ABSTRACT
In post-9/11 academic literature ‘Orientalists’ are frequently identified as perpetrators – the villains who are in some way to blame for the global tensions between ‘Islam and the West’. For Talal Asad and Wael Hallaq, to name but two of many possible examples, the ‘Orientalist’ knowledge systems are responsible for imagining the categories and descriptors of the ‘East’ as in dialectical opposition to the ‘West’. However, as Samira Haj and Farid Esack have observed, there were also oppositional voices from within this same cast of thinkers who have contributed in the search for an antidote. These identify amongst others Sheldon Pollock, and earlier Marshall Hodgson and Wilfred Cantwell Smith – all Orientalists by definition – who stood in direct resistance to the romantic and facile assumptions that Edward Said labeled as ‘Orientalism’.
Though it can be difficult to differentiate between the Kantian ‘lust for knowing’ and the sinister urge to legitimate the imperialist project, there is little doubt that the legacy of Orientalism runs deep in global academia. Identifying and assessing the implications is a complex task, and one that is further complicated by the fact that many of the leading ‘Eastern’ thinkers grappling with this discourse were trained in the ‘West’, often in the very bastions of this academic tradition.
Many of these same institutions now champion Cosmopolitanism as the methodology for the contemporary study of the East, and particularly of the Muslim world. There has been a sharp increase in funding and research programs to explore the Middle East, Central Asia, or what is called ‘the Muslim world’. But to what extent is this just a new and improved, or politically correct form of Orientalism? And, to what extent are scholars trained in the West, regardless of their cultural or religious heritage, free from complicity with the faults of this tradition? Are all that study Asia at American or European institutions the ‘New Orientalists?’ Or, can there be good ‘Orientalists’?
This essay will examine how certain Muslim academics are evaluating the impact of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist influence upon Muslim conceptions of identity. Many of these, such as Farid Esack, Samira Haj, Talal Asad, and Wael Hallaq, were trained in the same institutions associated with these Orientalists. Hence it is not surprising that these struggle with the complex role of Western thinkers in shaping perceptions of Islam. Their interest in Orientalism revolves around contemporary conceptions of the religious ‘other’. The chapter argues that the quest for identity runs parallel to the quest for sources of knowledge, and particularly, to knowledge that shapes religious authority. It examines the representative thinkers that challenge the assumptions of modernity and question what can actually be known of the ‘forms of knowledge’ prior to the arrival of the European colonial hegemony in general and also in South Asia in particular.
