ABSTRACT
Scholars have long observed that terminology meant to ascribe to the ‘Islamic world’ a specific cultural essence that is uniquely ‘different’ from the ‘modern world’ originates from the exploitative relationship established between certain European commercial powers and the rest of the world (Asad 1993). The underlying importance of these ‘taxonomies of imperialist knowledge’ is that they have served capitalist interests in harnessing indigenous social and political practices to efficiently manage overseas properties and their inhabitants. Among the methods adopted by the colonial-era ‘experts’ hired to facilitate the exploitation of overseas commercial assets was to reorientate the way ‘indigenous’ cultures mediated the daily contingencies of life in a world purportedly dominated by European capitalists. It could be argued that the so-called local characteristics deemed ‘pre-modern’, ‘traditional’, and ‘antithetical to western values’ in mainstream discussions about Yemen or the larger ‘Islamic world today’ are the products of specific ways of ‘reading’ local practices and not local essences as often assumed in the literature indebted to a deeply rooted conception of epistemology (Dirks 1992; Deringil 1997). Because these characteristics serve as the medium through which readers and television audiences are encouraged to understand the Islamic story, the fact that they are a product of a very distinct historical moment by default renders them problematic, if not outright useless, for faithfully analysing the various complexities of what is happening, for instance, in Yemen today. As the overall goal of this study is to provide an alternative set of explanations for what is happening in Yemen, such an aim is at a very basic level served by first questioning the categories used to analyse events.
