservatism and of Islamism. Later, in Afghanistan, this same policy was to have more immediately dramatic effects.

Yet these Arab movements had little success at the time, and only came conspicuously and strongly to the fore in the mid and late 1970s, in a specific conjuncture, marked by two elements. The first of these elements is the trend towards a minimilization of state action in the economy and in society, under the impact of new international structural conditions, characterized by the correlative elements of deregulation and of the ascendancy of finance, complemented by a theology of the free market. In social terms, this entailed the break-down of the post-Second-World-War Keynesian consensus, and this, in the West, has led to structural unemployment and attendant results, like the rise in the influence of extreme right-wing ideologies, and the counter-racism of various brown European and North American communities, some of which define themselves, for the purposes of counter-racism as Muslim.

In the Arab World as elsewhere in the South, these new conditions, under titles such as Ōstructural adjustment,' are exacting a very heavy social price correlative with the breakdown of both the will and the capacity to carry out policies of development. States came increasingly to be reduced to pure administration and to policing the effects of global deregulation. Mass social and economic marginalization leads in the South to results analogous to those in the North. Among these is the strong appeal of the ultra-conservative hyper-nationalist populism with a chiliastic flavour which we call Islamism, or which in India is associated with movements like the RSS. Both political Islam and the RSS followed the rhythm of modern world history: in their emergence simultaneously with Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s under al-Banna and Golwalkar, and in their revival simultaneously with the retreat of modernism and the correlative revival in the West of conservative ideologies, religious and secular.

So much for the singularity of the rhythm of political Islam. Let me add this, before I widen the purview of my demystification: The Islam of militant and conspicuous Islamism repudiates the lived Islam of its milieu and constructs an imagined Muslim past, using symbolic materials derived from Muslim canonical and quasi-canonical texts, but cast in ideological moulds common throughout the international history of conservative populism as well as anti-Enlightenment motifs. These use vitalist and social-Darwinist figures of history and of society, a romantic notion of politics as restoration, an organismic conception of culture and of law, all of them reminiscent not of Muhammad and the Koran, but rather of Herder, Savigny, and Spengler, of de Bonald, Gobineau, and Le Bon. Two of the most influential works of current Islamism in Arabic and Persian (by Sayyid Qutb and ŌAli Shariati) both specifically esteem most enthusiastically the work of Alexis Carrel, a Frenchman who, as some of you might know, started his highly distinguished medical career in New York, where he developed highly elaborate social-eugenic theories and then went on to become the cultural and scientific oracle of the Marechal Petain at Vichy. All the figures whose names I mentioned are of prime importance for political life and thought in modern European history. The fact that they are not well-known today, or that they are relegated to minor positions in textbooks of political and social theory, can only be read as a rather hopeful collective amnesia organized by liberal regimes following the Second World War. I will just add, to round up the picture, that Islamists use much the same political language and make similar use of archaic political iconography as do the Serb nationalists of Mr. Karadzic, their notion of authenticity is analogous to the Hinduttva of the communalist Right in India, and they combine together the political mysticism of the secular Zionist Right with a mild form of the doctrine of divine election propounded by Jewish fundamentalism.

It is important to note that the rhetoric of authenticity employed by all these movements is not the unmediated voice of the natural history of a culture or of a race, but rather a recherchˇ self-representation of this or that social force seeking normative hegemony; we are not dealing with nature, but with political purpose. It is precisely such a process that people commonly call an identity, a word much overused and abused in current public debate. Authenticity, in this perspective, is highly inauthentic, indeed, a counterfeit identity; it presents, as described by Adorno in another, aesthetic, context a fur andere masquerading as an an-sich: such is the case of the wholesale invention of vestimentary and intellectual traditions by Islamist ideologues, and the baseless albeit simultaneous assertion that these correspond to social practice. Such also is the deification of the Buddha in the atheistic religion of Buddhism, and such is similarly the elevation to divine of primacy of Ram by Hindu communalists in what an Indian friend of mine termed Semitization of Hinduism.

In all these and other cases as in many others, we witness the genesis of a culture of essentialization, of traditionalization as distinct from traditionalism; we witness the folklorization of classicism, in which elements from the remote past are presumed to constitute the lived present, and therefore often takes the form of self-parody. In this way are produced tangible tokens or icons of authenticity such as a particular manner of dress or of punishment, and thus also are virtual collective memories exhumed from old books made into elements of a populist rhetoric, by asserting them to be actual memories, exactly as an entire universe of private memory appeared to Marcel Proust in a cup of tea and a plate of madeleines. Through these virtual memories, an historical romance is constructed which is then put forward as a utopian social programme whose purpose is to construct a finalist and definitive Shangri-La where everyone and everything might be authentic, be this called an Islamic state, a tausendjahriger Reich, or the nirvana of life according to the Sanskritik dharma. Under such conditions, therefore, life most frequently devolves to performance, the performance of a psychodama. There are in fact several Muslim utopias in place: of these one might mention a troubled one throughout the territory of Saudi Arabia, no less than alternative Muslim communities in the United States, in New Mexico, consisting mostly of white converts, a sort of New Age Maraboutic idyll.

I conclude from all this that, over and above iconography, there is nothing generically distinctive about Muslim integralism and fundamentalism, beyond the specific way in which the tissue of its different times and places is created by its various conjunctural and structural elements. Its different components are generated from ideological elements present in the repertoire of political ideas universally available, no matter how much the rhetoric of identity and of authenticity denies this; they are socially crafted out of a social material which requires for its understanding a sociology of structural marginality and another of elite competition, not an ethnology of the exotic. Its understanding requires the normal equipment of the social and human sciences, not their denial.

What remains distinctive is local ethnographic fact, specified by region, class, and generation; but even this is being gradually swept away by a process of homogenization through the agency of international Muslim organizations, political and otherwise, and the emergence of a new form of Islamic acculturation to a piety and a militantism with a highly Calvinistic flavour. Modern communications and mediatic techniques give homogenization a tremendous force; the portrayal of the Western visual media of Arab societies as somewhat overdetermined by a certain form of religiosity is thoroughly complicit in this process of re-culturation: far from being an expression of cultural specificity, Islamism is an agency of homogenization in a global village. Finally, I must also mention a much-highlighted aspect, that of revivalism, which construes the utopia desired as a re-enactment of supposed origins or beginnings: the trope of return to authentic beginnings is a constant feature of all religious discourse and of nationalist and indeed much conservative discourse. In the Christian religious traditions it is termed typology, where present and putative origin are organized as type and reenactment, beginning and manifestation, original and figure, and where Reformation announces itself as no more than fidelity to origins: thus many Christian kings beginning with Charlemagne were described as a New David and as typus christi, Byzantine emperors were likewise regarded as instances of Christomimesis, and their capital was regarded as the New Jerusalem. All this forms a standard component of a broad sweep of Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) which is foreign to no religion. That this also occurs in Islam in unremarkable, and is a matter to be investigated in the context, not of an ethnology of the homo islamicus, but of the history of religions, which has much to say about beginnings as types of mythological charters.

Before I go any further, I shall briefly try to dispel the surprise of some of you at hearing how Islamism is an offspring of modernity rather than of tradition. Let me remind you that the Arab world, like all parts of the globe, was variously and unevenly incorporated from the mid-19th century, into an international order of ideology and culture, in which circulated discursive forms and ideas which, albeit of Western European origin, were to become universal, and came to be produced and reproduced locally, being enracinated in the cultural, legal, and educational apparatus of the Napoleonic-style states--that is, states that made it their business to become the hegemonic instance in the cultural and legal spheres. These states spread throughout the world from the early 19th century: By Napoleon himself, in Spain, Italy, and Poland, by direct Napoleonic example in Latin America, and as in the Ottoman Reformed state, which is the one relevant to the Arab World. This was a state of extraordinary innovativeness, which incorporated into its reforms some of the most advanced ideas of the age, such as non-sectarian education, ideas which in their countries of origin were thought to be dangerously avant-garde. The reformed Ottoman state of the mid-nineteenth century was almost a veritable laboratory for Comtean ideas and of positivist social engineering--Auguste Comte was quite aware of this, and his delight was evident in the open letter to Reshid Pasha that he printed in the first volume of his Systeme de politique positive.  We could actually say that the history of the Arab world in the past century and a half is an accelerated history of acculturation, in which major changes occurred very rapidly, much like the cultural history of England in the 17h century.

Of the new cultural forms were the journalitic article, the pamphlet, evolving forms of the novel, all of which utilized a new form of Arabic, generated in the mid-nineteenth century, incorporating substantial lexical and syntactic developments. Of the ideas, one might cite ideas of the nation, of the economy--which was born as a determinate conceptual field only in the 18th century--of society itself which in the early 19th century superseded the notion of estates, of the body-social as the assembly of individuals that we gain from English philosophy most particularly, and the related idea of an abstract assembly of rights that we see in natural right theories. That the ideas of progress, of popular will, no less that romantic notions of the organic continuity of history and the homogeneity of society, and others, are of the same order, goes without saying. None of these has precedents in Muslim traditions; all belong to the universal regime of modernity, which in one of its aspects constituted an exclusive repertoire of the conceptual apparatus by which peoples world-wide thought and wrote on public affairs. These imperative global forms of cultural expression are analogous to what were called Ō modules' in an important book on nationalism. I do not deny the pervasive existence archaism in the political and social aspirations of Islamists and other conservative populists elsewhere; what I wish to insist upon is that this is not some explosion of ethnological force long repressed, but it is a very recherchˇ primitivism deliberately crafted of the universal modularity of modern ideologies, and the discourse of inwardness, of authenticity, of particularity, expresses a political sentimentalism, formulated in a language and by means of concepts that are entirely heteronomous: sentiments of what is called identity are not immediately translatable into politics, but need to be articulated in terms of ideologies and programmes. When they do explode immediately, they take the form of direct action, as the melancholy musings that are normally identified with the romantic sensibility or otherwise as inarticulate terror.

This ideological articulation of religious sentimentalism was not the work of theologians, but of a group that emerged from the new public educational system, which marginalized the public role of the Muslim ecclesiastical establishment, and which was analogous in its purpose and effect to the role played by the lycee system in France or the Gymnasium system in Germany. A new class of intellectuals arose, analogous to that which some German scholars, with reference to their own history, refer to with dread as the Bildungsburgertum. It is this same class of the intelligentsia that sustained secularist and otherwise secular ideologies, in concert with the state. But it is the subaltern components of this intelligentsia that produced Islamism: reformist Islamism at the end of the nineteenth century, and political revivalism at the end of the twentieth.

All in all, it must not be supposed that the circulation and indigenisation of ideas and institutions of European provenance always results in poor carbon copies: we need go no further than cricket, which is generally played better in the former colonies than in England, or the English language, which when used by Anglophone ex-colonials still carries a certain elegance and sophistication that it has generally lost, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to a sparse vocabulary and a rasping syntax. Or we may look at East Asian capitalism, or indeed of democracy in South Africa. Again, the most important consideration of the concept of history written in the second half of this century is, in my opinion, a book published in Arabic in 1992. ₁   There is similarly no doubt in my mind, by the same token, that some of the most outstanding systematic statements of fascistic populism have been written in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, and I'd expect that there would be equally interesting texts in Hindi, in Serbo-Croat, and other languages that I cannot read.

None of the matters I have highlighted is particularly mysterious or inaccessible to the understanding. The socioeconomic conditions, the birth of Islamism from the interstices of universal modernity, the virtual reality of particularity which uses universal modules to construct itself, the multiple causalities that work to produce--amongst some Muslims as well as others--projects of involution and interiorization: all these, and many other collateral matters, are well-documented, and in some instances well-studied in published work. What is particularly striking is that there is so much resistance to perceiving the realities of the situation, so much systematic, even systemic insistence on misrecognition.

I do not intend to take you yet again over the debates concerning orientalism, nor do I wish to dwell now on the foetid alleyways of collective European memories of historical antagonisms, clearly but silently evident in Bosnia in the last few years; I do not wish to mention more than in passing and by way of reminder, the systematic and fevered demonization, under the title of terrorism, of various Muslim peoples, or the never-ending story of immediate political interests and the interests of the arms manufacturers.

What I do intend to do is to return to the present point in time, and to try and understand why it is that misrecognition is so passionately willed; to probe the conditions for the exceptionalism attributed to Muslim peoples, which places them outside the remit of the historical and sociological understanding and relegates them to ethnological folklore, to consider why it is that I--like many others--have to waste so much of your time on matters that ought to be taken for granted.

To a considerable extent, this has to do with the social and political organization, in western countries, of knowledge concerning Islam, of the production and circulation of this knowledge, of its criteria of public validation, and of the position that rigorous research as distinct from what is publicly claimed as expertise occupies in this organization. It is manifestly the case that expert knowledge--institutionally known as orientalism and as area studies--on these matters is marginalized; it has no social authority to arbitrate knowledge on Islam; members of the public and persons in positions of authority seem free to make all manner of whimsical or irresponsible statements and assumptions concerning matters Islamic without serious fear of disgrace or even of definitive correction. There is hardly a body of knowledge concerning Islam which is publicly authoritative and self-perpetuating, and this also applies, grosso modo, to the organization of university faculties, in which studies of Islam occupy a marginal and rather slight position which some scholars of Islam regard as rather a seraphic blessing--this explains to a large extent not only the manifest conceptual retardation of this field and its vulnerability to common cant, but also facts such as the virtual absence of Islamic materials in the context of other disciplines, including comparative religion: the work of Mircea Eliade, for instance, contains only two minor references to Muslim materials, both taken from a single article by Louis Massignon, and repeated in one book after another; we have all read various errors and wild misinterpretations in works of others.

This marginality is evident in many other ways: that the substantial though episodic advances in the study of Muslim societies in the past two decades has been unable to come into general circulation, that the excellent products of contemporary research published in Arabic are not read, for lack of linguistic competence no less than because of contempt, and above all that primacy is generally given to forms of expression and of discourse of higher ideologically density and authority and of wider reach than orientalist or area expertise. This is not new, of course: we find that the public authority on matters Islamic in 19th century Germany, for instance, was opinions of Otto von Ranke and of his historist school; some of you may know that Ranke wrote a history of the Ottoman state, in which he paid scant attention to the results of orientalist scholarship or to Ottoman sources, and preferred to rely instead on the Venetian archives. At present, such authority is assumed most specifically by mediatic forms of representation and their pre-literate techniques of semiosis, to whose conditions and categories university experts frequently succumb, not necessarily because of dishonesty, but rather because of conceptual vulnerability and disorientation, rendered all the more acute by the constraints of the medium. This general situation applies also to scholarship in general public circulation and with a public credibility far exceeding that of more careful research. I would cite as an example the work of Ernest Gellner, which, in its present form, theorizes the demotic notions of Islam in present currency and shares with this demotic notion one of its constitutive features, that of overinterpreting an ethnographic fragment, (or, more traditionally, textual fragment) as a total ethnological type. Gellner studied a village on the Moroccan Atlas in the 1950s, then asserted this village to be not only thoroughly Islamic, but a consummate apparition or indeed an epiphany of Islam itself, one which at once exemplifies it and sums it up. General and particular in the case of Islam correspond absolutely, and Islam is fully representative of Muslims and can be substituted for them: you will remember that I did say earlier that naming is conjuring, and this is a very good case in point. Given the state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that certain university faculties see nothing wrong in appointing faculty to teach Arab studies who are hardly able to read an Arabic newspaper.

Briefly stated, discourse on matters Islamic at present is characterized, broadly and in the form in which it enters the public sphere, by what we might call a neo-Renanism, the reference being, of course, to Ernest Renan's famous theories about the congenital incapacity of the Semetic mind to produce science and philosophy, but to excel nevertheless in the realm of poetry--a discourse based on taxonomic antitheses. We have a politilogical neo-Renanism which speaks, among other things, of the inappropriateness of democracy for countries characterized as Muslim because democracy goes against the grain; as a corollary, we have the proposition that democracy for such countries is best achieved if they were to be ruled by groups which correspond to the authenticity, to the nature of these societies, which is Islam. Correlatively, we also have a neo-Renanist pseudo-sociology, which takes the populist declamations of authenticity for accurate descriptions of social reality and which denies the realities of secularism in Arab life an grounds of congenital incapacity. This discourse has as its Leitmotif a culturalist differentialism, that is to say, a culturalist ethnology. This is a matter to which I have given considerable thought and I have concluded not only that culturalism uses the same figures and tropes that had been previously employed in racist discourses, but that like racism it operates in a rather simple manner. This consists of selecting visible tokens of ethnographic distinctiveness, which could be the colour of the skin, a certain manner of dress, or certain propositions concerning the organization of gender relations, then proceeding to give these the status of iconic markers or of stigmata of otherness, and finally to serve them up as totalizing criteria if ethnographic classification. This is really not unlike regarding, for instance, Lederhosen and skinheads as the iconic markers of Germanity, of cowboys and mobsters as markers of the north American identity, corresponding to its inner nature and constituting its cultural genetic capital, and proceeding to construct an ethnic type based on the associations of these images. I think it will be clear to all of you that this procedure partakes of all the characteristics of polemical rather than of scientific discourse, regardless of the footnotes: it is perhaps appropriate in this venue to compare Muslim history conceived in this fashion with polemical histories of the Society of Jesus written in nineteenth century France, in terms of structure, imagery, and argumentation, in which the record of Jesuit history was read as a symptomatology of the Jesuit spirit, and in which links between events were ones of mythical significance rather than ones of causality. ₂   All polemical discourse, like reenactments, in which change is illusory, and in which the primacy of mythical signification is undisputed.

Yet all this has in the recent past been expressed in terms of a disarming condition of innocence, often described as a post-modern concern for diversity, individuality, the empowerment of the marginal, and a whole host of other propositions on which there is a concurrence between xenophobes, liberals and third world communalists and integralists, all of whom speak the rhetoric of diversity, of difference, of particularity, a rhetoric which conflates the banal realities of diversity and of particularity with the topoi of culturalist and ethnographic classification. All in all, the kitsch and the spectacular, are taken for the authentic and invariant, and this procedure is often freely encouraged not only by ideologues of authenticity, but by various other native informants, some of them professional, who play to an eager gallery, although this is not usually noticed by anthropologists, journalists, or other experts.

This post-modernist delight in the pre-modernity of others is all the rage; what it subtends really is a vigorous and triumphalist post-modernism, premissed on post-Communism, and bereft of the normative, aesthetic, and cognitive attributes of modernism. It is hence captive to the relativistic drift inherent in the use, by history and sociology, of the metaphor of the organism to describe identities as absolute subjects. This, I have repeatedly reminded you, is a standard component of European irrationalism.

It is therefore particularly disturbing to me that Gellner--please note that I am neither sniping at nor picking on him: I refer to him specifically for convenience, because he captures with particular eloquence and limpidity the current demotic mood, and expresses clearly and explicitly matters that others prefer to state more guardedly, and carries them with authority outside the field of area studies into general circulation--it disturbs me particularly that Gellner, the anti-relativist par excellence, should state "In Islam, it is all different" ₃ --which once again reminds me of an anti-Jesuit polemic of 1880, by the novelist Jules Durantin, who wrote: "Everything progresses, except the Company of Jesus." ₄   Gellner similarly liberates himself from the burden of proof--but equally, and most saliently, he liberates himself from the discipline of his trade of sociologist, anthropologist, and theorist of history. He similarly proceeds to state and re-state an entire interpretation of Muslim histories and of present-day Islam, which he reduces to an invariant model whose schematism is breathtakingly peremptory, and empirical objections to which he simply ignores. Briefly stated, this "pendulum-swing" theory of Islam postulates two forms of religiosity, the enthusiastic-rustic and the puritanical-urban, in a primordial cyclical conflict which fundamentally constitutes Muslim history--so fundamentally, indeed, that the present condition of the Muslims can be conceived in no other way than that of the triumph of urban puritanism; correlative with this religious characterization of a history, reduced to religious culture, is the proposition that no modernism for Muslims is inconceivable in terms other than those of the Muslim doctrine and its dictates.

This theory is ostensibly derived from Gellner's Moroccan village, whose ethnography he construed in terms of an ethnological theory which, plausibly or implausibly, he reads into the work of David Hume and of Ibn Khaldun (whom Gellner needs to read in translation), who based his own theories on a particular reading of the history of North African Muslim dynasties--yet this theoretical genealogy appears largely fictitious when one looks at the actual origins of this theory in French colonialistic historiography of North Africa, which had a substantial input from the German deterministic social geography of Ratzel, and which is best exemplified in the work of Robert Montagne. ₅   When it is pointed out to him that even if we assumed--and this would be a very decidedly dubious assumption--this model to be applicable to certain moments of North African history, it is still utterly foreign to, say, Ottoman history, he seems simply to regard the 500 years of Ottoman statehood over central Muslim lands to be anomalous and uncharacteristic.

What this procedure displays, in fact, is a certain will to conceptual arbitrariness--arbitrariness with regard to facts of history and society, one which construes central facts as anomalous, and partial or local phenomena as normative; a conceptual arbitrariness which allows for an indiscipline which goes uncorrected, under the title of exceptionalism. There is a definite objective correlation between this arbitrariness and its historical conditions of possibility in the world outside the university, for this intellectual unaccountability is matched only by the presumption of unaccountability built in to an article published by Gellner in The New Republic (December 5, 1983, p. 22) which opens with the following statement: "Muslims are a nuisance. As a matter of fact, they always were a nuisance"--I shudder to think what would have happened to the author's professional and scholarly credibility had he substituted the name of another religious community for that of Muslims. But that which is of a particular salience in the statement was that it was simply a preface to reducing to a unity, in Islamic exceptionalism, of Moroccan corsairs in Newfoundland, Khomeini, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Clearly, the will to conceptual arbitrariness is correlative with the will to a certain form of combat which is bound by no rules. Societies, countries, territories, histories--all are reduced to a specific aspect that makes them manageable for purposes of confrontation or containment.

What this presumption of the will to symbolic violence--will to reduce complexity to simplicity, will wantonly to ignore reality, will to conceptual indiscipline, will to contradict both history and ethnography ₆ --what this leads to in scholarship is precisely what I started with this afternoon, the over-islamization of Muslims, their endowment with a superhuman capacity for perpetual piety, the reduction of their history and their present life to a play of religious motifs, and hence a denial of their actual history and present. It would be wrong to suppose that Gellner's statements and theories amount to no more than vulgar Islamophobia, or to some directly political position. Yet they are, like his latest theories about the impossibility of secularisation-- the very secularization that is so evident in the fundamental thrust of modern Arab history ₇ --based on an imperious will to denial.

All these matters are accounted for by an ambient culturalist conception, which renders entire histories reducible not only to a cultural moment but, in the case of Islam, to a unitary and invariant culture which is reduced to religion. This is not new of course: 19th century culturalism conceived the history of others as a trajectory all its own, a history of singularity utterly distinct from and incommensurable with the world history whose romance was played out by the Romance and Germanic peoples. Culturalist orientalism and its career in area studies was and is fully premised upon this.

The entire history of Arabs and other peoples which have Muslim majorities is thus reduced to a moment in a history which, in a vast error of categorization, is called Islamic, and indeed reconstituted as Islamic, as an history which is complete in itself explainable endogenously, describing a trajectory from origins almost absolutely pristine, specific, and religious, on to a termination almost equally absolute, described normally under the name of decline, i.e. the entropy of changeless things: yet we can more properly speak of the earlier period of Arab history stretching from the seventh to the tenth or eleventh centuries, as the last stage of Late Antiquity, most particularly if we take into account the theories, structures, and the iconography of public authority, and also if we look at it as the fulfillment of an historical trend previously embodied in Alexander and attempted many times before and after him, towards constructing a Mediterranean-Asiatic polity compromising an area of trade and high, literature culture. What followed this is what we may consider truly as the classical period of Islam, although culturalism prefers to find the classical period in the primitive stage of Islam: in this foundational stage reside religious texts generally seen as literal models and paradigms pursued and copied or otherwise failed, rather than what they in fact were, and perceived at the time, as virtual models the normative attachment to which led to the text-semiotic and hermeneutical theories if the classical period, theories of remarkable breadth and of prodigious subtlety and complexity, theories generated in the explicit knowledge that today is not yesterday, that the world is not text, that the text needs to be comprehensively processed in order to be brought into the realm of relevance. Thus the vast literature of commentaries and glosses, like that of a legal responsa, is ignored on the grounds of being derivative, whereas its decisive importance resides in its being the bearer of history and contemporaneity. The classical and the post-classical, Ottoman periods again can not be described exhaustively in terms of decline and ossification. It is, of course, unsurprising that great historians can discern these real historical trends and have a proper sense of its periods: thus, for instance, Arnold Toynbee is not inhibited by orientalist dogmas in his periodization, although his perspicacity is conjugated in favour of his vitalist doctrine, and is fully aware that the Muslim legal traditions cannot be reduced to the Koran or indeed meaningfully derived from it. ₈   Not dissimilarly, Fernand Braudel did not suspend historical judgment in his textbook sketch of Muslim history, cautioning against confusing decline with the loss of supremacy, and ridiculing the thesis that Muslim civilization could have crystallized in a short period of time. ₉   In contrast, when Braudel did depend on the works of orientalists, as he did in his discussion of urbanism, he was caught in the web on the common fictitious notion of an Islamic city. ₁₀

In this actual as distinct from virtual history, religion, the Muslim religion, played an important but not a determinative role, for in the histories of Muslims as in the histories of others, religion does not act as some imperious anthropomorph, but works through institutions: cultural institutions, intellectual institutions, social institutions, political institutions, hieratic institutions; what must be stressed is that the history of these institutions, even of clerical institutions, is not a religious history, although it forms part of the history of religion. What culturalism does, and in our case culturalism under the sign of religion, is to render invisible, on grounds of irrelevance, the vital forces and the processes of change, innovation, mutation, and the heterogeneity, the structural complexity, the unevenness of the histories of Muslims--in short, to render invisible, in the topoi of individuality and homogeneity immobility and of monolithism, the historicity and the all-to-human profanity of the histories of Muslim peoples.

If we move on to modern times, we will find that the culturalist reconstitution of Islam again gives the religious moment primacy in describing the present of Muslim peoples. I shall not dwell on this, as I have already done this in the opening part of my talk. What I should like to do is to start winding down towards the conclusion of my lecture. I shall propose to you a number of general theses which should, in my view, guide productive research on the present of Arabs and other peoples with Muslim majorities, when taken in conjunction with specific problem areas. You will find that some of my theses are formulated largely in the negative mood: not only because they are intended to be cautionary and conceptually prophylactic, but also because, by excluding false problematics, they will re-direct the gaze to areas of relevance, and re-constitutes Islam as a cluster of topics amenable to scientific consideration.

The first thesis is that Islam is not a culture in the ethnological sense. It follows from this that the modern history of Muslim peoples and communities, including the present, is not reducible to a unitary culture defined by religion, although there are of course Muslim religious cultures, with different styles, schools, times, and places. Islam subsists in many forms and coexists with many cultures, defined in terms of time, class, territory, generation, political orientation, ideological commitment, and much more, each of which is anchored in cultural forms that supersede that of religion, and which, even when religious or devotional, are not exclusively Islamic.

Matters assumed to be Islamic should therefore be approached through social, ideological, economic, and cultural processes, rather than through a play of ethnological topoi. If we were, for instance, to look at a question often brought out in connection with Islam, namely, gender relations, we shall see that the constants normally highlighted, such as polygamy, are matters of rare occurrence, correlated to social conditions (1% of marriages in Damascus, 2% in Cairo). We can also learn a great deal and draw profitable conclusions from other matters that reduce to absurdity other topoi than normally arise: we could consider, for instance, the fact that in Saudi Arabia, some 40% of private wealth is held by women, including about 50% of real estate in the city of Jeddah. It would be equally salutary to realize that a recent statistical study of the Arab world has shown that demographic data on fertility levels have no correlation whatsoever with religion, and that they are correlated exclusively to social variables. ₁₁   Further, if we were to look at the United Nations Gender Empowerment measure for 1995, we find that Iraq achieved the 47th position among all countries of the world, ahead of Cyprus, Brazil, and Greece; Syria came second among Arab countries, while Lebanon came last, followed in the international league by only Mauritania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.

When religion in the modern Arab world is studied, and this is my second thesis, this must not be confined to the Muslim religion, but should also take up Arab Christianity. Arab Christians share the same culture--in the ethnolographic sense--as their Muslim compatriots: they share common conventions of touching, greeting, of physical proximity and distance, similar notions and practices of hospitality, of honour and shame, of sociality, of endogamy; Christians in Upper Egypt, tend, if anything, to be rather more strict than Muslim villagers about the veiling of women. Levantine Christians, until very recently in the case of some sections influenced by Western churches, shared moreover in the cultural patrimony common to the entire region in their practice of circumcision and in their aversion to eating swine flesh.

Let me add that there is a very strong sense in which the daily culture of Arab Jews, in Israel and in Arab countries, is in many senses uniform and blends with that of other Arabs. I bring up as an example of this musical youth culture, in the figure, for instance, of the Israeli pop star Zahava Ben, whose style is indistinguishable form the standard pop music of the Arab world, internationally know as Rai. With the various peace treaties signed, this lady is now also capitalizing on this commonality of culture by singing in Arabic, which should, after all, have been her mother tongue.

Speaking of Arab Jews takes me on to my third thesis, that Islam is not an identity, although it is construed as such in the rhetoric of authenticity. Identity is not in fact an historical or sociological category or an identifiable entity, but the ideological sublimation of a sentiment, a name that acts as an ideological sign which, in determinate circumstances, interpellates specific social groups. Islam is only an identity in this context, that is to say, when carried, as a topos and siren-song, by politcocultural groups in the process of constitution as political forces in contest with others. Identity is moreover not simply a sentiment, for sentiments only become political and social forces when they are articulated in terms of political ideologies, and I have already proposed to you that the only ideologies that carry the rhetoric of identity are the modernist and global, albeit archaizing ideologies of romantic and populist conservatism, which carry the politics of sentimentalism worldwide.

A corollary of my third thesis of that any understanding of the modern history of Muslims must be premised on the dissolution of Islam as an explanatory category, and the recognition of how misplaced is the concreteness imputed to it. Any discussion of the matter of actual identities must be pursued in the symphonic mode, and this brings to mind the remarkable book of Fernand Braudel, L'identite de la France, in which the question of national identity is brought out of a configuration of ecological, political, cultural, social, and other processes over the long term and in relation to state apparatuses. No identities are given in the infrahistorical or the supra-historical mode.

My fourth thesis is that the history of Muslims cannot be reduced to origins nor interpreted in terms of such origins, be they imaginary historical paradigms, textual obligations, or an ethnological re-constitution of Muslim life. History is the domain of change, of mutability, of complexity, and the assumption of a constancy, the denial of time, is the result of a mythological turn of mind in the hard sense shared by Western culturalists and Muslim guardians of the cult of authenticity. I need do no more here than to quote to you a statement of Schelling, who regarded the notion of time carried by mythological thought to be prehistorical, and characterized it as follows, in his Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie:  ₁₂   Die schechthin vorgeschichtliche Zeit ist ihrer Natur nach unteilbare, absolut identische Zeit, [die] daher, welche Dauer man ihr zuschreibe, doch nur als Moment zu betrachten [ist], d.h. als Zeit, in der das Ende wie der Anfang und der Anfang wie das Ende ist, eine Art von Ewigkeit, weil sie selbst nicht eine Folge von Zeiten, sondern nur eine Zeit ist, die nicht eine wirkliche Zeit, d.h. eine Folge von Zeiten ist, sondern nur relativ gegen die ihr folgende zur Zeit (namlich zur Vergangenheit) wird. [ ... an absolutely prehistoric time...[a] time which is indivisible by nature and absolutely identical, which therefore, whatever duration may be imputed to it, can only be regarded as a moment, i.e. as time in which the end is like the beginning and the beginning like the end, a kind of eternity, because it is itself not a sequence of time but only On Time, which is not in itself an objective time, i.e. a sequence of times, but only becomes time (that is, the past) relative to the time which follows it.]"

Finally and in conclusion, if the present social, political, cultural, and ideological conditions in Muslim countries, or rather, in countries with Muslim majorities, is to be studied with sobriety and in a manner unconstrained by the perspective of the present moment, this can not be more than very loosely, and for the sake of some institutional convenience, be termed Islamic studies. It must be part of a broader disciplinary study in which religion has a part, but not a priori a privileged part. And the study of modern Islam itself must dissipate the present obsession with fundamentalism, exotic and telegenic as it might be, and return to the lived Islam of the Muslims, which is generally far less exigent than the Protestantism of northern Europe or of the United States, but also to the movement of Muslim modernism which constitutes, ideologically and institutionally, the central narrative in the modern history of Islam in the Arab World over the past 100 years. This Muslim reformism is not unlike Jesuitism in the eighteenth century, following the lead of the unhappy Richard Simon, which sought initially to produce an apologetic and, to some extent, historical approach to the Bible before this trend was curbed by the anti-scientific and anti-modernist influence of Lamennais and the policies of Pope Pius IX (1846-1878). This reformist trend was taken over by modern Arab states, and is increasingly moving towards conservatism in order politically to protect its flank; consequently the non-state component of this movement of Muslim modernism, though still predominantly apologetic, is moving on to a new stage, in a situation of great difficulty and adversity, under the pressure of fundamentalism, and it is starting to go beyond apologetic modernism and to embrace proper historical studies of the Koran. Some of these are philological and conceptual, in the moulds of classical philology although sometimes some of this is quite adventurous, at other times with the use linguistics techniques or of Bultmann's theories of demythologization. Now this is a re-constitution of Islam equally deserving of attention as that which is more clamorous, telegenic, and politically convenient. But I had better postpone talking about it to a different occasion.

About the Author:  Aziz Al-Azmeh is Sharjah Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Eberhard-Karls University, Tubingen, and his doctoral degree of Philosophy in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford.

During the Fall semester of 1995, Aziz Al-Azmeh was a Visiting Professor in the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Gerogetown University. Prior to this, he held positions as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Kuwait University and as a Fellow of the Centre for Near East Studies at the American University of Beirut.

Among his publications, Dr. Nusseibeh has written Islams and Modernities, Secularism in Modern Arab Life and Thought, Arabs and Barbarians: Medieval Arabic Ethnology and Ethnography, The Politics and the History of Heritage, and Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies.

This publication is based on the lecture delivered by Aziz Al-Azmeh on September 19, 1995. Back.

Note 1:  Abd Allah al-Arwi, Mafhum at-Tarikh, Beirut and Casablanca, 1992, 2 vols. Back.

Note 2:  See particularly Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth. Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford, 1993, ch. 5, pp. 192-3 and passim. Back.

Note 3:  Ernest Gellner (1981) p. 62. Back.

Note 4:  Quoted in Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth, p. 193. Back.

Note 5:  On this constellation of topics, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship, London, 1981, ch. 5. Back.

Note 6:  For ethnography, see particularly Martha Mundy, Domesic Government, London, 1995, especially pp. 52-54. Back.

Note 7:  Aziz Al-Azma, Al -Ilmaniyya min manzur mukhtalif, Beirut, 1992. Back.

Note 8:  Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1, pp. 72 ff., and vol. 2, p. 53. Back.

Note 9:  Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations, Paris, pp. 101-2. Back.

Note 10:  Ibid., pp. 97-99. Back.

Note 11:  Carla Makhlouf-Obermeyer, "Islam, Women, and Politics: The Demography of Arab Countries", in Population and Development Review, 18/1 (1992), pp. 33-60. Back.

Note 12:  Berlin 1856, p. 182; English version in Ernst Cassirer, Philosphy of Symbolic Forms, tr. R. Manheim, vol. 2, New Haven, 1955, p. 106. Back.